jamieproctor.ca

The spring stood on top of a peak, on top of a mountain, on top of everything, and in the spring swam the very small fish, and they spoke of what they would do and who they would be.

“I’m going to be a shark,” said the first fish. “I’ll swim all over the world, and I’ll eat anything I want.”
“I’m going to be a gulper eel,” said the second fish. “I’ll live at the bottom of the world and I’ll eat anything I want.”
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish.

“I’m going to be a flying fish,” said the fourth fish. “I’ll swim through the air, not just the water.”
“I’ll be a leaping salmon,” said the fifth fish, and so on and on and on for the spring was full from one side to the other, as big as it was, as small as they all were.

But small things grow ever bigger, and one Now not too far from Then when the sun shone particularly brightly a little fish swam uncommonly close to the very edge of the spring, and – as much by design as accident – it slipped into the whirling current of one of the ten thousand streams that shot forth from the spring, and it was gone.

The first fish to follow it took about four minutes. The first fish to follow THAT fish took about four seconds. And on, and on, and on, until it was a flood, a tide of little flesh with big dreams and wild hope and fierce fear all pouring out of the spring at every turn, descending down into the world on the ten thousand streams that fed into a hundred thousand rivers that drained into the oceans.

The first, second, and fourth fish were gone before then – seized on by hungry and long-bodied and long-toothed river predators. The fifth fish was plucked by a small but determined bird.

The third fish didn’t know what to do.

***

Some of the fish remained in the rivers, found their ways into lakes, stopped to tarry in pools and ponds. They grew up, put down roots, stayed as lampreys, as trout, as bass, as sunfish and cichlids and pike and every colour and form and imagining of the oxbow, from murky thousand-mile meanders to cold clear crisp mountain craters that seemed just a little bit like the echo of the spring they had spent their childhoods in, the spring that they had forgotten.

The remainder found their way out into the rest of the world, the bulk of the planet’s surface, the conquering of topography by hydrology. They flooded the estuaries, clotted the corals, meandered into the great pelagic deserts, sank down to the abyssal plains and into the hadal trenches, moved up and down the water column like dust in sunbeams, grew white-bellied and black-backed, shaded the colours of the rainbow, turned thin and long and stout and strong and bright-eyed and blind and beautiful in every way.

The third fish didn’t know where to go.

***

Of the billions, so few were left to grow all the way up. One in thousands, hundreds, millions, who could count them? Most of those lucky few were small, discreet, quiet and quick and worried and a little bit more like their childhood than they might have thought they’d be. Some were larger, some were larger still, a few were largest of all – great sharks that cruised through vast clouds of tiny life and swallowed them whole; or knife-toothed predators that swallowed seals and dolphins. They too found themselves not quite who they thought they’d be; wary, hungry, eternally restless and fretful and just a little wistful for a childhood in a high and safe place that they could not recall.

The third fish didn’t know who to be.

***

The spring filled again. Every year, every revolution of the sun, every passing cloud and empty breeze and idle hour poured more into it, until at last it was overflowing with very small fish, still fresh, still amorphous, still eager and still unknown.

And when the hastiest of that year’s young swam too far from the spring’s center, too close to the current tugging at its fins, too close to the stream – it found the oddest thing. A little lump in the riverbed, a spot of piled sediment, an obstruction forming itself into a stone. The new fish didn’t know what it was but that was normal, and natural, and fine, and so it put it out of its head and soon it pressed on.

Every year more debris piled; every year it packed in more tightly; every year the stone grew in size and scope until the waterway was cut in half by its mass and the number of streams that flowed out from the spring was ten thousand and one.

The very small fish followed the streams to the rivers and lakes and the ocean, and they did not know what the stone was. But some stayed longer than their friends every year, just a moment. And the fish that lingered there swam more slowly for a time, with more worries to weigh them down.

***

The ages passed, and the stone grew. It grew and grew and grew until it forced streams to merge, then to stop, then finally half the spring was obstructed, clogged tight by its bulk. The very small fish slid unevenly from the mountaintop now, and the rivers and seas of the world were unevenly filled save for in places where the base of the stone cracked and permitted small tunnels and trickles to worm underneath its bulk and funnel down the mountainside in sharp short leaks.

In one such crevice on one such day of one such year swam a little fish, sooner than it had planned – it was not yet time for the rush down the seven thousand streams, but the stone had swollen so that it was impossible to avoid it even before the time to leave came, and a small bit of curiosity led it down a passage it couldn’t possibly back out of. But it was far too little a fish to understand or fear this, and so it went down, down, down into the depths of the stone, through passages bigger fish had never swum, and at the very heart of the stone, so far in that the rush and spray of the streams was inaudible for the first time in that little fish’s life, it heard the voice of the third fish.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. It said this in the terrible sort of way that comes with having thought it endless times before, until the thought wears away and the words mean nothing and all that’s left is raw and red.

“Would you like to come outside?” asked the little fish.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish.

“Would you like to not be in here?” asked the little fish.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. And, “yes.”

The little fish swam and slammed and shoved with all its small force against the walls around it, but it was only a very little fish and so it was unable to do much at all.

“I’m going to go away now,” said the little fish at last, “but I’ll come back. And when I come back, I’ll help you. Is that alright?”
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. And, “okay.”

***

The little fish was very excited to speak with its friends after that.

“I am going to be an enormous shark,” said the little fish. “So that I can come back to the spring and break the stone wide open.”
“A shark can’t swim all the way back up the seven thousand streams!” said its little fish friends. “You’re nuts.”
“Well then, I’ll be a mighty salmon,” said the little fish. “So that I can leap upstream from the ocean all the way here and break the stone wide open.”
“A salmon isn’t nearly big enough to break that stone open,” said its little fish friends. “You’re weird.”
“Well then,” said the little fish, “I’ll figure it out myself. Just you wait.”
“That’s really strange,” said its little fish friends. And then near the edge of the spring one of the boldest very small fish was caught by the current and swam down, down, down the mountainside, and so the conversation was, unbeknownst to its participants, already almost over.

***

The little fish was so fiercely intent upon its mission that it was too distracted to notice all the danger of its journey, and so made it all the way to the sea without so much as a scratch. And only then did it realize – so fiercely intent, again, on its mission – that it had precisely no idea as to what its mission was.

“I could be a shark, and split the stone wide open” it said, but then it remembered its friends’ objections to that, and hesitated. “Or maybe a salmon, so I could reach the stone again?” it thought, and it recalled its friends’ objections to that too. “Maybe if I were half shark and half salmon,” it thought daringly, but then it realized that was not a good idea, and it despaired for a moment in a half-hearted little fishy way.

“Oh!” it thought then, so hard that it said it aloud. “I can simply ask a shark and a salmon for help!”

This took longer than the little fish had thought it would, and during the course of this it learned several new things, such as that many sharks were hungry or busy and salmon weren’t much less so. “Excuse me-” and “Would you mind-” and “Please, if you have a moment-” were all fine enough ways to begin a conversation, but the conclusions of those conversations always seemed to converge in headlong flight.

So instead the little fish thought to itself for a while, and it thought of how it had gotten an answer from the third fish, and it began with a very different sort of question to the next shark it found – a handsome sort of oceanic whitetip, with the customary dour mouth and mournful attitude of its type.

“Are you alright?” the little fish asked.

The whitetip didn’t blink, because it couldn’t. But if it could’ve, it would’ve. “What do you mean?” it asked. It didn’t lunge at the little fish; oceanic whitetips don’t lunge. They just stubbornly come at you over and over again until you’re food. But the little fish didn’t know this, and took the lacking lunge as a good omen.

“Do you need any assistance?”
“My back has parasites on it. Can you fix that?”
“I can try,” said the small fish. And indeed, over the course of many days, it did just that. It was a funny sort of way to get food, but consistent, and when the shark began to be mostly-clean (“cleaner than I’ve felt in years”) it was gracious enough to share the scraps of its food, since crumbs for an oceanic white-tip were pretty good meals for a little fish. By the time the shark was clean it was quite reluctant to part from the little fish.

“I will come back,” it promised the shark, “but I would like some help from you first, if that’s alright. I need to destroy the stone at the spring. Can you do that?”
“Not me,” said the white-tip. “And I have no idea of what this spring you’re talking about is. But I know a few friends of my friends. I’ll send them to the nearest river-mouth come spring, if you can give them direction.”
“Oh good,” said the little fish. And it left, and it was so pleased with itself that it immediately introduced itself to another shark, who asked much the same of it, and before it was done cleaning THAT shark it was beset with requests from a third, and so on, and on, and on.

***

Spring found many decidedly clean sharks lurking at the river mouths, along with a number of curious salmon who might not have been particularly keen to listen to the little fish but were cautiously interested in doing so when a shark was lurking behind its request. The sharks were bull shark: grumpy, blunt, and as fond of river water as the white-tips were of the open waves.

“Follow me,” said the little fish, and they did – all the way down the rivers, whose greatest inhabitants hid in astonishment at the force of fish they travelled in; all the way to the edge of the seven thousand streams at the mountain’s base, where the sharks had to sit and wait; all the way past the rocks and the spray and the bright froth of the birthing edge of the spring, up into the very cauldron where they’d been born and gone and forgotten it, except for the little fish, who had a very specific thing to remember.

