jamieproctor.ca

It’s a terrible thing to watch a body eat itself, particularly when the whole job’s in on it, not just the mouth. The liver overrunning the kidneys; the small intestine trading jobs with the large; the brain beating an angry poem into the lining of the skull as the blood vessels swell and sputter like indignant old men.
Regina was breathing her last. It was just that, thanks to the complicated series of tubes jammed through her larynx, her last had been in process for over six months already.
“Tell me,” she asked her relative (lord knows she couldn’t keep track of them all by now, four generations deep as they were), “what kind of day is it out there right now?”
Her relative looked out the window. “Sunny,” they said, after a while. “Very blue. A good day for throwing Frisbees, swimming in ponds, catching frogs, and admiring birds. The plants love it.”
Regina rested her gaze on the only plant representative available, a tiny long-ago-potted specimen that, regardless of former species allegiance, by now resembled some sort of diminutive dwarf strangling vine. “Selfish little bastards, hogging it all to themselves,” she muttered.
“Grandma?”
“Oh, nothing. But I tell you what, there’s nothing worse than to sit indoors on a day like this without so much as a fresh leaf to brighten the space.”
“We could take you outside.”
“Not since they installed that last tube. It goes, I go.”
“We could take it outside.”
“It’s connected to this machine which is connected to this pump which is connected to this valve which is connected to this generator which is connected to this wall.”
“Oh dear.”
“It happened last week, dear, don’t worry about it too much. I don’t think you were on shift then.”
Regina’s relative looked apologetic. “Still…”
“Oh, don’t be that way. Look, if you want to make it up for me, I’ve got one thing I want. One wish. I want you to get me a tree.”
Regina’s relative paced the doorway’s width three times, squinted and tilted their head, moved their lips a lot, and made a sort of aimless buzzing sound deep in their throat. “Well, maybe a sapling’d do it…”
“No deal,” said Regina firmly. “I want a tree, not a potted planter. Now hop to it and let me have some rest.”

So Regina’s relative hopped over to another of Regina’s relatives who phoned up another of Regina’s relatives who sent an email to yet another of Regina’s relatives who knew one of Regina’s relatives who knew a guy who wasn’t related to Regina at all but who seemed to recall seeing something like what they were talking about in the bottom of the back of an old, old, old, old mail-order catalogue from the early 1980s, buried under a heap of advertisements for long-dead home computer systems.
They sent the cheque in anyways, because inflation had rendered the sum nominal by now and they figured it was worth a shot. And indeed, two to three mailing weeks later, Regina’s relative opened their door to find a box the size of a car wedged onto their porch.
“Sign here please” said a very faraway and irritated voice.
“Where?”
A clipboard was launched over the box’s top, with pinpoint accuracy.
“Ow.”
“On the dotted line, the dashed line, the solid line marked with an X, the solid line NOT marked with an X, the three perforated portions, and the supplementary signature section, boxes Q through Z-B.”
“Right. Isn’t this a bit much?”
“Oh god no. You have no idea how much paperwork it takes to get a tree built around here.”

The first step of the matter was to get the tree to Regina’s hospital. This presented difficulties until one of Regina’s relatives mentioned that they knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a girl who knew someone who had a trucker buddy who was awfully free with company property, at which point all transportational difficulties were solved with eighteen wheels and a few thousand horsepower.
The second step was to unload it, piece by piece. Each portion of the tree had to be lifted up three stories, and the hospital refused the use of their cargo elevator.
“The insurance doesn’t cover trees,” the director pointed out. “Even if you don’t so much as chip the paint – which I very much doubt you’ll manage, I mean, is that a conifer?”
“White pine,” said Regina’s relative.
“A nightmare of scraping,” the director murmured. “The needles alone could peel a wall to the bare bone, the sap, the sap, the awful, awful sap…” She shuddered and shook herself vigorously. “Anyways! Even if there’s no damage whatsoever from the rough rough bark ANYWAYS I’d be in trouble for permitting that sort of risk to take place on the premises.”
“What if we winch it up?”
“Oh that’d be fine, go nuts. I think one of the old dialysis machines we’ve got in the basement can be repurposed to do that, if you ask one of the technicians.”
It could and did, because nothing gets something done faster than a bored techie, and soon, ring by ring, a disassembled heap of tree was growing on the floor of Regina’s bedroom as she dozed the afternoon away.
“I can’t let you do this if there’s going to be any hammering,” the head nurse told them. “This is a palliative ward. People need their sleep.”
“Don’t worry,” reassured Regina’s relative. “The manual says this thing assembles without so much as a screwdriver. It’s all dowels.”
“Dowels?”
“Yes.”
The head nurse opened his mouth and shut it again and repeated that a few times, then settled for a friendly pat on the shoulder. “I’m sure it’ll all be fine in the end,” he managed through a three-tooth smile. Then he departed, slumping.

The basic principles of tree assembly were simple.
Each ring was attached to the next largest ring with three dowels every four inches.
The outmost ring was attached to a slab of bark with four completely different dowels every five inches.
Pasted between each layer was 4 fluid oz. of sap mixed from four separate plastic pouches, none of which were labelled.
All needles were labelled A through Z and 1 through 1,000, in reverse alphabetical order, and each had its own corresponding dowel, all of which looked to be of equivalent size and none of which were.
The roots were in a separate bag hidden somewhere in the bottom of the box which had to be retrieved from the hospital’s recycling dumpster. Each root was composed of eighteen or more interlocking and wholly unique dowels, like a jigsaw puzzle.
You see? Simple.
“This is not at all simple,” said Regina’s relative, buried somewhere in needle clumps Q010, R592, and S008.
“Simple or not, it’s got to be done,” said another of Regina’s relatives, who was trying to sort the (unlabelled) dowel packages into the comfortable illusion of control provided by orderly rows and columns. “And I don’t want to hear one more thing about it.”
“Um…. One thing.”
Another of Regina’s relatives dropped the package she was holding, which bounced off six others and sent them spraying across the floor with a noise like a cat pissing on a tin roof. “Yes?” they said.
“What do we do about the ceiling?”

The next problem was the ceiling.
“We could cut a hole through it?”
“No,” said the director.
“We could separate it into portions, and just sort of stack them up floor by floor, each above the other but separated by the floorboards, if we just moved some of the beds around.”
“No,” said the head nurse.
“We could cut a SMALL hole through it…”
“No,” said the director.
“What if we planted it outside the window and just moved her over to look at it through that?”
“No,” said Regina’s relative.
“What if we used a drill instea-”
“NO,” said the director.
“What if,” said Regina’s relative, “we just assembled it sideways?”
They all looked at each other, carefully assessing reactions, cataloguing acceptance, measuring sanity.
“Fine,” said the director. “But run it through the south door. East is the children’s ward, and they’ll try and climb it.”

Regina’s eyes opened. It was a bigger accomplishment than it looked on paper.
“Surprised, grandma?” asked Regina’s relative.
She looked up. Not terribly far up; six inches past her nose it was nothing but needles.
“We had to stick the roots out the window,” said another of Regina’s relatives. “But it seems to be doing all right.”
Regina turned her head, with some difficulty. “Wow,” she said. “How big’s that thing?”
“One hundred and forty-two feet,” said another of Regina’s relatives promptly. “We ordered size L; XL said ‘limited stock’ and since the ad was thirty-four years old we figured that-”
“Wow,” repeated Regina. “That’s some tree all right. That’s really nice, you know that? Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” said Regina’s relatives.
Her lips pursed. “Still… did it have to be a pine? I really WOULD have liked to see a fresh leaf in here; it’d really brighten the space.”

And Regina laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed at their expressions, a long, full cackle that sent four miles of plastic tubes buzzing with glee.
“Oh man,” she choked out, “you’re REALLY easy to get! Oh my! It’s lovely, thanks, I’ve never been happi” and then she died, but very cheerfully.

They brought the tree to the funeral.
It seemed right.