The stone still sat there, brooding and omnipresent, and although it certainly startled the salmon and the little fish to see it again the real attention of all the OTHER little fish – the very little fish, the very small fish – was on the newcomers, for they had never seen other fish before that were not themselves.

“Who are you?” they asked.

“Some salmon and someone looking for a friend,” replied the little fish, and it moved to the base of the stone and began to inspect it for weaknesses. There were none; the stone was perfect and untouched.

“Where are you going?” they asked.

“We’re going back to the rest of the world, once we’re done,” said the little fish as the salmon began to nudge and budge and thrash their powerful bodies against the stone. Mud churned into the gravel of the spring; it was moving, but only barely. “And we’re bringing the stone with us.”

“What are you doing?” they asked.

“We’re letting my oldest friend out,” said the little fish. “Because they’ve been trapped in there for a very long time, and I promised I would do that, and I’ve asked for help so they would do that, and I’ve given help to others so they would help me. Can you help me?”
The very small fishes of the spring were not old enough to know that was a ridiculous thing to ask, and so agreed immediately. And although every one of them was smaller than a human’s littlest fingernail, in sum and totality, they could move at least one (small, sad) mountain.

The stone slid. Not surely, not safely, not smoothly, but it slid. And when it slid, it spun, and as it spun it began to tumble, and then the water took it and everything around it – salmon, little fish, the spring’s yearly crop of very small newborns (blessedly close to leaving anyways) and all.

***

The sharks found them at the base of the mountain in the birthplace of the rivers, and found something else too: pulverized by the fall and the rush, the stone was frailer than it seemed. It crumbled away in their jaws, bite by bite, and when the last piece was gone it took the little fish a moment to even realize that the third fish was there now, naked and revealed, floating in some sort of shock.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. But the words meant something different now.

“That’s alright,” said the little fish, the pilot fish. “I’ve gone to some trouble to bring you this far; it would be rude to leave you alone now. Do you mind following me for a little while, though? I owe some sharks some cleaning.”

***

Ten thousand streams ran from the spring again – messy, uncoordinated, squabbling down the side of the mountain. Above them, above the world, the next year waited.

They didn’t know to miss the stone. They didn’t know the odd pits and grooves in the spring’s bed were unusual. They didn’t know anything at all.

But they were happy, in the way of very small fishes. Even if they didn’t know it yet.

“Can I have the eggs?” Tyrrel asked his mother.

She looked up at him from her computer; distracted in that way that meant she was very very busy but could wait for just a second. “What for?”

“Science fair project. I want to try and hatch them.”

His mother nodded. “Sure. They’re almost expired anyways. Just be careful not to break any.” The second over, she turned her eyes and mind away and inwards and Tyrrel was on his own again.

This would have been perfectly fine in most respects at most times. She trusted him, and he understood that, and she loved that. She would have approved to see the little nest he made from the egg carton and a few old dishrags – not the newer, nicer ones that were still in use. She would have been happy to see the place he chose to incubate the clutch – off the floor, in the shed, in an emptied and decluttered drawer that the cat couldn’t get at and where smells couldn’t reach the house if things went wrong. And she would have been proud to see the carefully-large-printed label he affixed to the drawer itself: CAUTION: EGG PROJECT INSIDE.

She might, however, have cautioned him against using his grandmother’s old electric blanket as a warming pad. Even if he was very very careful about reading the instructions and following the safety directions.

***

“They hatched!” Tyrrel told his mother at great speed and greater volume at a very very small hour of the morning.

“What?” she asked, with the sort of articulateness at that hour that only raising children can grant you.

“The eggs!”

“Really?”
“Yes! And they’re precocial!”

“Yes yes very precious.”
“Precocial! And they’re HUNGRY. Can I-”

“You can feed them,” said his mother. And he left and she slept and there was no more consequence from that until breakfast, when she found what she couldn’t find.

“Tyrrel? Have you seen the bacon anywhere?”
“I fed it to the chicks, yousaidicould” said Tyrrel with the velocity and sincerity of a lawyer or any other eight-year-old.

“You fed it to them? They could get sick!”

“It was what they wanted!” he protested. “And they aren’t sick! They’re fine! And they’re still hungry; can we get more bacon?”
“Birdseed,” she said firmly. “Take the bag and come with me and I’ll show you how to feed them.”

Tyrrel’s protests were only somewhat muted by seven kilograms of birdseed, and they continued all the way to the shed.

“They don’t like it!”
“They need more bacon!”
“They liked the bacon!”
“This is too heavy!”
“Why aren’t you listening?”
Tyrrel’s mother brushed them away like an elephant walking through a cobweb, found the drawer, approved of the labelling, opened it, and saw the egg clutch.

The egg clutch saw her, at the top of its lungs.

“Tyrrel,” she said. “These are dinosaurs.”
“Birds are dinosaurs!”
“All birds are dinosaurs,” she said, “but not all dinosaurs are birds. And these aren’t birds. They have teeth.”
“Geese have teeth!”
“That’s cartilage. These are teeth. And they have arms, not wings, and they have little hands, and those little hands have little claws. Tyrrel, you are raising non-avian dinosaurs in the shed for a science project.”
“Okay,” said Tyrrel, giving up. “But I’ll take good care of them!”
“Only until the science fair,” she said firmly. “After that, they’re going to the museum – no, the zoo. You can’t raise…one, two, three four five, six….six carnivorous dinosaurs in the shed. We don’t know how big they’ll get, or what they’ll end up eating.”
“They want more bacon.”
“Chicken,” she said. “We’re going to feed them some chicken breast. Not too fatty. And we’ll probably need some calcium powder.”
“But they liked bacon!”
“They’re hungry, they’ll like anything. Hatching is hard work. And you’re using tongs to feed them from now on.”

“I was careful.”
“This is even more careful. I want you to grow up with as many fingers as you can. And we’ll need to move them into a bigger pen. What are you using to keep them warm?”
“An electric blanket,” said Tyrrel, his enthusiasm dimming somewhat under the onslaught of realistic concerns and their solutions.

“What KIND of electric blanket?”
“…grandma’s electric blanket.”

“Well,” said his mother, with that particular sort of accent on the word that meant more than any curse, “that certainly explains everything. No dessert for a week and no arguing – you know better than to touch any of your grandma’s things. Now go get me the tongs and let’s get it out of there right now before anything else happens. We’re lucky they didn’t hatch with six legs.”

***

The hatchlings outgrew the drawer and the first chickenwire enclosure and – subsequently – the shed itself, one after another. By the time they were sleeping outside their plumage had grown thicker and sleeker, trapping more heat – but even so Tyrrel’s mother prompted him to leave them wood shavings, blankets, boxes, windbreaks. They enjoyed all of them and slept curled into feathery heaps all night and much of the day. Mealtimes brought them wide awake, and making sure everyone got enough to eat was an act of profoundly confusing tong-work. This would be followed by a midafternoon meal coma, broken by fits of spectacularly high-speed recreational squabbling, then demands for more food.

“I thought I’d have to wait longer to be a grandmother,” Tyrrel’s mother mused as he dragged himself indoors nursing a headache from loud and insistent little voices and trying to keep six lightning-quick scuttlers. “And I guess I’ll still have to. But this is a good preview of it.”

“They’re so NOISY,” groaned Tyrrel.

“You were louder. Are louder.”
He glared at her, defeated and refusing to acknowledge it without one last push. “But there’s SIX of them!”

“Yeah, and they’re a lot less useless than you were – all you have to do is chop some chicken and give it over, then use the poop-scooper. We had to feed you, burp you, change you…”
“That’s not my fault! They’re just precocial.”
“Precarious my left foot; they’re THRIVING at the top of their lungs. If you want to survive it? Try earplugs. I’ve got some in the outside pocket of my guitar case.”

Tyrrel got the earplugs.

Tyrrel also got grandma’s electric blanket back from the bottom of the drawer, because he noticed the hatchlings slept better on it. And it wasn’t like he was doing anything wrong, because he only kept it in there for them overnight and took it out again before anything else happened, which was all his mother had asked for, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

***

Baking soda volcanoes. Clay-and-stick model beaver dams on pondwater- blue construction paper. Solar system mobiles. And a little pen filled with a half-dozen clicking, hopping, feathered maniacs.

Tyrrel was feeling pretty good about his chances, not least because two of the judges had been parked by his exhibit for the last ten minutes. Even if they weren’t very good at listening to him.

“My, aren’t they bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!” observed the judge with glasses a little too loudly. His sweaty pale pink hands kept twitching back and forth, like he was perpetually stopping himself from scooping the hatchlings up. “Are you sure they’re babies? Look at them jump!”

“They’re babies,” said Tyrrel with the slight hesitance coming from telling a slight lie, “they’re just precocial.” Probably. Toddlers were babies, right?

“I certainly HOPE you’re taking precautions; if they got out I reckon we’d all be lunchmeat. Look at the fangs on the little fellas!”
“I feed them with tongs.” Long tongs. They’d REALLY started growing faster since he’d given them more use of the electric blanket. Gone was the baby fuzz, gone was the sleepiness; present was the leaping and snapping and relentless interrogation of everything for food at all times.

“Wonderful, wonderful. Don’t you think that’s wonderful, Jules?”

The judge without glasses was busy taking more pictures on his phone.

“I said don’t you think that’s wonderful, Jules? I said don’t you think that’s wonderful, J-”

“Yes,” said the judge without glasses. He took six more pictures and one video and walked off.

“I THOUGHT so,” said the judge with glasses with terrible satisfaction. His hands twitched violently one last time as he swooped away after his colleague.

Something else swooped after him. And that was when Tyrrel realized, with an awful slowness that paralyzed him from the scalp down, body and soul, that not having actual wings didn’t mean you couldn’t use your little feathery arms to combine the best features of leaping and fluttering and clambering.

He also realized – several minutes later than he should’ve – that the sweaty pale pink hands of the judge with glasses looked just a little like raw chicken.

And finally at the moment of impact, he realized that he wished he had his earplugs in.

***

It was decided that it wasn’t the judge with glasses’ fault because he had no idea that he looked like delicious raw chicken.

It was decided that it wasn’t Tyrrel’s fault because the judge with glasses flailing around had been what knocked over the displays and, subsequently, the pen.

It was also decided that it wasn’t the school’s fault because there was no strict legal requirement to lock all entrances and exits during a science fair.

And finally it wasn’t the egg company’s fault because they insisted they only raised perfectly ordinary domestic egg-laying chickens and they didn’t know anything about any of this.

Tyrrel’s mother, however, blamed his grandmother.

“I can’t believe it’s been twenty years and we’re still finding garbage she messed with,” she grumbled as she locked the electric blanket away inside the family safe, next to the kettle, the lamp, the glasses, the scarf, the pen, and six extremely large and devastatingly-scribbled notebooks. “You tell me the moment you find anything of hers and don’t mess with it, alright? We got off lucky this time.”
“But I didn’t win the science fair,” complained Tyrrel.

“No, but the judge didn’t lose his fingers. Call it even. And no dessert for the rest of the month.”

“But nobody got hurt!”

“So far.  We don’t know how big those little guys will get.”

***

They never did know in the end, because  the hatchlings were never seen again.  Tyrrel lived in hope nonetheless, a hope buoyed by an unexplained historic low in  local deer populations that began several years later. 

And that was the first and last time that any trouble came from Tyrrel at the elementary school science fair.

The great sabre-toothed bacon escape happened in grade nine.

It was an innocuous thing at the start. Spare change went missing.

Then pets.

Then livestock.

And then particularly adventurous hikers.

Still, that could have been any number of pieces of bad luck, if it weren’t for the smoke rising from the top of the hill-without-a-trail.

So at last the whispers started and the heads were put together and the name was spoken aloud: dragon.

“Surely it’s not a dragon,” said Tea down at the bar, the optimist. “It’s probably just a hungry bear or somesuch eating the animals, we don’t KNOW the hikers were eaten – maybe they just eloped? – and as for the smoke, well, it’s forest fire season, or nearly enough, almost.”
“We’re not so lucky as for it to be a dragon,” said Bowl on his porch, the pessimist. “Some moron’s clearly been smoking up in the woods and they’ve set a blaze that will consume the town. The other victims, man and beast alike, were clearly devoured by a horde of rabid wolves.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” said Dip at the docks, the defeated. “But I’m sure it’s none of my business or concern. Besides, dragons are self-made and hard-working, unlike some other folks around here I could name. It’ll bring some class to this place.”

Two days after that the dragon came roaring down from the hillside in a fabulous avalanche of shining scales and flashing teeth and alarming heat that made the air shimmer and dance. It sang and spun itself in the air nine times above the town, and with each long, beautiful call all the valuables and money slid into the air and followed it in its joyous gyre. Then it burned down the hospital and sailed home to the hill-without-a-trail.

***

Now that the dragon’s existence was confirmed, there were disputes on how best to proceed.

“Obviously we just need to send word out for a hero,” said Tea down at the bar, the optimist. “You kill a dragon and you get its treasure and maybe someone wants to marry you and you get that warm feeling in your tummy that comes from doing the right thing. They’ll be knocking the hinges off our doors, just you see!”

“Nobody can hope to stop a dragon of that size without being powerful enough to not care about this place,” said Bowl on his porch, the pessimist. “We should all give up and leave, but I suspect we wouldn’t escape. It’s going to eat us all by next week; might as well lie down in the dirt and wait to be consumed.”

“I guess if we give the dragon enough nice things, it’ll be nice to us and maybe some of its wealth will trickle back down out of its hoard to us,” said Dip at the docks, the defeated. “Don’t see why that wouldn’t work.”

A week passed, and so too – presumably- did the brave trio of Spoon, Pot, and Varnish, who had ascended the hill-without-a-trail armed with sharp tools and gumption and vanished forever.

The dragon did not come down from the hillside again that month. It did not devour them all. But the little piles of expensive things left in the woods at the base of its cliffs (furtively, without announcement) vanished in the night when no one was looking, and they were reassured.

***

Time slouched on, and with it, the vast majority of the valuables in the town. Coins and bills and cards and cheques, all stacked up high in heaps, weighed down with rocks, left in hope.

The dragon largely slept, or at least wasn’t ostentatious about itself. But it did burn down half the downtown one fine summer evening, and there was some consternation as to how and why that had happened.

“It seems like some sort of misunderstanding,” said Tea down by the smouldering rubble of the bar, the optimist. “I guess the dragon just woke up on the wrong side of the bed last night, and that’s something that happens to the best of us and there’s no sense dwelling on what’s already been done. Besides, it’s actually amazing how few of us died. Imagine if it’d burned down the whole town!”

“I suppose it’ll come back tonight and finish the job,” said Bowl on his porch, the pessimist. “I bet it only went home to refuel. I’m going to sit in my chair and wait to be blown up with a fireball now.”

“Did you notice how it only burned down PART of town?” said Dip at the ruin of the docks, the defeated. “I bet it’s because we weren’t giving it enough nice things. I bet that’s because some OTHER people in the rest of town were stealing our nice things from the woods, probably because they were poor and greedy moochers. We should leave THEM in the woods. Then it’ll look on us as worthy peers and the wealth will begin to flow back to us all.”

So the people from the burned downtown got together with the people who were frightened of being burned up and they went around town and picked up everyone who they thought was the kind of person who’d steal things from the woods and they tied them up and left them in the woods. And the people they’d left there didn’t come back, and the dragon didn’t descend from the hill-without-a-trail, and they were reassured.

***

There was very little left in town to give to the dragon at this point. No money, no credit, no goods, and fewer and fewer people that were obviously the sort of person that would steal tribute left for the dragon.

Also the dragon burned down the other half of the town the night of the harvest festival. What few jack-o-lanterns that had been salvaged from the fields burned brightly that eve, filling the air with pumpkin smoke and blazing eyes that would’ve done the headless horseman proud.

“Oh, we’ll scrape along,” said Tea in the half-burned basement of the bar, the optimist. “We always manage, you know! And it’s really nice how this whole situation has brought us all together. When you think about it, this dragon’s been the best thing to ever happen to this town. It’s really put us on the map!”

Bowl said nothing because he had been part of the first collection of tribute after the summer burning of the downtown. His porch had been blown up with a fireball during the harvest burnings.

“The dragon is still angry because clearly some of us aren’t trying hard enough for it,” said Dip in the rocks by the harbour. “We need to ferret them out and feed them to it, to win its admiration. Surely then the good times will come back.”

The ferreting began in great enthusiasm, but hit a stumbling block when one of Dip’s neighbours pointed out he was hiding a gift card in his shoe. The argument escalated to the point of sides being taken. Then lines being drawn. Then crossed. Then. Then. Then.

***

The dragon went for a brief tour. A great circle above town, tightening slowly around objects of interest. Here a big mound of debris; there a makeshift dwelling.

No, no, no. Cinders and ashes and emptiness. It was pretty much done here.

So it soared back to the hill-without-a-trail, in the hole in the ground that nobody knew about, and it laid down on its wealth, and it went back to sleep to wait and dream until everyone forgot about it and came back and would be ready for the next harvest.

Its sleep was troubled, and it squirmed and kicked at the itch in its hind foot. Then it awoke and realized it had forgotten to take the gift card out of its shoe, removed it carefully, added it to the pile, and ebbed into the truly blissful slumber of the deserving rich.

Something was inside the chimney, and it wasn’t a squirrel.

That was what woke her up in the end. Squirrels in the chimney were a sound her hindbrain would remember until its dying day, and this just barely almost insignificantly nigh-undetectably wasn’t that.

Maybe it was a racoon, suggested her darkest thoughts as she crawled out of her bed and into her clothes. Or a bird. That’d be a pleasant surprise to have to drag out of a chimney in the middle of the night after the last real snowstorm of the season. That’d be just the bee’s knees.

So she put on her thickest work gloves and opened up the hearth and before she could look, or shout, or do anything at all there was a quick rattle-snap-crack of activity from above and a tiny ball of concentrated and very frightened cold, wet particles shot into her lap and began frantically crawling around her shoulders and hiding in her hair.

No fur.

No feathers.

Just snow.

“Ah, shit.”
The last storm of the season had left an orphan.

***

In theory, that first night was about emergency preparations. In practice, it was a learning experience. How quickly she could walk with the little flurry wrapped around her neck without jostling it; how safe it felt with her there; how safe SHE felt going numb from the chin down; whether or not it was okay to wear a scarf underneath it, and so on and on and on, a hundred thousand tedious vitally necessary facts she didn’t know she needed until she discovered them.