I walked out my door and into a man. Good thing I was planning on walking; if I’d had my car keys out, he’d have speared himself on them. Not that he was moving very quickly, or at all. He was just one of those people who seemed to be hurrying in place.
“Hey hi there nicetameetcha howzitgoing heyyoulivehere nicehousehowaboutthathuh heyyyyy…” he gargled out and then paused for breath.
“Uh-” I managed.
“SO! Want to buy a World War Two-era battleship?”
“I want to get some milk from down the street,” I said.
“Right, right, right. Good stuff milk full of calcaratilagenoucerouscarcharadoncherrycumulu-cumulo… Calcium! Right, calcium. Good for strong bones! But buddy c’mere and check this out what I’ve got is so good you won’t WANT bones you’ll have steel and iron old ironsides ahahahahahahhaha ANYWAYS it’s only five dollars.”
“Five what?”
“Five dollars.”
My head was hurting at this point. “Five…million?”
“No!”
“Five thousand?”
“NO! Five. Five hundred pennies, a hundred nickles, fifty dimes, twenty quarters, FIVE DOLLARS. NOW YOURS! For four dollars.”
Now my eyes hurt too. Mostly from squinting. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Wrong? Wrong?! Nothing’s wrong with it! It’s a part of history, it’s a piece of the action, and it’s YOURS, YOURS, YOURS for three dollars fifty cents. Two dollars fifty cents.”
My ears hurt, the sun was starting to sting my shoulders, and the man’s shoulders were vibrating in a sickly way that offended me. So I shoved half my milk change in his fist, mumbled “thank you,” and left as quickly as I could.
I didn’t really need more than a litre that day anyways.

When I came back, I had a battleship moored in my driveway.
It was about two hundred and sixty metres long, according to careful use of about thirty measuring tapes. It probably displaced something like forty thousand tons. It was equipped with four 16-inch rotating turrets that could fire multi-thousand-pound shells. And it was the rustiest thing I’d ever seen in my life; caked red and brown and grey and mouldering faster than last fall’s leaves. It sighed when I walked by it and groaned when I walked on it. The smell was somewhere between an oil slick and a lake of blood, and everything I ate tasted like dead metal the moment it went in my mouth. My dog ran away from home, the neighbour’s dog ran away from home, the whole block’s dogs ran away from home. I expected complaints, but heard none, although that could’ve been because the battleship’s hull looming over my house was ruining my cell reception.
There was no name on its hull, only rust. So I called it Earl.

I was locking up Earl for the night that Thursday when I practically ran into another man, who looked absolutely nothing like the first one I’d practically run into. The pace was the same though. He was vibrating.
“Hey hi there nicetameetcha WANT A TANK?!” he gasped into my face. His jowls were really alarming things, somewhere between barbels and basset hound lips. They quivered at rest, and I was filled with fear that he would dart his head forward and swallow me whole.
“Yes sure whatever you say bye!” I said, and then I was off and away, scampering like a rat down the street and cutting corners until I felt myself comfortably out of sight, mind, and sanity. I had a brief lunch of junk food and waste liquid to fortify myself, then returned to find a genuine Mark I tank parked over half my lawn and most of my front stoop, not even remotely as fresh and shiny as it had been the day it had been abandoned in a flooded bomb crater in the Somme. Mud dripped from its gullet, bird-nests filled its interior, there was a raccoon inside the right six-pounder and a macerated stray cat in its treads.
I crawled over it to reach the door, went inside, and drank for four days.

The next day I woke up brushed my teeth walked outside checked my mail and found that my mailbox was full of aged, decrepit firearms and expired grenades. Also, my mailbox was now made of concrete, some twenty feet across, fitted with firing slits, and was a pillbox. A small note in a neurotic hand attached to its front with scotch tape charged me forty cents for the privilege, all for labour costs.
I left fifty and went to bed again in the hope that the world would make more sense the next time I woke up, or at least be less flecked with rotted steel and grime.

It didn’t. The first thing I saw was a set of yellowed, half-ground teeth. The second thing I saw was that their owner was sitting on my chest, whimpering and begging and pleading in an endless stream that was probably more at everyone than it was anyone.
“C’mon pal,” he muttered through a moustache that had slid into a goatee, “don’t leave me hanging. Just give me a chance. I’ve got a lot of stock to clear out and the boss’s coming back soon and I need to show him proof it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault. You get it, right, that it’s not my fault c’mon give me a hand don’t do this to me. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s nobody’s fault. Just help me, give me a few minutes, I just gotta get rid of this stuff-”
I stuck my head under the pillow and hummed for three hours until I passed out from lack of oxygen. When I took it off again he was gone, but there was an entire set of extremely used gothic plate next to my bed, complete with the large, rust-eaten dirk that had been jammed through its eyeslits.

The next day I went outdoors, the sky had changed. Someone had parked an aircraft carrier of unknown make (it was covered in sixty years of corals and sponges) next to my house, then dumped aircraft on it until they ran out of deck and had to use my roof. A derelict Boeing B-52 Superfortress had slid off at a funny angle and squashed my backyard flat. Helicopters lay splayed across the street like flies in midwinter, rotors at random and mostly disconnected.
I went to work and hoped it’d all be over when I came home, spent my shift searching the internet for answers and not even finding questions, and when I drove back I found that my backdoor was blocked by a heap of long-expired “Fat Man” atomic bombs, my front door was somewhere inside a thicket of discarded and broken pikes, guisarmes, glaives, halberds, and fauchards, and my windows were blocked from the inside by a complex array of disassembled ballistas, catapults, and trebuchets.
I slept in the street. At some point I woke up to water dripping and someone had parked a small siege tower on top of me; rain was running down its guts and onto my nose. I crawled out from underneath it and hurried over to Earl, who was still the only one of my acquisitions to have a name.
Earl was many things inside, but, against all odds, one of those things was ‘dry.’ It would’ve sunk in seconds if there’d been a body of water large enough to hold it within twelve hundred miles, but the bridge’s roof was intact. Mostly. I poked at bits and pieces of who-knew-what and pulled dead levers. There was a moth-eaten hat under the desk, which I did not put on.
At some point it was dawn, but with the rain, who could tell? I sat in my ship and watched the water rise up, bubbling and babbling and eating up all the broken airplanes and burnt-out Humvees and shell-shredded Jeeps and who-knew-whats. There were skeletons down there – warhorses? Some of them could be elephants. They smiled at me from under the rippling downpour. It was strange to see biological decay, next to all that rust.
There was a gurgle. One of the phones on the bridge was trying to say something. I picked it up and shook it.
“Thanks you’re a pal you’re a pal and a half take it now the stuff’s still good as new, go on it’s yours, you’re like a part of the family you’re a good customer. Listen, I’ve got to go, right? I’ve got to go right now. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do be a sport see ya.”
Click.
Deeper under the deck, something else went click. The waters had risen and the engines were moaning their way to unlife. We were off the street and floating on our own wreckage.
I looked through the bridge window as Earl started to move, wondering where we were headed, but all I could see was haze.

It was a hard, grinding, ruthlessly uncompassionate sort of Monday. Long, too – the kind where minutes take hours and hours take days and the afternoon becomes something unspeakable. By the time she got home, Joan wanted three things in basically this order:
-a drink
-another drink and some food
-bed and also one more drink
and after some amount of effort, she succeeded at all of them. Plus a few extra drinks.
She lay back in her bed and listened to the snow fuss itself into drifts outside her window, felt the gentle hum of Dan failing to snore at her elbow, sank just a little deeper into her bedding and let herself slip away into staring wide-eyed at the ceiling for four hours while every single muscle in her body wound itself tighter than a can of tuna.
It was not the best time she’d ever had.

The next day was twice as long as the first. She lurched from place to place, missed half her breakfast aimed at her mouth, and spoke half in English and half in her own private language and mostly in sentence fragments, some of which were inside her head and the rest which weren’t. She drove to work backwards both ways and sped through the stop signs; she turned on her computer with her face and typed with her wrists; she brought a jar of pickles for lunch and ate the butter in the fridge by mistake.
“I’m awfully sorry,” she told her co-workers and boss and everyone. “I seem to have lost four hours of sleep.”
Unfortunately, all that came out was “Mmsneeery. Isheedeehuurrr. Beep.” Which was not the most informative thing in the world and made everyone a bit jumpier than usual – if possible – and prone to hitting the coffee pot.
Joan stared at the ceiling again that night, her and every other person she’d come in contact with that day. And so it spread.

By Thursday it was obvious there was a real problem. Half the town was on edge and dozing on the move; sliding through traffic lights and mumbling to themselves. Workers did no work. Junkies missed veins. Firemen put out fires by slumping over on top of them, stifling the blaze with their numbed mass. It was not much fun for anybody, particularly Joan, who went to work at the wrong building that day four times running until she gave up and spent six hours changing oil and testing emissions instead of filing budgets.
“This would never have happened if I hadn’t lost four hours,” she told Dan that night. Or something like that.
“Mmm-hmm,” he yawned at her. “Good night, honey.”