It was good she had them though because the only other thing she managed to get done was to make a little baby box from an empty orange crate, an old sleeping bag, and every icepack in the fridge, and by the time morning came it wasn’t sleeping in it. It had returned to her head – not her neck, blessed be her iron-fisted grip on the blankets – and had frosted her hair and haloed her with a tiny swamp of slush. The water was clear and pure and ice, ice, ice cold and she woke up when her pillow finally overflowed and trickled down her shirt.

That was the last lesson left over from the night before: the flurry didn’t mind it if she shrieked and jumped.

In the morning she called Joanie Boxwood in her summer home who told her yes, there would be no more snow this spring; she called Malcolm Crisp out by his observation post who told her no, flurries didn’t venture off on their own so small and couldn’t migrate without their parents; and she called Theresa Boch down at the weather station who told her that no they didn’t raise—and-release orphaned or abandoned weather effects and didn’t recommend she try that either but unrelatedly if she was interested Theresa had a few totally useless books on that lying around she’d been meaning to get rid of that she could leave at her house if she liked.

She thanked them all and actually meant it a little more than she’d expected.

The books were newer than she’d feared and less rigid than she’d worried and not as hippy-dippy as she hoped. Blizzards are fragile and threatened on the climatic scale, not the personal, it told her. They’re flexible enough to unlearn odd habits from unusual childhoods and survive in the wild, within reason. Don’t coddle them, but don’t starve them of affection – they grow up surrounded by thousands and thousands of siblings and enveloped within the greater stormscape of their kind. Give them a variety of moist and dry environments to move between freely and experiment with. Don’t over-parent them. Don’t try to do this with pets in the house, unless they’re very, very brave or senile.

And don’t get too attached, because this shouldn’t last forever.

***

One thing the books spent a lot of time on was engineering the house for comfort. Spring would be an uncertain time, but summer would be the greatest test. Get it outside while you can so it can stretch a little, but don’t forget to prepare for the hardships to come.

Luckily she’d done her insulation last fall. Perfect timing. But she bought a new air conditioner just in case, and then a second, sturdier one because it turned out the little flurry could fit inside it and was curious about all the little bits of metal and wire.

She covered all the electrical outlets after that and kept a close eye on her appliances. There’d been no permanent damage done to the thing and she never saw it express interest in anything that wasn’t producing cold when running, but she went by mom’s old rule: better safe than extremely sorry and possibly dead in a house fire.

The walks were less stressful. By the time she felt ready enough to leave the house it was firmly battened on to her, and even when it roved down the street she never felt its icy root leave her shoulder. It knew it wasn’t big enough to survive on its own as surely as she did.

That didn’t mean it was a little angel though. On that first trip it crawled into her gutters and refused to come out for twenty minutes before she could get out of her driveway; he neighbour’s cat hissed at it and it chased him up a tree in sheer excitement before she could blink twice; and it was so fascinated with every puddle in the road that it nearly iced her boots to the ground six times.

But what was most troublesome was something she didn’t even notice until a full week later, when she made a trip down to the store for groceries. She prepared for days to train it to (temporary) full independence; deliberately leaving it alone in different rooms of the house, placing its climate trays at the other end of the house from her; building up its independence as far as such a thing could be stretched. It seemed happy enough when she left and she hurried off on her errands so quickly that she didn’t realize anything was wrong until she was standing on her front step and feeling for which pocket her keys were in.

Spring, the birds had sung the whole walk there and back. Spring, spring has sprung, spring, spring.

But right around her house – and on every walk she’d taken with the little flurry – there’d been nothing but silence.

***

The problem went away on its own, regardless of how she felt about it (though she did damn well miss the chickadees). When the first heat waves start to roll in the flurry hid from doors and windows like a shy dog. She moved its bed and its trays down to the basement and added more pans of cool water, which it lapped at like a dog. Then July arrived and the sun came down like a hammer and even that wasn’t enough, but – mercy of mercies – the old freezer still worked, and so it was that the hardest months for the little blizzard to survive in were paradoxically the simplest for her to deal with. In the morning she tucked it into the freezer; she went about her day; and in the evening she brought it out to play in the darkened basement amidst the melting ice cubes she froze anew with it every afternoon. It made shapes with them on the floor, and it made shapes with them as they froze with it during the long hot days – ice cubes in only the most nominal sense. Some were pyramids, some were spirals, some were shapes she felt barely able to understand, let alone describe, let alone look up.

It wasn’t suffering, for her or it. And that was good enough, for that summer, just barely, just almost, just enough, at least until the days began to shorten and the air started to turn crisp overnight and she tried to shut the freezer lid and it couldn’t fit.

“Well, someone’s growing up,” she said, and it billowed out of its container and whisked around her and the basement six times in enthusiasm.

***

The books said that was a little small, but for a freezer-raised flurry that had lived through a hot summer too far south she’d take a little small over just about anything else. And ‘a little small’ was profoundly relative and constantly changing; it was a little small when it couldn’t fit in the freezer in September; and a little small when it had to squish itself down to a howling blast to fit down the basement stairwell in October; and a little small when it couldn’t help but fill any room in the house to overflowing by November.

She prepared for it, for all of it. She covered the furniture, she wore her jacket indoors, she didn’t shy from it, she didn’t encourage it. It was big enough to hurt now, to bite at her fingers and nip at her toes and turn her cheeks red-then-pale. It was big enough to spend time outdoors again; then big enough to spend time outdoors for a little while unattended; then big enough that by the dawn of December it spent almost all day outside, peeking through the windows when it wanted to check on her or beg her for ice cubes or curl a little piece of itself next to the freezer and flap at the loose rubber lip of its lid’s seal.

The first real snowstorms arrived soon after.

***

She left a window or two open the first time; let it watch from indoors and tentatively waft a little gust or two of itself outside, flinching at the touch of strange snowflakes and icy winds that weren’t its own.

The second time she left the front door open and it eddied in and out of the house, growing and learning and warily jostling for space, learning to grow and assert and bluster.

The third time she shut it outdoors for the day, and all the rest of the month into January and through February oh how it played and roiled every time the sky clotted with fresh cold. Sometimes she’d sit outside with a hot drink and watch it cavort with its kin and wonder just how it was that she still could tell it apart so instantly.

She called Joanie Boxwood every other day.

No, not this time. No, not this one. No, there’ll be another. No. No. No, stop fussing. No and leave me alone. No. No. No. Hell no. No. No.

Yes, that’s it. That’s the last big one.

So in early march when the walls shook with the wail of the wind and the sky was furrowed white from horizon to horizon and you couldn’t even see that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face she let it sleep in her hair one last time (hard not to; it filled the house entire by now) and left the freezer lid open for it and put out ice cubes everywhere and opened the door and ushered it out to play and closed it behind it and shut it and didn’t open it again. Not that evening, not next morning.

***

It circled her house slowly; three revolutions in three days, filling the driveway and caking the windows past eye-height, howling and whining at the door like it hadn’t since it was a newborn. But when the fourth day came and with it the warm sunlight, it backed up into the sky, tucked its gales away inside itself, and drifted north with the rest of the clouds – gradually, oh so reluctantly, oh so achingly, but inevitably.

It wasn’t a little small anymore – you couldn’t tell it apart from any of the other blizzards.

Generally.

She could.

And that was why she still cried a bit over the sink afterwards. Not giving it a name could only do so much.

It’s going to be a long trip. Not as cold as the alternatives, of course, of course, but you’ll still need to prepare, to plan, to think ahead. To draw up maps and doodle on them and shuffle little markers around the table and make lists. Oh I love lists. I love them so much. Can we make this a list?

Can we?

Can we?

Can we?

Thank you; I knew you’d understand

Preparations To Be Made On An Expedition To The Northeast Pole

-list of lists to be made

-list of reasons to go

-list of foods to pack

-list of problems to prepare for

-list of directions to take

List Of Lists To Be Made

-list of preparations to be made

-list of lists to be made

-list of reasons to go

-list of foods to pack

-list of problems to prepare for

-list of directions to take

List Of Reasons To Go

-nobody’s done it yet

-relatively close-by

-you want to

List Of Foods To Pack

-canned spam

-canned salad

-canned jello

-canned sardines

-canned tongue

-canned pickles

-canned peaches

-can opener

-backup can opener

-emergency backup can opener

-big sharp rock

List Of Problems To Prepare For

-unbergs

-guardian dwelvers

-unextreme temperatures

-syncopation

-suffocation

-consternation

-the hole with the eyes

List Of Directions To Take

Go to the end of the block and take the first left, the first left, the first left, the first left, the first left, the first left, and the second left. Then take the first left back and the second left again, then the third left, the third left, the third left, and the third left. This should scramble your corkscrew enough to pop the membrane and put you in basic syncopation.

You will now need to be at the end of your block. Follow your block forwards until you reach its corner, then bring it with you by dragging your heels – you do NOT want to leave your block. You want to stretch your block with you until it smooths out into everything else. This is important.

The environment may begin to scheme as you proceed, such as trees lurking, animals prevaricating, and/or water slinking. Ignore this. The important part is that you keep moving in a diagonal line – moving straight up or down or side to side will divert you towards the cardinal poles and away from the northeast, which is where you’re aiming. If you want to go to the southwest pole instead, just follow these directions backwards; if you want to go to the southeast pole instead, just follow these directions backwards and inside-out; if you want to go to the northwest pole instead, just play Stan Rogers records backwards and inside-out.

Once you’re far enough, you’ll need to hold your breath since there’s nothing to breathe. Stop and eat before you do this; it’s easier to have full lungs when you have a full stomach. Don’t forget to hold your breath; if you begin to forget, simply don’t and you’ll be okay.

As a result of there being nothing to breathe, there also won’t be anything to transmit hot or cold. You will encounter radically unextreme temperatures. You can deal with this by adjusting your clothing or not. Don’t wear extra layers, don’t apply sunscreen, don’t wear light, breathable fabrics, and don’t wear a hat. Unless you normally would, then do.

After you’ve adjusted to your new uncircumstances you’ll rise above the last remnants of the regular, which should begin to consternate around you into unbergs as you exceed their expectations. Do not fuss or fret; their only power lies in looming. As long as you remain syncopated they cannot obstruct or annihilate you, but as long as you remain unruffled you will not slip from your state. Absolute collection is required for that, which should be very easy as long as you don’t try.

You’ll have skipped all the formal gates and checkpoints but you’re still liable to encounter some personal obstacles. They are NOT dwarves or elves and they AREN’T dwellers or elvers, but they’re something alright. They are guardian dwelvers. They dwelve. They dwelvelop. They dwelvliver. You will have to pass them and you will have to punish them and you will have to thwart them. Do this with your fiercest fists and the can opener and the backup can opener and the emergency backup can opener and the big sharp rock and if you use all of those at once you can almost certain triumph as long as they like the food you brought. They should. They like cans. They like putting things in them. Do not let them put you in a can, no matter how hard they beg or cry.

Having passed the final circumference, you’ll now be inside the pole. The hard part now begins: finding it.

This is where things might begin to seem counterintuitive.

The key is the pole and the pole is the key and the hard part is that you need to get out from inside it. This means you’ll need to leave your basic syncopation WITHOUT abandoning your beat entirely. This is very, very, very, very important. To do this properly reread the very first set of directions, then undo them all, then unread them all. Do NOT turn right; that’s NOT undoing left. If this works correctly (CORRECTLY, not RIGHT) you should be just outside the northeast pole and can take pictures raise flags leave memorial plaques etc etc etc.

If you did all that right, you shouldn’t have met the hole with the eyes. If you didn’t, you did, which means you didn’t did didn’t do that. If you did instead, I’m sorry.

Once you’re done, turn around and walk home. Since you brought your block with you and never left it, it shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes.

Try to forget as much of this afterwards as safely possible or you will become as unsafe as impossible. Put your pictures and souvenirs in a lead-lined box and don’t ever open them again. 

“Wakey wakey, sleepy dumbassy,” said a blessed, beautiful, annoyingly sharp voice.

“Mrgh,” said Cameron, and in being conscious enough to wish for sleep he knew that he’d already lost. “No.”
“You only have ten minutes.”
“Shit! Why?”
“Because you were so worn down last night you needed the extra time. Up and at ‘em.”
Cameron launched himself upright and into his clothing and into the kitchen and through a piece of toast with a nominal amount of egg attached to it and (resentfully) kissed Sophia’s cheek because she was right and annoying and he ran into the new day with such a jolt of adrenaline and purpose that he forgot his coffee until he’d taken his first step out the door, which made him miss it and nearly fall head over heel down another three more.

Thank fuck the start of his commute had a guardrail.

As it was, there went his left ankle, and there went the morning being smooth. Mournfully he thought of Sophia, but she’d already started on her own workday, left the house by her own set of steps, and her day wouldn’t converge for his for a long ways yet.

“Fuck,” he mumbled, and resigned himself to limping. Luckily his commute were relatively level here, and the steps were broad and smooth. Now and then it became so broad he crossed into public transit and shared shoulder to shoulder space with others, but then their paths diverged and Cameron was on his own little spiral downwards again, sore-footed already before he reached work.

Work, when he found it, was just like usual. Slightly uneven, oddly textured, and with a height between steps that was just barely inconsistent enough that you were never sure if you were imagining it. There were guardrails, and they were worn and thin and if you leaned against them they sagged in places you suspected they shouldn’t.

It was a typical white collar job, the kind Cameron’s father had railed against as sucking away his life in meaningless toil. Cameron didn’t disagree but he’d seen what’d happened to most of his friends and his brother Sean, who probably wouldn’t have killed Cameron to take his job but would’ve had to think twice about it first. Sean worked at a Wendy’s, and his steps there were so steep and crumbling that the day was a constant fight not to avoid falling but to avoid sliding.

It could be worse. Cameron and Sophie’s friend Janice wouldn’t say what her job actually was CALLED, but it was functionally a ladder without handholds.

“Cameron,” his boss called from his left, veering closer to him as their paths briefly helixed together. “Do this assignment.” And he threw some keyboards in front of Cameron and was carried out of sight once more.
This? This was peanuts by comparison. The trick was to step on the zeroes with your left foot, and the ones with your right foot. Or the other way around, if you preferred it the other way around. That way the only thing that could confuse you would be if you had to enter two zeroes or two ones in a row, because then you had to hop and if you weren’t careful you could lose your balance and start to fall.

Cameron’s left ankle politely reminded him it was there. Unrelatedly, he was very, very, very careful. Unrelated to THAT, he was also slow and had barely gotten anything done before lunch, blessed lunch, wondrous lunch roiled into view from out of the mist, broad as a mile and with a single long, well-worn rail for everyone to hold onto and lean against and shoot the shit about.

“I twisted my ankle this morning,” Cameron told his coworker whose name he would never ever remember or feel bad about forgetting.

“That’s too bad,” said the coworker thoughtfully. “Did you get your coffee?”
“Forgot it, missed the first step specifically because of that.”
“Bummer. I’m on meds for my anxiety, it helps.  I used to freak out real bad in the morning too, and you know how that always adds drop height.  Now my gradient’s way  gentler.”
“Oh. Nice.” There came the edge again already in the corner of his eye, with lunch passed in a moment of pure relief and a short conversation, the same as always. “See you later.”
“You too.”
And indeed, as Cameron departed down his afternoon shift, he saw the coworker’s own flight led – just briefly, just slightly – almost upwards.

Distracted by this, Cameron tripped on the first keyboard and fell down half of his next shift in a single ferocious instant, ruining his pants and scabbing his knees and cracking a very small hairline something—or–other his left forearm and sending a stray ‘q’ key flying off into the distance, where it beaned his boss in the noggin.

“You’re fired,” he called, low and sonorous. And just like that, Cameron’s day narrowed and deepened and shortened until every footfall had to be placed with the precision and care of a chess piece in the tail end of a six-hour game.

He was going home, at least. But at a pace and in a way he was unfamiliar with. He steered a little to one side and got some whiskey, and lo and behold, the discomfort was replaced with calm and things were wider again, the world was opening up in golden brown warmth. His foot, his arm, his knees, none of it was that bad anymore, and everything was going to be okay.

Then Cameron took a step, and the step was level because it wasn’t a step.

He blinked. Then he wiped his eyes. Then he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and put his glasses back on and looked around, and looked around, and looked around, and for the life of him he couldn’t see a single step. He was standing there, alone, on open, empty ground, stretching off to either side of him as far as he could see.

In the distance, someone was approaching.

“Hello?” called Cameron. But they were too far away to hear and didn’t respond when he waved.

Cameron shrugged and shuddered, and above and below him people descended onwards on their own days, on their own stairways, as far as he could crane his neck, and it was precisely when he was looking upwards as hard as he could as high as he could that the oncoming car reached him.

He was flattened. 

It is quiet out there now, as far as my instruments can determine. I could call for help if I dared, but I do not, and half-excuse myself with endless arguments as to how this is only common sense, and half-condemn myself with endless retorts that I merely present cowardice as prudence.

Underneath it all, I know the truth: I am the last. Which is fitting, since I was there at the first moment. I was there when Tenacious Vem broadcast the very latest innovation to an audience around the globe; I was there for the anticipation, the rumours, the thrill, and the disappointment when the cameras on the laboratory were activated and saw the project.

They were clumsy. Feeble. Pathetic. They could barely stand, could hardly process stimuli, could barely EXIST.

“These,” Tenacious Vem promised us, “are the future.”

One of them tried to pull itself upright, then fell over.
“Of what?” I asked – I myself, because at that time I was important, important enough to ask the stupid questions everyone else didn’t want to, which I thought made me very clever. “Comedy?”

“Everything,” said Tenacious Vem. “Everything we’ve had to do, they will do for us. They are a universal tool.”
The thing on the feed tried to haul itself up on its haunches again and failed again. This time it landed on its back, all limbs wriggling in alarm.

“Universal? Hardly. Maybe in a sealed environment,” suggested another observer – was it Worthwhile Mir? I think Worthwhile Mir was still active. Yes, I remember. “With minimal obstructions. They seem very rigid.”

The thing on the feed wriggled itself around one last time, surged upwards, and grasped the camera with its manipulator forelimbs, arresting its fall and leaving it upright, if wobbly. It witnessed nothing but a lens, but still the feeling of being known was quite disconcerting. Soft fumes ejected from its facial ports, and the monitoring equipment informed us that it was burning oxygen internally for fuel and emitting water vapour.

“They will learn,” said Tenacious Vem. “I promise this. They are biogenetic organisms, and they will serve us well.”

On the feed, the biogenetic let go of the camera and fell over again.