Friday, the brink of the weekend, and a national emergency was declared. The entire province was paralyzed and it was in danger of seeping past its borders – the snowploughs wouldn’t run; the policemen wouldn’t patrol; the legislature wouldn’t convene; the cashiers wouldn’t ask you to tap, chip, or swipe. All anyone could do was wander around in a daze and accidentally do the wrong jobs until someone told them to stop, or at least mumbled “uitt ooin thaathing. Goowai.”
“We believe this event began with a single, small shortfall of restfulness,” announced the prime minister. “A handful of lost hours, at least. Either that or we’re all the targets of some kind of super-villainous plot, but let’s be realistic here.”
And then the prime minister blinked.
“Hey, where’s parliament?”
The woman behind the till dragged herself upright with force of will and fingers of iron. There was a customer to be served, even if they’d just spent the last twenty minutes giving some kind of bleary-eyed speech to the kid’s menu.
“C’n takyerordurrrr,” she managed.
The prime minister thought about this, gave up, ordered something, left without paying, and drove into a lamp-post. Like everyone else.
Joan tried stronger coffee. Then she tried eating coffee. Neither helped.

On Saturday morning, a man yawned in Cairo. By evening his exhaustion was in Paris, Melbourne, Nome, Cape Town, Beijing, and a million other places whose inhabitants were too tired to remember their names. Chaos reigned in the streets, in the cities, in the fields and in the forests. Spontaneous mass nappings broke out; governments were sleepily overthrown as they dozed in office; entire industries ground to a halt as the machinery of the globe was turned down so its operators could futilely attempt to get some shut-eye.
Joan stayed up until 5 AM watching reruns of a remake of a prequel series to a show she’d never liked. It did not help.

Sometime Sunday, the global sleep-shortage crossed the species barrier in several places. Nobody was awake enough to make specific notes about where or what or who, but by the evening everything from aardvarks to microbes and on to zebras was nodding off. Flowers waited in agony as bees aimlessly bumped against their stems; falcons zoned out while diving and pancaked into the dirt; giant pandas wandered off to look for coffee mid-mating attempt. In the worst of it, the gut flora of three point eight billion humans forgot the difference between the stomach and the small intestine, with extremely unpleasant results.
Joan counted sheep, cows, pigs, cats, dogs, and the strange flashing lights and humming noises she could smell whenever she shut her eyes. She kept losing track and starting over at eleventeen.

Monday came again, but there was nobody to remember its name. The sun rose on a sleepless, aimless, exhausted world with no memory, no energy, and no point.
Joan would’ve resented it, if she’d had the fortitude. Instead she had her breakfast of coffee and used tea bags, walked into the wall eight times, wandered down the street, and for the first time in seven days remembered she’d forgotten her keys on her bedside table and went back for them.
The bedroom was dark, quiet, and peaceful, with only Dan’s breathing to mar the thick warmth of the air. Joan groped her way to the right side of the bed after four tries, found her keys on the eleventh try, and had nearly found the door again when she realized something important and actually managed to not forget it.
She shook her husband awake.
“Mmmm?”
“Dan,” said Joan, with great effort.
“Yeah, honey?”
“Hwwr you. Sleeping.”
He blinked in that self-satisfied sleepy way of someone who’s had a really long rest. “Well, I don’t quite know, sugar. I’ve been really lazy this week – called in sick for all of it, actually. Nobody’s called, so I’m sure it’s alright.”
Joan tried to line up her thoughts, failed, and commited herself to blurting the first question that popped into her mouth, which was “Wheeennyouget seepy?”
Dan’s brow half-furrowed, muscles too relaxed to manage more. “Hmmm. Well corn syrup, I think it was last Monday. I was a little tired in the afternoon, so I took a nap, and then-”
Dan was a fairly large man and Joan was a fairly small woman, so her hands didn’t quite fit around his neck, but she was powered by pure tension and muscles that hadn’t unclenched in a week and he was soft and limp. She hoisted him clear above her head before either of them knew it.
“TOOK it?!” she screamed. “You TOOK it. YOU took it! TOOK IT! I NEVER LOST IT AT ALL YOU BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD.”
“Woah there aspartame,” said Dan, “let’s just calm –” but by then he was in mid-air and the window muffled his mouth something fierce as he ploughed through it.

The window was open and the cold wind poured in, tinkling the broken glass on the floor. The sun was bright and harsh and there was the smell of something burning down the block.
But the sleep that Joan seized on that half-made bed was the very best in all the world at that moment, and she was so grateful for it that she almost didn’t mind having to rebuild global society afterwards.
Besides, it only took a few months. She had loads of energy after all that.

It was bad weather. Real, hard, cold, cruel weather. The kind where the rain’s half-hail and half-mad; the kind where the air is aching and your cheeks are slapped silly by the breeze; the kind where you get your umbrella out indoors.
It was just the kind of thing that Lalie liked to listen to, in her crib, laughing and cursing at each new thunderbolt and oohing and aahing as the trees came down around her. She was five days old but already she knew what she liked, she’d known it since her mother laid her down.
Her mother’s name was Gogtride, and she was a hag-giant. She had come down from the hills and given birth with one hand and slapped a cradle together with the other and put them both together.
“I name you Lalie,” she told the scowling infant. “After my great-aunt. Now stay the hell away from me.” And then she beat it before Lalie could figure out how her legs worked.
Since then Lalie’s days had been rather dull, especially after the second bear, when all the wildlife had decided to avoid her. This storm was the best thing she’d ever seen in her little life, and she was smiling crazy as her soft, downy hair stood on end with static force.
Then a hailstone came singing down out of the night and smacked her right between the eyes so hard they crossed twice.
“Hey!” she shouted. “What’s the big idea, numbnuts?”
Thunder boomed and cackled and ignored her. The cloud was moving on, the rain was already ending.
Well.
Not if SHE had anything to say about it.
And so Lalie stood up in her crib made from the bones of her enemies and wrapped herself in the swaddle made from the skins of her enemies and she breathed out her fierce, one-toothed grin and set off in pursuit of the thundercloud.

It was a long, hard chase. Lalie had never walked before, much less run. But the thundercloud was idle and lazy, rolling over the landscape rather than sweeping, and she was a fast learner when she was irritated. Soon she was back in the full froth of the storm, and that was when she closed her eyes and started counting mississippis after every lightning strike.
One and TWO and THREE and BOOM
One and TWO and BOOM
One and BOOM
One and GRAB and Lalie latched onto the lightning strike bare-fisted and was up it like a monkey, giggling all the way up its length and into the streaming, tearing heights of the thunderhead, feet dancing over arcs of electricity already fading out and turning back into normal old dead air.
Whump!
Bump!
Wham!
And she was in the clouds, safe and sound, as safe as anything could be, when it was around Lalie. Or anyone, and there were a lot of anyones up there, tall and thin and wearing expensive clothing and cheap grins. They were mingling in crowds, chatting and lying to each other as they dined upon dainty bites of fog and mist; comparing lightning strokes; seeing who could spit the most rain the farthest distance. A few of them were wielding long clubs and knocking hailballs the size of golfstones into the earth. “Fore!” called one. And they all laughed.
They were all Lalie’s kind of people. The breakable kind.
She elbowed her way into the crowd and headed straight for the driving range, leaving a trail of confused and bruised shins behind her. When she stood up to the line, the attendant holding the clubs raised her perfect eyebrows at her.
“Little short for this, aren’t you, sweetie?” she said. “Come back when you’re older. Where are your parents, anyways? Children your age should mind their manners and stay at home.”
“I am here to defeat and destroy you in every way I can,” Lalie told her, for truthfulness was in her genes.
The cloud-golfers laughed, laughed, laughed, and around them the thunder boomed. And they kept on laughing right until Lalie snatched up one of the clubs and drove it as hard as she could into the attendant and the three cloud-golfers standing right behind her.
After that they stopped laughing and started shouting. The thundercloud wobbled and gained height; the lightnings stopped flickering out and started crackling in. The whole mess boomed and bobbled against the sky like a drumskin, and here and there a cloud-person fell out screaming, pow-pow-pow, like popcorn popping. But just as each of them was about to hit the ground they swooped back up again, riding little fuming cloudlets, and came back into the fight.
This was annoying to Lalie, who had been enjoying herself at first. None of the cloud-people were staying punched at all, and their lightning was beginning to make her skin itch and her eyes water. This was the first fight she’d ever been in where she was losing, and she didn’t like it, not at all. Like her mother, she was a sore, sore loser. And the best way to help a sore is to spread it around.
So she threw the cloud people harder and faster and faster, whirling them around her head like bolas, and by chance she came to see something, which is that the little cloudlets and the lightning bolts and the booms of thunder were all coming from a single place, buried under her feet in the center mass of the thunderhead.
“I’ll break THAT,” said Lalie. And she stomped once, twice, thrice, and each stomp drove her down four times her height until she fell through a roof of soft fog and landed in the heart of the storm, a hazy little cavern tucked away above the world.
This heart, though, was something strange. It was clotted and clogged and overflowing with bones, great stone bones, and every time the cloud rumbled and the lightning surged they groaned in soft, long, endless sighs.
“Now what’s YOUR problem?” asked Lalie. The bones couldn’t answer her, but they rolled in their prison, empty skulls gaping, fleshless jaws gasping. Every time they bumped together the world boomed and sparks flew, and she could see they were cracked and bruised from their rough treatment by the cloud-people.
A shout and a yell came from above Lalie’s head; the cloud-people had found her again. She glared at the stone bones, then cracked all of her knuckles and half her back for good measure.
“I want you to know,” she told them, drawing back her biggest, best fist, “that this is because I don’t like hail, and not because I am your friend. Got it?”
And then she punched the bones.