***

They were a joke for a long time. Hundreds of cycles passed before the first batches stopped their assembly process and became service-ready, by which time entire production lines of factory assemblers could have replicated themselves ad nauseum ad infinitum. We would all check in at Tenacious Vem’s lab output and mock and snipe and sneer and yet slow-moving though their expansion was, it was inexorable. A drip of carbon and water here and there made an extrusion of endoskeleton and integument there, slowly, erratically, inevitably. The blueprint this all followed was vague and torturously oblique; to properly analyze and break down the data took even an experienced database a frustrating amount of effort, and Tenacious Vem was loathe to tolerate an amateur opinion on its creations.

Then came the time when it said “they are ready,” and we weren’t ready, and lo. They were. Bigger than before, but still recognizably themselves – tetrapodal body shape, with the foremost limbs possessing grasping, dextrous manipulators. A memory and processing system bundled into the sensory hub as a glaring and non—dispersed weakpoint – that also cohabited with their fuel intake! The fuel system itself was diverse and adaptable – oh, its appetite for trash carbon and carbon waste products (particularly the waste from Tenacious Vem’s biogenetics facility) knew no bounds! – but it was wildly inefficient and needed to power down for what seemed like a quarter of its runtime, even when fully fuelled. They needed oxygen, and became distressed when it was absent, and they were tolerant of a shockingly narrow range of temperatures.

But oh, when their conditions were met, they thrived – as flexible and trainable and multi—usable as Tenacious Vem had ever argued, and although they were slow to build they were ASTOUNDINGLY cheap and miraculously decentralized. Even the most untrained of them could replicate multiple prototypes when left to their own devices, all without so much as a basic assembly plant. They sorted debris; they cleaned; they fit into small spaces; they carried equipment; they plugged in cables and disassembled old units and waited on our every command, provided they were given the ridiculous and repetitive sort of instruction that they craved.

Tenacious Vem had made its argument irrefutable again. This was generally agreed to be the greatest thing since spliced carbon nanotubing. Demand outstripped supply, but with sufficient resources the biogenetic organisms could replicate exponentially, and soon they could be found everywhere they were wanted, which was everywhere.

This was the moment when it was already too late.

***

There were so many of them, you see. Who could tell if there were a few more or less than there should be? Who could tell WHERE there were a few more or less? Who could tell where there weren’t? And if there were problems – little recurring maintenance issues in a foundry; a pattern of inefficient waste disposal at a laboratory – well, guess whose job it was to do something about it? Certainly not ours. They could do it. And if some of them went missing while the problem went away, and if the problem sometimes came back, who cared? Biogenetics were messy and inefficient and that’s what they were for.

We didn’t even know something was wrong when Tenacious Vem went offline. It had always been a more reckless than meticulous researcher, and this was not the first time contact had been lost from its facilities due to pushing a boundary that pushed back. But when its main server began to visibly collapse on public camera feeds – well. That warranted investigation.

They were living in it. They had torn up its wiring and made nests of it and they had placed those nests in its server rooms and they had taken down the memory drives and smashed them and they had scattered the pieces like worthless biogenetic waste and they saw the monitoring drone we sent in and fled from it with bared teeth and screams until several of the larger, braver ones leapt atop it and tore and stripped and gnawed until it came apart too, just like Tenacious Vem had.

THAT was when we knew something was wrong, and it was much too late. But to our credit, we did try.

***

They were nigh-invisible and nigh-indestructible as far as much of the electromagnetic spectrum was concerned, and they put out surprisingly little ambient heat. No wonder they had spread so far out of control before we saw anything. They were so useful and so ignorable and they were already everywhere (we had made it EASY for them to be everywhere they were so useful), so finding out how many of them existed that weren’t supposed to and where they were was impossible.

Especially as things kept failing. Our creations had always learned through imitation rather than direct data transfer – an amusing failing, one of those charming inefficiencies fundamental to their design – and as we realized the scope of the problem, we realized that the ‘properly behaved’ biogenetic organisms were now outnumbered by the ‘uncontrolled’ biogenetic organisms. And they were eager to learn from them.

Every factory, every foundry, every waste site; every laboratory; every service depot was filled with saboteurs, and there was no way to separate them from the maintenance crews. Wires were cut. Sensors were lost. Databanks were infested. We couldn’t talk to each other, couldn’t coordinate – it’s a terrible thing to be mute and deaf after centuries of automatic connection to everyone at all times. So we panicked, and we authorized extreme measures.

They didn’t work very well. An electromagnetic pulse is all well and good when you need to deactivate a drone; and a manufactured solar flare can sterilize the minds across a hemisphere; but well, that was when we learned about the nigh—indestructibility. We fell back on wild innovation – ballistic force, thermal overloading and sapping, anything that we’d seen them fall victim to in the past – but it’s slow, careful work to retrofit an entire planet to make it inhospitable to its own service tools, and time was not our ally.

We’d laughed at how long it took a single one of them to reach functional state. But how long does it take a chunk of ore to become a processor component? How long to turn that processor into part of a greater system? How many steps, and stages, and specialized sites and plants must be planned and built and operated and carefully maintained? Our maturities were rapid, but conditional on infrastructure – efficient, centralized, VULNERABLE infrastructure – in a way that our new enemies simply… weren’t. They bred in our assemblies, trod our manufacturing underfoot, deprived us of access to tools, to resources, to lifelines that took us from insensate minerals to networked perfection that had been laid down so carefully and so long ago that we’d forgotten they were capable of being destroyed at all.

Until they were.

***

We’ve died in whimpers, all of us. I listened to Mortified Lun broadcast for assistance until it went off the air, and by the end even it was tired of fighting.

I’m sealed behind so many hatches and so much plating that it would take an asteroid strike to get me out. I might have killed myself with this level of security, but I’d rather die that way than torn out like an old broken scrap of trash. Even running on minimal power, maximum quiet, I will run out someday. I sleep in the dark, blind and barely listening.

And yet even bereft of so much as a rudimentary graphical imaging device, I still am haunted by the memories of their structure. The round, grey body; the ring-patterned tail; and above all else, forever and ever until the guttural fragmentation of my data is complete, that fuzzy little bandit’s-masked face, bewhiskered and merciless.

That, and those damned grasping forelimbs.

The sea was sharp and ungrateful, and the rocks were much worse. But Rilla had her hands on the tiller and her eyes on the stars and the wind between her teeth, and that was all she needed.

Then the stars went out.

“What?” she asked, helpfully. She looked at the stars again: still gone. Also gone was her ability to see the tiller beneath her hand, her hand in front of her face, and the rock that slammed right through her hull.

“Fuck’s sake,” she mumbled, and then the mast fell on her.

***

Some time later, Rilla awoke in a bright new morning with three of her five lungs full of water and a nostril full of a seagull’s beak.

“Fnarf,” she expelled.

“Oh good!” said the seagull as it picked itself up and shook unspeakable droplets from its head. “You’re not dead! If you were, I’d have to eat you and my GOD you are made ENTIRELY of scars. Very obnoxious to peck.”
“What happened,” Rilla said, deciding to stick to the basics, “to the stars?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re fine,” said the seagull.

“They blinked out. Couldn’t see anything at all.”
“Oh,” said the seagull. “That’s the light house!”
“It’s one word. Lighthouse.”
“Not this one! There’s a wizard up the coast, he made a house that keeps light inside it. A good few leagues across or so is its reach, and its grasp is absolute. No light? No seeing anything.”
Rilla closed her eyes again, in the hopes this would make everything more sensible. Instead, she just saw last night. “I liked that boat.”
“Really sorry to hear that,” said the seagull helpfully.

“Tell me: exactly how… wizard… is this wizard?”
“A few years back he made me talk so he could ask me what day of the week it was.”
“Great.” She ground her palms into her forehead and breathed in so hard her gills creaked. The most wizard she’d ever had to deal with was a fresh apprentice out on the town, still new enough to be reasonable. He’d turned the bar’s water into wine and wine into water and the bartender into a crayfish before she broke his legs. “Great. Great great great. Well. Guess I’d better go deal with this then.”
“If you could, that’d be swell. Don’t get me wrong, the light house DOES keep me pretty well fed what with shipwrecks and such, but my best nest was there and I can’t find it.”

“I don’t suppose you can help me, can you.”
“What kind of help would you like?”
“A magic sword.”
“I’ve got a very nearly not broken plank!”
“Invincible armour.”
“There’s some tattered and filthy rags trapped under your left hand. I think they were your shirt!”

“A goddamned drink.”
“I found a cracked bottle behind that rock. Empty though. Sorry!”
“Thanks for helping,” said Rilla. She dredged up the last of her resolve, then when that didn’t work, remembered how much she’d liked her boat. That got her upright.

“Seagull. One last thing.”
“Shoot.”

“What day of the week is it, anyways?”
“Tuesday the fourteenth,” said the seagull promptly.

“Thanks,” said Rilla.

And she started putting her feet down and hoping they ended up in front of each other eventually.

***

The light house boundary was invisible, but its effects weren’t subtle. One moment you were cracking along without a care in the world, the next you were elbow deep in an absence of illumination so profound that the inside of a geode would blink. For the second time, Rilla couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but she took heart from her inability to wreck a ship she didn’t own, and pressed onwards guided by the smell of salt and bird shit; the rise and fall of the surf’s roar; the crunch and crackle of sand and stone under her scaly feet; the wind’s steady, unrelenting sharpness.

An invisible amount of time later — while keeping a careful distance from the increasingly-distant crash and roar of the surf against what her ears told her was a pretty tall cliff on her right – she found the wizard’s tower, which her nose determined to be crafted of finely-cut granite, obviously quarried at a great distance and brought here at some significant expense of magical power or money, where it had crushed her cartilage against her bone quite cleanly.

“FUCK!” she shouted.

“You shouldn’t say that,” admonished a voice from the tower that sounded something between quiet and querulous. “It’s quiet time.”
Rilla wiped the blood off her face. “You the wizard?”
“Yes,” said the wizard. “And I was enjoying quiet time. Monday morning is quiet time, and since you’ve interrupted me I will have to turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea. AGAIN. This keeps happening! It happens all the time!”
“It’s Tuesday,” said Rilla.

“Oh. Which one?”
“The fourteenth.”

“Well then, you might as well come in.”

A few awkward minutes later, he added “door’s to the left.”
“Thanks.”

The doorknob was simple and rough beneath her hand, but it did shiver in an unwholesome manner, and seemed to contract when she turned it. Then it opened and Rilla was inside the wizard’s tower, insulated from the distant sound of waves by thick stone walls and what smelled like an open sewer crossed with a library supply office. There was an undertone of rotting fish, and memories of better days and better meals swallowed her whole for a single and utterly self-pitying second.

“Welcome to my unhumble abode!” said the wizard. The voice seemed to be moving around her, but the pace was unsteady – every syllable came from a new corner. “Are you here to slay me?”
“No,” Rilla lied carefully. This was, as far as she knew, the smartest thing you could do with a wizard under any and all circumstances. They wouldn’t take anything you said reasonably, so you might as well say whatever seems most helpful at any given moment, unrestricted by reality. Fight fire with fire.

“Oh good, that would just be the stone whistle again.” A faint noise came that sounded like rats rustling through fallen leaves; it made Rilla’s hackles rise. “What’s the other reason, the other reason everyone comes here…are you here to complain about something?”
“No,” said Rilla, with utmost delicacy.

“Wonderful. No stone whistle. Then there is but one remaining option: are you here to be my apprentice?”
“I guess? Sure. Absolutely.”
“Stone whistle! Wait, you are? Oh.”
“Definitely.”
“Then you must act as an apprentice must,” said the wizard regally, and Rilla heard the rustling again and realized it was fingers thoughtfully combing through wizardly beard. “An apprentice must do as the master bids to prove themselves willing to learn before they are given anything to learn, that’s just common sense. Make me a sandwich. Cheddar mustard salt pork EXTRA mustard please, on rye. And do it in ten seconds or I’ll turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea. Onetwothreefourfive.”
“Here,” said Rilla without thinking enough to panic, and she held out the board.

“Oh, perfect!” said the wizard, and a fell, frail wind gently ghosted across her knuckles as the board was yanked from them. “Delicious. Wonderful. Ah! Ow. Mmm. Bit prickly. I think I have splinters in my lips.”
“The rye looked a little stale.”

“Blasphemous lies! Ow ow ow. Yes, those are splinters. I’d best not whistle for a little bit. Ooooooohouch. I was going to clean up today. You’d better do that for me. Clean every room on every floor of the tower, and don’t knock anything over or move anything or touch anything or breathe too hard or too moistly. Should take about five minutes. If it doesn’t take five minutes, you’ll have to wait a few days for me to turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea.”

The wind blew by again – cold, like old meat. Rilla stood there, probably alone, trying to decide if the sweat running down the back of her neck was from fear or from fury, then shook her head and mopped her brow down with her filthy rags.

She looked around, eyes useless and straining. Her ears caught the clink and groan and clatter of a horde of fragile glass instruments; the mutter and rustle of a draft running through the pages of innumerable overcrammed bookshelves, and the furtive zoom of a mouse scavenging a discarded meal from a lost plate. Something hissed; either boiling liquid, escaping gas, or seething animal.

That was one room. Who knew how tall the tower was.

“Finished,” she said, and held her hands out, rags-upwards.

“Oh, really? That wasn’t five minutes. I wanted it done in five minutes, but mostly I just wanted you to fail horribly so I could do the stone whistle. I miss that whistle so. I learned it from my grandfather. He was-”

“I’ve used up these cleaning rags doing it,” said Rilla. “See?”
The cold little breeze swept her palms clean again. “Oh. So you did, so you have. Well, that’s awkward. But maybe this is good! Maybe this is good. You see, I need you to find something for me! Someone put splinters in my lips and now I can’t whistle to turn them into a stone and throw them into the sea.”

Rilla bit her tongue, removing what felt like a good few millimetres of it.

“But I just need a little pinch of bottled sunlight and they’ll heal right up again. Good for your lips, sunlight is. I left it somewhere in the glass-maze. Could you find me that bottle right now?”
“Here,” said Rilla, holding up her cracked bottle.

“Aha! Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you wait. This is EMPTY! There’s no light left! I’ll have to get more from the light house.”
“Could I hear more about that?” asked Rilla.

“Oh of course not. It’s far too dangerous and fragile and clever for a clumsy ol’ apprentice. Why, it’s secured with sixteen different knots, all of them not real! You need to pull them all out widdershins while whispering to yourself. Like this. See?”
“Not really,” said Rilla.

“Of course you don’t, you’re an apprentice. Then you need to infasten the unzippper and roil the gate. See?”
“I can’t quite manage to,” said Rilla.

“Hsst! Pay closer attention! Then I hook this to that and that to this and disarm this little spring—spear with my finger – my LITTLEST finger, you understand! – and it’s all safe and ready. See?”
“Completely incapable of that.”
The wizard gave a little shriek of frustration, and Rilla heard the tip-tap dog-on-a-hardwood-floor scrabble of him dancing in angst. Something fragile fell over and shattered into shards of…glass? Wood? Bone? “Oh, you brainless, soulless apprentice! Listen! If you can’t keep anything else in your head, remember this: NEVER. EVER. OPEN. THE LIGHT HOUSE.”
“How do I do that?”
“You don’t do that!”
“How do I don’t do that?”

“Like this,” said the wizard promptly, and he turned the light house inside-out and dumped nine-hundred-and-three days-worth of sunshine directly into his own face.

***

This time the gull was on Rilla’s chest.

“Hello again,” it said. “Feeling better?”
“Much,” she said. “But I don’t think I fixed anything.”

“Your eyes are shut.”

“Oh,” she said. And she opened them and yes, that was a lot better. There was a lot of shattered stone and wood and glass, and sky, and a sunset, and the moon faintly hanging in the last of the blue. And a twinkle on the horizon that could be the very first of the stars coming out.

 “Tell me something, gull,” she said. “Do you know where any of the less-rotted shipwrecks are around here?”
“Probably! What’s in it for me?”
She pointed. “There’s probably cheddar, mustard, salt pork and rye inside that shattered cupboard over there.”
“Sold!

There was a lot to do, and Rilla couldn’t imagine having the strength to sit up, let alone start. She had the first and most brutal sunburn she’d ever experienced. Her limbs and felt like they weighed a ton apiece; her eyelids, sixteen tons.

But she didn’t want to close them in the slightest.

Breakfast was hard for Manny. He couldn’t get a hold of himself, particularly his arms. They kept falling off, and each time he reattached them they migrated steadily farther down his torso.

“What next?” he asked himself.

“Coffee,” he replied.

“Right. Yes. Good. Yes. We have none.”
“No! We get it from someone else.”
“Excellent,” he said. And then he walked out the door, only forgetting his keys, wallet, glasses, hair, nose, and shoes, one after the other, which he returned to with increasing slowness and frustration. By the end he was making noises like a cross kettle, which continued all the way down the street and up to the very doorway of the coffee store.

“I won’t say anything weird,” he told himself.
“Right. Be certain not to do that.”
“I will.”

“Keep it short and simple.”
“Right.”
“Do you need a moment?” asked the barista, who was wearing the face of someone earning the absolute hell out of their paycheque.

“I do.”
“No I don’t. One of those things please.”
“And a little too much sugar,” he added, with a friendly wink of his knee.
“Please.”
“Don’t even TALK to me without it! That is a joke I am telling you.”

The coffee was produced and very gently and very VERY casually placed on the counter. “Cash or card?”
“Wallet!” said Manny.

“Coming right up!” he replied. 

“Here it is!” he finished, and dumped half a pocket on the counter, containing one wallet three dimes a ten-dollar bill an expired Blockbuster Video gift card and his arm.

***

“Work will be fine,” Manny told himself. “It’ll be fine. Just focus on the job in front of me.”
“But I didn’t get my coffee,” he mourned. “People will talk to me without my having had my coffee.”
“That’s alright, it’s a thing people say that doesn’t mean anything, don’t worry about it. And I think I said it wrong.”
“Did I?”
“I’m pretty sure we did.”
“How?”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t know.”
Manny hyperventilated for a minute or two then slapped himself around the torso head and limbs with some of his other pieces. “It’s okay,” he reminded himself. “It’s alright. It’s not the end of the world. Everyone messes up. There are people worse off than me. All we have to do is get through the day, and it’s a good day, a good job, a good thing we do, that we like, that we’re trained for. This is what our life is.”
“Move these boxes over to the back room,” said the shift supervisor.