Well.
They got it, all right.

Boom, and stone chips flew everywhere, poking the thundercloud apart in a dozen dozen places and leaking raindrops everywhere.
BOOM, and the heart of the storm burst on the spot.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM and down out of the sky flew Lalie, the last scraps of thunder, and a hundred, hundred screaming cloud-people, each and every one of which went splat, splat, squirt on the ground like fruit dropped off a skyscraper.
Except for Lalie. Lalie just went thunk. It ran in her family.
And as Lalie stood up and knocked the dirt clods out of her ears she saw the tails of the thunder beasts fleeing over the edge of the sunrise-ridden horizon, shaken free of their bones and back in the world again.

“Nice,” she said.
And she grinned, twice as strong as before. Her second tooth had come in.

It had been there a long, long, long time. There before the swamp, there before the silt, there before the sandstone and the storms and the long cool nights and the gouging of the glaciers and the inky blackness of the ashes in the air.
A certain small space where things were quiet.
It was not a big space. Walk across it and you’re there and gone in moments or less depending on your leg length. But it was very firm, and very fair. Ferns were chewed in it with softened, careful mouths. The heaviest treads weighed in feather-light within its borders. If something was being disembowelled its mouth did not move and even the entrails were quiet as they slithered out over each other. Shssh. Shhssh-shusshh.
But that was then, then.

And this is now.
Before now, when they came to the new place, they found it there, that certain small space. And most of them didn’t like it. They knew that sounds were meant for living souls, and that life was inherently noisy. They knew that small children were made of surging energy and growth and that an awful lot of that came out as yells and shrieks and whines and laughs. They knew they didn’t belong there, and they treated it as such, and were happier for it.
Except for Agnes, who wandered through it over and over and liked what she didn’t hear. So she built a little home on its borders, and took tiny walks through its borders, and grew a small garden at its heart. She doted on it, though it never gave her anything other than the smallest, most stunted tubers, and she left her children in it whenever they irritated her too much and she couldn’t be bothered.
Once upon a long time later, Agnes’s heart gave out a sigh during one of her walks and never raised its voice again. When they found her – reluctantly – two of her children came to the funeral: one to see the body, the other to take up the house.
The first was too wise to leave anything, even her name, but the second was called Heloise.

Heloise also liked the quiet, but she disliked gardens. She spent a long, dirty month gutting out the remains of her mother’s tubers and herbs and blossoms, arms filthy to the elbows with clinging silt and spackled mud. Their roots were much deeper than they looked, and their grasp tenacious.
When she was done, she built a new home, larger than her mother’s home, which was now a toolshed. And she filled this home with herself, and it came to be that most of herself was made of paper and bound in leather, more and more as time went on. Near the end of Heloise’s life most of the sounds she made were rustling, and most of the rustling she made was when she slept, relaxed from the stress and dangers of the day.
She wasn’t like her mother, not at all. When her time came she ran through the town square, squeaking and screaming and slamming her head against anything that came to hand until she came upon a likely cobble and sufficient vigor.

After that the space was quiet, and left to its own devices, and this was, perhaps, the biggest mistake so far.
Then they decided they needed a library, and this was no longer the case.

It is a good library now.
Heloise’s halls were built very poorly for a human to live in, but their criss-crossing, multi-chasmed ways are perfect roosts for books. They have room to see each other from farther aisles, and to confer at night. And the size of the rooms bring echoes upon echoes upon echoes, so that if a single noise is in danger of being made the sheer oppressive weight of it will crush itself in self-shame.
There are small discreet signs in each room, each bearing the traditional warning of a library, long after any library ceased to use them. A modern librarian would have fixed that. A modern librarian would have sorted, filed, and categorized the books. A modern librarian would have locked the doors each evening and gone home and eaten and gone to bed and woken up and said words to other humans and travelled back each morning.
This is no difficulty for the library because it has never had a librarian at all. It prefers it this way. There is less noise, and less fuss.

There are not many visitors to the library. Nobody has a membership card. The doors stick in the damp and it never stops being damp and the steps are slick and treacherous grey slate.
Now and then, someone drops by. They have no idea what they are doing or know it exactly and it’s very hard to say which is more dangerous, but they always mind the signs, and they always read them carefully.

Please be quiet for it is its own reward.

Please be quiet for the consideration of other readers.

Please be quiet for the sake of tradition.

Please be quiet because the books are listening to you and they learn quickly and the shelves that hold them are so very thin so very very very thin and small and only made of wood, dear small frail bent dead wood, and they are words.

And if the visitor is very, very persistent or simply too dense to leave, they will make their way along through the uneven and overflowing corridors and they will always come to the same place by the same path at the same pace, footsteps sinking into footsteps like travellers crossing snow. A little room with a locked door, swung half-open, buried underneath a tower of twisting stacks that sway at the pace of mountains mating.
On the door is a worn sign, obviously scribbled by someone in either a hurry or a panic, and that sign says

QUIET

and it is not a command.

That library won’t stand forever. The books have grown fat and cumbersome and bloated; they’re ready to pop, ready to go to seed. The walls will cave in at last. It’s only stone and wood after all.
And what it’s holding is so much older.

“I still don’t understand why I have to be down here.”
Ann shut her eyes and breathed carefully for three seconds before replying. “It’s how the trick works. You know that. Oh no oh dear, those poor helpless marooned mariners, only two of them left, better help, pish posh pash, then SURPRISE up comes the one with all the weapons and we get the goods.”
“Yeah, but why me? The bilges are busted and it stinks down here.”
“You’re eight foot nine, Lizzy. You don’t look helpless enough.”
“I damn well feel it. I’m starving. Besides, why are we following the trick? It isn’t a trick! Fen ran us right through a keelee pod, FEN should be the one down here snorting bilge fumes in every orifi-”
Fen had been dozing quietly against the lifeboat’s engine until then, and she didn’t really seem to stop. She just shifted, snorted, and ended up with the muzzle of her broadbarrel pressed against the metal-plated deck.
“I heard that. Hey Ann, tell her that thing would barely break my skin even without the hull in the way.”
Fen yawned. “Tell her I’d be aiming for the eyes, Ann.”
“Hey Ann? Tell her I’ve got four extras.”
Ann shut her eyes again, crossed them, and muttered curses to herself over and over and over. She wished she could go back to her old standby of imagining stabbing the two of them, but in the confined space of the lifeboat she was a little worried that fantasy could become factual very quickly.
Not that it wouldn’t be useful. They weren’t running low on food yet, but they weren’t on any of the major shipping lanes. Could be a long wait, but she could at least make it a long, QUIET wai-
“Hey Ann.”
“What?!” she snapped in spite of herself.
Fen tapped her shoulder. “Smoke to the west, coming on in.”
“That’s bullshit. There’s nothing out there.”
“Is now. Been watching it for the last hour.”
“You didn’t say anything!”
“Wanted to be sure.”
Ann allowed herself a brief relapse of bad habits. Blood on her hands, Fen’s variously-severed anatomy around the deck, Lizzy sealed in the bilge and set on fire. Very relaxing.
“Fine,” she said, sugar-sweet and twice as soft. “Let’s get the engine going.”