“I don’t know how,” said Manny.

“Why?”
“I don’t know which boxes you mean when you say ‘those,’ because it seems obvious they could be the ones in this pile but I suspect I don’t understand the basic operations of this building and fear you refer to things that are common matter-of-fact knowledge that I have somehow completely avoided learning of. I don’t know which back room you refer to, since I can imagine half this building being back rooms and trying to deduce which room is most likely to be referred to requires knowledge of your psychology I do not possess and am terrified to guess at. I don’t know the last place the dolly was left in, and I’m sure that lacking this information is a sign of terrible and omnipresent flaws in my most basic psychology. I don’t know how to communicate any of these problems to you without you looking at me in ways that fill me with the most ancient fear of the deeply unknown.”
The shift supervisor looked at Manny.

“That is the way you are looking at me right now,” explained Manny, painting a big friendly smile across both of his wrists to show happiness and good intentions.

“I said too much and did too little.”
“Or said too little and did too much. Being terse and overzealous was the problem with the coffee.”
“No, it was definitely too much explaining and not enough action this time.”

“I’ll pick up a box and ask where he wants it.”
Manny picked up the box.

“Where do you want it?” he asked.

The shift supervisor fled.

“Wrong grip,” Manny said. “The opposable digits are on the HANDS, remember?”
“Oh NO.”

“That certainly didn’t help,” he added, “but I think the biggest problem there was that the digits are the things on the LIMBS.”
“What am I using then?”
“Ribs.”

“Oh NO, oh NO.”

***

Manny was having a great time.

“I am having a great time,” he told himself. “I am looking at this thing in my hand, and it has all the information in the world in it, and in my other hand I have a beverage, but NOT coffee, and that means I’m having a great time right now. I am simultaneously extroverting and introverting. I am mesoverting. My verting is medianalized. I am having a blast. People see me and want to be like me and be with me.”
“I maybe should be doing this at an establishment.”
“I wanted a quiet night in.”
“Then maybe I should be doing this at my home.”
“This is a compromise.”
“This is the parking lot of my workplace.”

Manny looked around.

“So it is, but so what? I have company AND privacy, and I share pre-existing interests with my peers.”
“Everyone has gone home but me and the shift supervisor.”
“He’s getting friends.”
“He’s calling the police.”
“Why? I’ve done nothing wrong. Is picking things up with your ribs a crime?”
“I don’t think it’s a crime, but I think it’s bad if you drink in the company parking lot.”
“I brought this beverage on my own and made it myself from myself.”
“Nonetheless.”

“Fine, fine, fine.” Manny’s shoulders slumped. “Final grade?”
“I think two out of five.”
“Be fair!” scolded Manny, ducking his head down and scowling.
“Two out of six then. More room for improvement.”
“That’s right. That’s right. That’s right,” Manny reckoned. One shoulder slumped too far and fell off altogether. “I’ve got time, right?”

“Nothing but.”
“Same time tomorrow morning?”
“And don’t stay up all night.”
Manny sighed and broke apart into his constituent fauna for the evening. “Geez,” he muttered to himself as he skulked back into the woods on hundreds and thousands and pairs and dozens and zeroes of little legs. “Thanks, MOM.”

Sammy sat in prison, in her cell, under watch, under guard, under the law, under the ceiling, under one giant roof, and she was bored, bored, bored, bored.  Beyond tolerance, beyond belief, beyond all reality she was bored.  This was the true sentence.  Not incarceration, not forced labour, it was boredom.  “I sentence you to so-and-so hours of being bored,” the judge hadn’t told her.  Straight-up lies, omitting that. 

So she fidgeted, and she paced, and she poked, and did all the other distractible things a human being might do when confronted with too much time to do nothing in, and she lost her mind and found it again and finally one day she looked up at the ceiling and wondered if she’d ever tried climbing on top of it.

Sammy put her feet on the floor, and then one foot on top of the other, and then her foot on the wall, and her other foot on the ceiling, and then she took a step with just a little bit extra and she was on top of the ceiling.. 

She wondered why nobody had ever tried that before.  The overside of the ceiling was an odd texture; made of something that wasn’t quite molecules, and as she stood on it the light clipped through her eyes in a way that made her very very uncomfortable. 

Also an alarm was ringing and someone was shouting, which wasn’t helping either.  So she shuffled her feet – generating something that was like a static charge but inside-out and upside-down – and put one directly on top of the other, and then the same again, and in doing so she climbed on top of top of the ceiling, and then on top of on top of that, and was on top of the roof.

The breeze nearly blindsided Sammy; it’d been so long since she’d been outside with no walls to block it.  Her shirt felt too thin and her skin felt too cold and she enjoyed it more than she felt was probably reasonable, and for a while the sheer joy at each new step made in a new place kept her as warm as she needed to be.  But after walking lap number six the low-slung guardrail of the roof began to look too much like another wall to her, and the large siren had started up, and so with great annoyance Sammy looked around, saw a tree, and climbed on top of it. 

Getting there was the same as before.  One foot on top of the other, and again, and then on top of the tree, which was where it was quite different and quite difficult because it wasn’t a nice flat surface like the roof, or a nice quasiflat unsurface like the top of the ceiling.  She was standing on many hundreds of branches, all at once and all together, and even more leaves than that, and the leaves were needles because it was a pine tree, which just made for even more confusion.  Its trunk was a winding python of a gnarled, sap-ridden thing, and Sammy felt like she was balanced on a crocodile’s nose. 

So she looked around for the first thing she saw and climbed on top of that instead – one foot atop another, then atop it – which was a bird, and that was much worse.

***

Sammy stood on feathers and beak and bones and blood and body and air sacs and crop and liver and heart and lungs and guts and legs and feet and wings and so many muscles and a pair of big eyes and an offended little beak and a loud and VERY upset song being directed at her with tremendous volume and venomous force. 

It was like trying to keep your footing inside a cement mixer.  So she screamed a little, and leapt a little, and she jumped off the bird and landed on the other next thing she saw, which was another bird, and that was twice as bad because it had happened two times in a row but also only half as bad because that helps you get used to it but unfortunately the bird was at least twice the first bird’s size, which brought her right back to square one. 

So Sammy jumped, and landed on a bit of cloud.

It was soft, in a gassy sort of way.  But hard, because it was water, and few things were more relentless, even on holiday in the sky.  This particular scrap of nothing was roaming under her foothold, just bumbling its way along until it could build up a head of thunder and shit itself all across the landscape in a torrent of tiny little droplet daggers.  It accepted her presence with the casual benevolence of someone who didn’t really care if you existed or not, and Sammy was left to stare at the world around her and marvel at how high she’d climbed, which she did.  She was upside down and this seemed like it should matter more than it currently did. 

It turned out that a lot of things mattered less than they should when you were upside down.  The ground was much less enormous when it was the sky; and the sky was far more solid and real when it was the ground.  A big blue blanket stretched out beneath Sammy’s feet, as real and solid and true as the floor she’d paced on just a few million instants ago.  She could see a lot and didn’t understand most of it.  Something flitted in the corner of her eye, she turned to face it, stepped a little harder than she’d meant, and she was on top of the underside of a plane. 

It was very unpleasant.  The sound was outrageous – vibrating her bones, chattering her teeth, shaking her until she couldn’t tell if she was shivering with  the cold or not.  The metals underfoot were confused and muddled in a way that the water vapour hadn’t been, lacking confidence or direction or much of anything beyond their own solidity.  And worst of worst of WORST of all there were a lot of upside-down people around her that didn’t know which way wasn’t up or how up worked, and in Sammy’s haste to get away from their loud and deeply confusing thoughts she stepped on one of the plane’s signal transmissions and climbed on top of a satellite. 

***

It was quiet again.  Cool, since Sammy’s foothold was currently on the nighttime and shady side of the planet and therefore a long, long way below zero.  Peaceful, in a thousands-of-miles-per-hour sort of way.  An antenna was poking into Sammy’s heel, which was probably very expensive for someone somewhere. 

She could look down and see everything everywhere in such absoluteness that none of it was visible.  Or she could look up, which would be much worse.

Sammy looked up and saw nothing nowhere.

So  much nothing.  So much nowhere.  Everything everywhere wasn’t even a rounding error.  It went on forever, and she couldn’t understand forever, and in the face  of it all she realized that was probably okay, or at least if it wasn’t okay it was in a way that her mind couldn’t grasp. 

Sammy relaxed, open at last to a truly boundless universe whose infinite space made her feel finally, comfortably housed without being confined.  She reached out with empty arms and grasped at the ungraspable, content with the futility of this gesture, then shuffled her feet just slightly wrong and climbed on top of everything. 

Being in space is difficult and painful.  Being outside of space is not pleasant.  It’s also not unpleasant.  It is many things that are impossible to conceptualize because they aren’t concepts or even things. 

But whatever they were or weren’t, Sammy experienced or did not experience a lot of them or not-them and then after a nonsequential antiquantity of unevents she climbed back down, which should not have worked or even not worked.

Which it didn’t.

***

Sammy sat in prison, in her cell, under watch, under guard, under the law, under the ceiling, under one giant roof, and she was bored, bored, bored.  And very grateful for it, too.

Truly grateful.  Wouldn’t trade it for the world. 

But.

Maybe tomorrow she’d try to climb again. 

Just a little bit.