The ship was a low-slung thing; its deck barely above water. Fat and heavy and set root-deep into the waves, it reminded Ann of a burnt hulk. Already sunk, already-dead.
No sails, no mast. A single bulky chunk of superstructure that seemed mostly to exist for the sake of housing a well-protected antenna.
“Nobody up top,” observed Ann. “Not that there’s much for them up there.”
“Nobody listening, either,” said Fen. She shook the bulky ship’s radio; eight years older than any of them and one of the few things they’d wrestled out of the Perse’s bridge before the sinking. “Not on any of the usual channels.”
“Maybe they know about the trick and they’re ignoring us,” said Lizzy.
Ann glared at the ship. “In that? For fear of us? Not likely. Look at it; the crew can’t be smaller than eight dozen; six at the pinch.”
“Ghost ship?” said Fen. Her teeth were bared now in that friendly way that meant an edge of fear mixed with a dose of adrenaline.
Ann realized her hand had been creeping towards her belt and stopped herself. Tells like that could get you killed. “Maybe,” she said. “If not, we can always fix that.”

The entrance was air-locked; a double-sealed descent down a ladder.
“They knew that deck wasn’t staying dry, didn’t they?” asked Lizzy. She stretched herself, all five arms as far above her head as she could reach. “I like these people. They know how to build a proper ceiling.”
“Shut up about the bilge,” said Ann. But she was thinking about that. They were standing in a broad, basically-empty corridor, nothing special about it beyond a ridiculously chicken-scratched floor; the sort of thing you’d find in any humanoid or nearhumanoid vessel. That was reassuring; dealing with enemies outside your species was hard enough, when they were outside your phylum things could get very difficult. But the space from the upper deck to the floor was a good twelve feet.
“Giants or not,” said Fen, “we’re armed. And we’re awake, or alive, or whatever they aren’t.”
“Captain is asleep.”
The voice was calm and bedrock-steady, despite the slight radio crackle. Before the first word had finished, all three of them were armed and tense.
“There,” said Fen. She pointed her broadbarrel at the ceiling’s corner, where a tiny speaker was humming to itself.
“Captain is asleep. Please do not make loud noises. Captain is asleep.”
“Identify yourself and your home port,” said Ann.
“Captain is asleep. We sail from eastmost onward. Guests may find lodging-space in one of the holds. Please be quieter. Captain is asleep.”
Fen sheathed her broadbarrel, laughed when Ann snarled at her. “Nobody home,” she said. “Hear that monotone? No inflection? It’s got to be a recording. Or a basal AI.”
“Y’mean I don’t have to stab it?” asked Lizzy.
“Stab it? Let’s just find it. Wherever it is, the bridge is. Wherever that is, the captain’s near. And where the captain is, is money.”
“If this thing’s really from west, it won’t HAVE money,” said Ann. “Not anything a decent bank’d recognize.”
“If this thing’s from west,” said Fen, “it’s practically made of money already.”

Made of money or not, exploring the ship was tiring business. The doors were a strain to move, even for Lizzy. The corridors were too long, their legs were too wobbly from the lifeboat’s confines. And no matter where they walked, the speakers followed them, echoing just slightly from the bare walls of the all-too-clean rooms they walked through. It was starting to get on Ann’s nerves a little; an honest ship deserved some dirt. The nearest thing this one had was the scratches on the floor; long, wobbled, and interwoven.
“Captain is asleep,” the speaker said quietly, as she slid into a vast, half-darkened space. “Please do not overly disturb the cargo. Captain is asleep.”
Ann prodded the nearest pallet. Spongey, soft, but packed hard. Some sort of grain. “Food,” she said.
“Lots of food,” said Lizzy. “Big appetites for big people.”
“So where are they all?”
“Captain is at the bow of the ship, against the keel,” said the speakers. “Please do not disturb Captain. Captain is asleep.”
They looked at each other.
“Not a recording, then” said Ann.
“AI’s worth a good chunk of money,” said Fen. “Especially one from off the map. Bulky to move, though.”
Lizzy cracked her knuckles. “Bulky’s my maiden name.”
“Captain is asleep,” repeated the speaker. “Please do not approach.”
“Which direction do we go if we don’t want to disturb your captain then?” asked Ann.
“Right at the next intersection.”
Fen’s grin came back. “AIs,” she said, fondly.

Left at the next intersection was less direct than it sounded; the ship’s guts might have been gleaming-clean, but their layout was a coiled mess, wrapping around from room to room to room. Engines, generators, storage closets – the size of mess halls – and more and more food lockers. Mostly full ones, but one or two dead empty, bare-floored. They hurried through those vaults a little faster than necessary.
“No bunks,” said Ann.
“Maybe they don’t sleep,” said Fen. “Or they just drop wherever they’re sitting.”
“’Captain is asleep,’ remember? And don’t tell me they’d sleep just anywhere they feel like; I haven’t seen DUST since we got on this thing. Where’s the crew?”
“Captain is asleep beyond this door. Please depart immediately. Captain is still asleep.”
Lizzy reached up and checked the handle.
“No lock,” she said, marvelling.
“Release the handle immediately. Captain is asleep and will be disturbed. Please-”
The door slammed against the wall, but the three pirates were inside the captain’s chamber before it had even started clanging, weapons out, eyes moving.
There was no bed. There was no desk. On one wall, a cabinet was mounted, securely fastened. And on the other, a mass of machinery and plating that reached to the ceiling, centered on a door that was built like a giant’s casket.
“Fen, check the cabinet for the AI. Lizzy, let’s wake up the napper.”
“Captain’s sleep cycle continues for another six hours. Captain must not be disturbed or shipboard activity will undergo severe desynchronization. Please do not disturb Captain’s berth. Please leave Captain’s quarters immediately.”
There was some sort of soft vacuum sealing the berth, and Lizzy ended up having to use all five arms, fangs gaping in concentration, eyes pulsing in their sockets until the metal squeaked and she roared and the whole thing popped open in a flash, knocking her flat onto her back.
Ann was already there, slipped between doorway and berth, blade out and humming with frictional force.
The captain was nearly what she’d expected; alien, but not altogether so. A tetrapod, vaguely reptilian; spindly and elongated in a way that made her think of a chameleon, but moreso. Tailless, nearly eight foot curled up; closer to eleven maybe if it was standing upright. Its eyes were flickering in the restless whirl of REM sleep. Machinery crowded the inside of the berth, nestled around its mouth in a way that made her think of nursing; deeply inappropriate for an egg-laying creature.
“Ann?”
It took her a moment to recognize the voice. That wasn’t Fen; Fen never sounded worried. “Yes?”
“There’s no AI in here. Just spare parts.” Machinery clanged off spotless deck plates. “It has to be here. There’s nowhere else they’d put it. Where is it?”
“Captain is waking up.”
It was a calm, steady voice. It was entirely empty of static. It was coming from the berth.
“Captain is waking up,” and this time Ann saw the slight movement from the captain’s throat, heard the hiss and whistle of air moving up from lungs bigger than her torso. “Capacity for communication receding. Depart immediately or safety will be compromised.”
Ann watched the thing’s pulse accelerate with a professional’s eye. There. Right there. That would be the quickest way. “Yours first,” she told it, and drew back her blade.
The first thing that happened was the eyes stopped moving.

The third through fifth things were obscured by the impact of the second thing against Ann’s skull, which sent her hurtling out of the captain’s quarters and into the opposite wall of the corridor.
The sixth thing must’ve been because of Lizzy, because as Ann’s hearing sloshed back into her head she could hear the other woman roaring. Or screaming. Or both.
The seventh thing was Fen passing her at a jog, face set dead, feet flailing. As she rounded a corner the eighth thing pursued her in a titanic blur and a shriek of metal, surging past Ann’s face before she could tell it from anything.
And then she was alone again, head aching, mouth and nose full of blood. Some of it wasn’t hers; she could smell the acrid tang of Lizzy mixed with a deeper, richer undertone, and knew that she wouldn’t find anything good if she looked in the berth.
Ann started walking. She knew she should be running instead, but every time she tried to make her legs move faster something in her side shifted and pressed against deeper, softer portions of her insides. So she tottered, like an old woman. Forgetful like one too; she’d left her blade behind. There was something horribly tranquil about the realization that it probably wouldn’t make a difference.
Finding her way wasn’t hard, at least. They’d left a trail of open doors in their wake, for which she was doubly thankful; opening one on her own had gone from difficult to impossible now. Her muscles were jelly and her head was still swimming, which was probably why she didn’t notice the captain until she was right behind it.
It seemed bigger; it was the first she’d seen it – properly seen it – out of its berth. It was bent low over the floor, arms whirling, and when it spun to face her, for a split instant she saw what was gripped in its hands and it was the funniest thing she’d seen all day.
Then it was on her, and over her, and sprinting down and past her, deeper down into the ship, trailing a scream and a scratch behind it as its claws slid over the floor at full speed.
She walked over to the spot it had been squatting. It glistened with the universal scent of strong soap, but there was something redder underlying it that her nose recognized.
It had been cleaning up after Fen.

Ann walked a little faster after that, even if she’d just proven to herself that the captain wasn’t necessarily about to kill her, not with its body awake but unthreatened and its brain turned off. It was going to finish its chores sooner or later, probably sooner, and she’d rather that she wasn’t still around afterwards. She reached the airlock without incident, and for a while she dithered at it, trying to find a way to wedge it open. A bad squall or a sharp storm, and it would all be over fairly quickly, even with just the one entry available But the machinery was well-crafted and she didn’t have her blade and besides her head was pounding again, pounding so hard that she could barely think of escape, let alone revenge.
And as she unmoored the lifeboat from the side of the ship and slid back into the big empty blue of the far west, she realized it had done her a favour anyways. There was plenty of food now. Plenty of food for a long, quiet wait.

I’d done all I could. That’s why I did the thing I shouldn’t.

I’d worked hard, broken two fingers on each hand.
I’d spoken soft, brought in every distant cousin and disgruntled neighbour.
I’d begged pious, drowned the greenstones in a flood of prayers and blood from my strong arm.
I’d acted firm, bent the landscape with my mind from all angles and willed it to be as if I were a great holy one from the mornings back when the sun hadn’t yet risen.
And still the triple-fucked tabbas crop was as dead and dry in its soil as a twenty-year-locust husk.

That can get to you, and get you to try things you wouldn’t.

So I sat there at the mallen pool, the damp wet browness at the backwoods that only children could be trusted near, and me a full adult of thirty years and spare, and I spoke to it as a child did.
“It’s all good for nothing,” I said. “Rain falls beside it, around it, and I swear over it, but none of it hits the soil.”
The mallen pool lay there, placid and rotting. Little fish peeked out from under its mossbanks, regaining their courage after the tremors of my arrival.
“And the well’s dead. Eighty foot deep, thirty of which I dug with my own hands. Thirty deeper than the deepest well I’ve ever heard of around here. And the driest. Nothing. It’s like trying to drink from beach-sand.”
A turtle, with slow, insipid grace, fell off a log. The ripples were endless.
“So that’s it,” I said. “I’m done. The fields will die, and so will I. Off to labour in the fields of my cousins or leak my way into the city and find a stray name. No more Vhedder fields. No more Vhedder.”
The water was quiet again. Flies didn’t dare buzz.
“And that’s why I’m trying this,” I said, holding up one fist.
In the cities, I’d heard they used wells for this, deeper ones than I’d ever imagined, shafts you could count to six in before a stone struck splashing.
But that was the problem.
“I wish for a well that works,” I said.
The coin’s ripples took much longer to subside than the turtle’s had. I left not knowing if that was good or bad or just a trick of the lightened and airy imagination of someone with nothing but hope left in their head.

The night was alright. My sleep was neither good nor bad, just absent. The dawn was slow and uneven.
The well was strange: it held a copy of my face down there, bubbling up from underneath. And when I dropped a bucket down it, it broke apart into slaps and smacks and the coolest, cleanest drink I’d had in my life. I dabbed the leftovers on my scales and watched the sun burn them away, tasted the residue with my tongue.
Good. Very good.
Twelve hours per field, twelve hours of careful digging and pouring and planning and painstaking measurement to be sure feast didn’t murder the tabbas as sure as famine would’ve. I didn’t sleep till it was over, I didn’t slow.
I have no idea how the night was after that, or half the day, either. But my sleep was completely fantastic.
The shoots were already vibrant greens when I climbed down from my perch; the air was filled with the smell of growing food. Not as strong and thick as it should’ve been, but a good sign in a place that had been dead of hope or help for far too long. I didn’t agree with everything about the cities; I didn’t want to ever live in the cities; I had never visited the cities. But I did like their notions on wishing.

Come a month and more later and I was starting to turn back my opinions. Six fields isn’t so hard to tend when there’s less and less of each one to worry over every year for a generation. Six fields seething at the seams with foliage, half of which you need to stamp and burn before it bursts, is another thing. Particularly when you’re the only one and your cousins and neighbours have all already – and loudly – said they’ve spent enough time doing you favours this year, thank you very much, and in any case what’s your problem if you’ve got a crop at last, be grateful for your luck, you so-and-so-and-so, and so on and so on.
I knew I was in trouble when I found the first gripseed vine. It was as thick around as my strong arm and three times as truculent from the damp and cold, and I broke my third finger of the year ripping it out and snapping its spine. When I looked around, I knew there’d be more, I just knew it. It had spored. There were going to be more fights like these if I wanted to harvest; a lot more if I wanted to harvest without fear of being strangled with a hoe in my hands.
And when I thought about it, it seemed sensible enough. A lot of life is doing what seems to work over and over, as my mother had told me. And as her advice had, so had this.
“That was my last one,” I told the mallen pool, to the frogs and the insects and the green scum and ferns. “So this’ll have to do instead.”
In went the raging bulk of the gripseed, twitching with impotent fury right until it hit the surface.
“I wish for help with the fields,” I said. And I turned and left before I could watch what happened, and begin to feel doubt.

I climbed down the next morning and found a guest, the first guest I’d seen since I was young. I was so surprised and so embarrassed (in the middle of scraping fungus from my scutes, a child’s habit that’s bad enough manners in a baby) that my apologies swamped his own for a full hour as I found him mash and mug. Only when we’d both mouthed our way through a bigger breakfast than I could afford to have did we start to understand each other.
“Work?” I asked.
His tongue flickered assent.
I measured him up. He was a little small for a man, but not considering his age. “Shouldn’t you be on your mother’s fields?” I asked dubiously. I wanted no runaways. Bad enough to get in a fight over that sort of nonsense, worse still to lose one; I didn’t have half the muscle mass I should’ve this time of year. The field was chewing me raw.
“My sister’s fields,” he said. “And not mine anymore. Too many brothers, and I ate too much, and our well has had troubles with silt and grime, and…”
And you were the youngest and easiest to throw out without a meal or a care, I didn’t say. He heard it just the same, and buried his snout in his mug to hide this.
“They’re rough fields,” I told him.
“I saw,” he said.
“We won’t get much rest,” I told him.
“I know,” he said.
“If either of us gets gripped, we’ll be worse off than we are now,” I told him.
“I won’t,” he said.
“Take a hoe,” I told him.
“Thank you,” he said.

At some point, in between fields five and six and months two and five, I must’ve asked him to marry me. I’m not sure if I was joking or not; I’m not sure if he was either. But I guess that worked out well enough because soon the nest at the top of the tree held eggs for the first time since the mornings of my mother.

The gripseed was throttled back; the tabbas fattened so hard they burst the soil free of their tops; the first shell cracked when the final root had been dried and packed away; the clutch was healthy, noisy, and growing, and this was all completely unacceptable.
Not to me or edder, of course. But I saw the eyes on me when I stood in the market. I heard the click of teeth as I put away my stall, hours ahead of anyone else and already sold-out of all I could carry. I felt the long, slow burn on the back of your head that comes from too many people thinking the wrong sort of thoughts about you.
There’s nothing wrong with success. There’s nothing wrong with generosity. But if you can get ahold of both while everyone else around you is dealing with drought, gripseed, grief and worse, well. People start to wonder.
Sometimes I thought about the mellen pool, and I wondered too. I told edder about it, but he thought I was being strange.
“It can’t be ghost-work,” he said. “Ghosts don’t come into cities. All that cut stone frightens them, makes them worry that they’ll get cut up too if they show their brittle bones. I don’t see anything wrong with what you’ve done.”
“Right,” I told him. “But you aren’t my neighbours.”
edder looked at me with that little face of his. “No,” he said.
“Your sisters are.”
“Yes.”
“And you think…?”
“They don’t see anything wrong with what you’ve done either. But they don’t need to see it.”
And that was three mornings before the mob came by.

It was a hard run. The fields were clear and clean and firmed with the autumn chill, firm under your feet, but that went double for the crowd behind you. Nothing to do but speed up, speed up, keep speeding up and hope you discourage them more than you infuriate them as your stride grows and grows and grows, arms full of not-quite-hatchlings that you’d normally tell off for sitting on you, saying they’re too big for that now. Quiet as death, every single one, and that gave me nightmare thoughts as I went uphill.
We cut through the woods. That slowed us both down, but they had to look for us everywhere, and we just had to look for one path. Which I found, out of habit and instinct, and followed to the end of its length and my muscles.
edder was still there, worn even thinner than me, blood-a-boil with the torpor of a surge gone on for far too long. I let him lean on me, fell over myself.
“They’ll come,” he muttered through a deadened mouth. I shushed him and dragged myself along, scraped belly-flat into the hollow and dipped my teeth into sluggish, cool water, felt the furnace inside sizzle down to something that wouldn’t set my blood alight.
And when my ears were emptied of the inner roars and filling up with angry shouts, I hauled myself half-upright next to the mellen pool, still stirring with the leftover droplets from my muzzle, and I spoke for a minute.
“I’ve got nothing left for you that I can bear to give,” I said. “And I’m about to lose that too. So I’m offering no good trade, just a debt, and those aren’t big enough to leave ripples. But here it is anyways: please help my family.”
Then I sat back and listened to the water, listened to the bellows of the mob, and wondered at how strange it was that even as the calls for our blood got louder, I could still hear the soft lap of the mellen pool as clear as a bell, quiet but insistent, as big as a hill and deeper than my well, rising up and up and up through my feet above my head even as the shrubs were torn under angry feet that slid to a stop and fell silent.
I opened my eyes again. The rage was gone, the words were gone, but the water still splashed. It was seeping, dripping from high above my head, running down crevices of dirt and rot and who-knew-what, a skull of stone with a flesh of loam as big as market square, flatter and longer and toothier than anyone’s should be.
Its eye, its one eye, quivered in that head. Life swarmed and churned as an iris; frogs and minnows and a single confused turtle the size of a grown man. The mallen pool could not blink; it was anchored by its banked lids, its fern lashes. All it could do was stare. And you couldn’t meet that stare, and you couldn’t match that stare, but you couldn’t look away.
There were no words, spoken or silent. There was no message. But there was an understanding that all of us found there, at the mallen pool, looking into the breathing roots that underlay all we lived from. And when it saw this in us, I think that was when it slid back into its den with barely a sigh of soil, traceless and tired.
But the mallen pool was still there, still open. Fish spun, puzzled, in its return to immobility. Scum eddied back into place. Back to normal, but normal wasn’t, maybe, what we’d always thought. Not anymore.

Which was what I told my clutch as they grew. Just to be safe.
And there was something else I told them too. Just to be just.
Pond-wishing still isn’t a universal child’s pastime around here. Somewhere around three in seven have dropped a toy and a hope into the mallen pool, I’d say, and most no more than once. But that’s still pretty good for something that was taught to one clutch a single generation ago. Debts don’t leave ripples, but they should be paid in them.

Once upon a time, in a faraway castle, there was an elderly and respectable giant of great size and luxurious, flowing hair. Many were his impoverished, plucky subjects, and enlightened and benevolent was his paternal rule over their short-sighted and selfish whines for charity, even if he did have to punish them now and then for their own good as was his just and manifest right.
Then one day, as the relaxed giant was having his morning bowl of Cloudflakes in his breakfast nook, a fearful great stretching and scrunching sound arose from beneath his feet, growing louder and louder faster and faster until WHOOM a great beanstalk burst up between the cobbles of his floor, vigorous and virulent.
“Goodness gravy,” said the genial giant, putting down his pitchspoon. “I didn’t think I told the gardeners to use that much fertilizer; I’ll have to have their families deported. Now, who’s this then?” he asked of the tiny, fuzzy creature clinging to the side of the beanstalk. It chittered at him and bared its tiny, simian teeth.
“Ah! It’s a young urchin,” deduced the clever giant. “How utterly peculiar! Mayhap I can train it to shed the most irksome of its wild and savage ways and lead it upon the path of prosperity and right-mindedness! Here, m’boy, try a mouthful of this pate. It was made from the finest and fattest marrow-bones of the most upstanding paupers I could grind. Then we can wash you up, chain you in the dungeon, and put you to work weeding my driveway, waxing my limousine, and earning an honest day’s minimum wage, minus expenses on my part for housing, education, food, drink, and oxygen.”
The urchin gently reached out and touched the bowl, then flipped it into the air and atop the generous giant’s face. As he stumbled, cursing, it plucked his silver pitchspoon from his paw, his novelty golden egg dispenser from his table, and last and most audaciously his second-favorite golden smartphone from the charging station on the kitchen counter.
“I’ll grind you alive!” reproached the wounded, tender-hearted giant, but alas, he discovered to his chastisement that the urchin was far nimbler than he, and was already halfway back down the beanstalk. The bereaved giant shook his fist at the retreating thief, went back inside and found his eighth-favourite golden smartphone, and dialed up the mayor, police commissioner, and governor to complain, all of whom were his golfing buddies.
Two weeks later a tough-but-fair series of bills to cut down on crime, lawlessness, youth delinquency, and smartphone theft rolled out, and the weary giant sat in his nook with a sigh of contentment as the paper proudly informed him that the incarceration rate for peasant, urchin, and impoverished children had skyrocketed. Some of them were being arrested even faster than they could charge them with anything!
The gentle giant sat back in his chair with a satisfied smile and idly glanced out the window, where he was satisfied to see the foreclosure on the tiny, unkempt cabin far beneath his castle had finally gone through. At the press of a button on his newest, favoritest smartphone, a foreman pressed another button and it was knocked to flinders and cinders.
And he lived happily ever after, particularly after his fourth martini.

A long time ago, in a cave far, far away, there was a wise, rich, beautiful, magnificent, powerful, and wealthy dragon of discerning and sophisticated tastes. In particular, it deeply enjoyed consuming lovely maidens, and it was the pleasure and benefit of the local lands that this was so, for this habit supported a thriving throng of jobs in the maiden-sacrificing industry. Truly, it was a pillar of the community; nay, without its blessing, could any community be said to exist at all? Such is the generosity of the great, from whom all money and goodness – but we repeat ourselves – flows.
On this particular day a lot of blessing was flowing; the dragon’s stomach was rumbling most fiercely. It had been feeling fiercely peckish for the past few weeks, and was beginning to suspect its wards had been shortchanging it on maidens, or perhaps their maidens were subquality. Perhaps it would have to raze a few of their cities and take its business – and jobs – elsewhere. It would be hard on them, but that was the free market, after all.
A wavering scrap of silk peeked over the edge of the valley, and the dragon’s mood improved. A princess! It had been a while since it had eaten a princess. Perhaps it would be the sugar-sweet blood of royalty that would elevate its moo-
Then its hopes fell silent as sunlight glinted from the spearhead embedded in the heart of the fluttering fabric. Hooves echoed in its ears. The smell of armour polish and ferocious flop-sweat filled its nostrils.
A knight. The unruly little ungrateful bastards hadn’t been trying to make it happy after all. They’d been organizing on it! Going behind its back! And after all it’d done for them! The thousands of feet of city walls it’d motivated them to fruitlessly build! The hundreds of promising careers as a guardsman it’d launched and subsequently ended! The millions of hours of crying, weeping, and moping it’d inspired! All for what? SOME GRATITUDE.
The dragon was, of course, properly bred and brought-up, and so did not display any of this inner turmoil overtly. Instead, it simply snorted venomous fire once, laughed as the puny spear clanked off its impenetrable armour, then waddled back towards its cave for a nap.
A faint chewing sound followed him, then there was an unpleasant clang as a sword bounced off its thick, noble skull. The dragon spun about in disbelief – then its eyes flew to its prize-winning orange tree.
The little bastard had stolen it. Stolen its precious, juicy, best-in-state fruit with antitoxidant properties, the only green thing that could grow in its valley. It could SEE the moistness on his filthy stubby-fingered trade-working lips as he swung his stupid clunky sword at it. Then it huffed and sputtered and spat horrible toxic embers all over his stupid body until all his armour turned green and came off.
Another orange. ANOTHER ORANGE! The dragon couldn’t believe what it was seeing as the impertinent little weasel dared eat its fruit in front of it, defiant as you please. This was the last straw. Not only had its (pampered, beloved) subjects dared to express dissatisfaction with its kindly, supple regime, not only had they conspired against it, not only had their emissary stolen the fruit right out of its mouth, but he was defying it to its face, standing against the tide of its poison, eyes blazing with gall.
The dragon puffed out its chest, dug its claws into the ground, lashed the mountain bare with its tail, and threw strikebreakers at the knight until he was buried under a pile of pummeling, hairy fists a thousand knuckles deep.
Then it burned down three or four of its poorest cities too, just to show them who was boss.
And it lived wealthily ever after.

Four score and seventy million dollars past, there was a just and charitable witch who ruled over an expansive private forest. It was the best forest in all the land, and it was coveted dearly by the hordes of unscrupulous, ungrateful peasants just outside its borders who wanted to ‘hunt’ or ‘pick berries’ or ‘just have a nice walk is that okay?’ inside it, the little moochers. The poor old witch, elderly though she was, had little choice but to spend much of her golden years in constant vigilance, ever on the look-out for trespassers. So when she came back from a walk one day to find a pair of grubby little children chewing on her mantelpiece, well, the witch did what any right-thinking person would’ve: she slammed the boy in the cellar and chained the girl to the wall and told them they’d have to earn their keep if they wanted to get out.
“How?” they asked her.
“She sweeps, you eat,” she told them, affectionately slapping them across their stupid little impoverished faces. And she bustled about gathering things to feed the boy, because she was really getting peckish and a nice plump child pie was just the treat to take forty years of crinks off of her spine.
The days went by, the boy was fed, the girl swept, the forest stayed silent, and day after day the nigh-blind old witch felt the little boy’s finger and it grew no plumper.
“It feels almost like a gnarled stick or a twig,” she said, dispirited, three weeks in. “Something you’d find attached to the end of a broomstick.”
“Definitely not!” said the children simultaneously.
The witch trusted them, softhearted old dear that she was, but a creeping fear tickled at her bra-straps as she went about her business. How could the boy stay so trim after nearly a month on an all-suet diet? He must be exercising in there when she wasn’t looking, doing some sort of calisthenics regime or somesuch. Amazingly disciplined, too, to keep the pounds off. But who would…
And the witch knew, she knew it with an icy terror that took all the moisture from her mouth and the strength from her knees. He was a G-Man, an FBI agent, a tax collector come to steal away the precious few coins she’d managed to scrape together for her retirement. A government crow come to peck the two ferryman’s-pennies straight from her eyelids, and the eyeball, too! It was enough to make her blood boil, but she settled for turning the oven on full blast.
“We’re cooking your brother a bit early, slave,” she informed the little girl. “Now lean over and test the coals to see how hot they are, there’s a good child.”
The little girl stared at her, radiating a thickness no brick could match. “How?”
“Just lean over the coals and hold your hands out near them.”
The girl wobbled around with her fingers in the air. “Like this?”
“No! Lean over the coals and hold your hands out near them! Palm-first!”
The girl did a surprisingly capable handstand, toes wiggling. “Like this?”
“No!” said the witch, puzzled and bemused by the strange habits of the badly-reared. “Just like this!” And believe it or not, just as the poor thing leaned over to show what she meant to the little hellion, she shoved her into the coals pointy-hat-first, without even time to swear. Five minutes later she’d pulled the key out of the ashes with the poker, let out her brother, and they were down the road a mile and moving more.
Mercifully, the law was quicker still. At that very moment the witch’s daughter received a notice of her mother’s untimely death – and, thanks to a timely repeal of the faraway land’s estate tax, her entire fortune, stocks and bonds included. She promptly and wisely invested much of her liquid cash in fortifying the gingerbread cottage into an apocalypse-caliber bunker, with enough left over to hire a bigshot lawyer to take the two little children for every worthless penny they earned from then unto seven generations.
And she lived very pleasantly vindictively ever after.

I think I’m coming down with something. It’s that time of year, right? It happens.
Accretion, that’s it. I’m cursed with accretion. My matter’s all clotted up and I’m forming large wads of debris. I’m coalescing day and night and none of my meds have done either jack or shit let alone both. If this goes on I’m going to clot up and who knows what’ll happen then? Swelling, that’s what. Swelling and bloating and balling, rolling around night after night until I’m the size of a thirteen-thousand-mile-diameter balloon.
Mom was right. I shouldn’t have moved all the way out here to the galactic rim.

I think I’m coming down with something worse. Can’t get a day or night’s rest by now, the grinding and tossing keeps me up all night. I think I’ve got tectonics, real, chronic, rock-hard tectonics, and it’s gotten so bad I can’t even bring myself to throw up most days; all the magma’s stuck burbling down in my guts and rumbling under my lithosphere. I’m seeing double and my cratons are grinding and chafing, and all this after I’d finally gotten over the leftover nausea from picking up a moon. And once you’ve got tectonics as bad as this, it’ll stay FOREVER. I’ll never get over this. Never.
Dad warned me about this. He said I was taking up with a real gadabout of a star, a yellow flickerer that was all promises but no novas. Good job, dad.

I think I’ve never been so sick in my life. I’ve got blizzards, I’ve got blizzards, I’ve got billions of blizzards, and they hurt real bad, thousands of open, festering blizzards all over my surface, from the poles right down to the equator. I’m pale white from tip to toe and frozen tight; locked down and shivering. It’s better than the tsunamis, at least. Lord I hated those tsunamis. Nothing worse than waking up with a wave popping off your seabeds; and now I’ve got seabeds, I’d forgotten that. All this water, all this loose and unseemly water, splattered across my surface and caking me and eroding me. It’s putting wrinkles on my face, doing what the tectonics haven’t already done – and that’s a real trick.
My sister told me this would happen. Oh, it’s all fun and games and dancing in the emptiness at first, she said, and then you just think oh, a casual swirl around that star’d be fun! The next thing you know, you’re stuck orbiting.

I think I’m coming down with something new. I’d finally come down out of my chills and what happens but my oceans start filling up with… goop. Green, glurpy, glurgy glops of goop. Matted and thatched; domed and mounded, shovels and piles and heaps and seas of thick, syrupy goop, clogging me up and making my skies wheeze. And it’s RESPIRING at me, it’s sucking up all my good, honest carbon dioxide and replacing it with alarming levels of radical oxygen. I keep telling it I won’t have that nonsense claptrap on my surface, on my terms, but it just sneers at me and turns up the volume of air filtering.
My grandmother lectured me about this sort of thing. Never let people get anything off you for free, she said. Then they’ll come back and you’re stuck with them for life.

I can barely think at all now, I’ve got it so bad. I wake up groaning from an asteroid bouncing off my head or a major anoxic event and I find new lifeforms scattered across every possible piece of my biosphere – EVERYTHING’S a biosphere now, I’ve got no privacy at all. Swimming standing strolling sculling soaring sailing scooting scuttling sliding everywhere, absolutely everywhere. I’m infested; no amount of spraying will fix this now. Radiation, climatic shifts, earthquakes… nothing’s stopped them. Why can’t I be more like Mars? Mars is quiet and clean and dead as a bone; it had a bit of liquid water but it locked that up all tight a long time ago, and it kept itself clean of biology, and it has no atmosphere, no tectonics, no buzzing, humming magnetic field to keep itself awake at night with a pounding ache in its core. Just peace, pure peace, as mild and cold as can be.
My grandfather never shut up about that sort of thing. If you’ve got to go planetary, he said, go in style. Go big, like a gas giant, for showiness and beautiful swirls; or go small, like a planetesimal, and keep out of people’s way. I’m the worst of all possible worlds.

Oh god, it’s spreading, it’s breaking out all over me. It’s on the moon now. The MOON. I’m contagious, I’m a menace, the sickness was onside me all along. No way to avoid it, no way to excuse it. I’m burning up, I’ve got a fever on my skin as well as under it, and I’m choking and wheezing on the methane and CO2 in my own atmosphere. I never signed on to be anyone’s monkey bars.
I’ve had enough. I’m getting out. This corner of the Milky Way was a mistake. I never should’ve come here and I never will again. Five billion more years to get over this sickness, to watch stupid Sol go foom and burn me out, then I’m going to laugh in its stupid white dwarf face and go home and work as interstellar debris again. An honest, meaningfully meaningless life. None of this plague, none of this rot. I’m done, I’m through, I quit.
My family always told me not to get mixed up in this, or mixed up in myself in aggregate form until I formed a large mass. And you know what? They were a bunch of snide, nasty, microwhining jerks, but they were right.

I’m so sick of my life.