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Ring, ring.                                                                                                             

Exclemptes zo Wilhomp, Purveyor and Planner of Beastes Moste Reptilliyan, looked at the doorway to his establishment as if it were a dead spider. One-handed, he fumbled for the speaking-trumpet at his desk – a new and very much unwelcome addition.

“Akoloids!” he snapped down it.

“Yeah?” came the reply, fogged by several dozen yards, many spiderwebs, and the sucked-dry corpses of hundreds of lost mantisflies.

“There is a CLIENT at the doorway and they don’t seem to understand how to OPEN the DOOR. Do I need to put up instructions?!”
“Is the door locked?”
“The secretary takes care of that.”
“You fired the secretary. That’s why you’re up front.”
“She fired herself. Nobody strikes the person of the Baron Vogelschnapps and expects to retain employment, no matter how hard he tries to stick his hand down their blouse.”

“Right. Right. So, did you unlock the door, since she didn’t?”

Exclemptes hung up the speaking trumpet and glared sourly at his desk, where a large, beautiful key watched him with innocence. Your forebears build the business, you tend it as all your predecessors have, and what do your employees do? Leave you in the lurch to clean up their messes. Some people are just too stupid for words. It was in this spirit of mind that he took up the key, put it in the front door, turned it, and returned to his desk, where he plunged the instrument into a deep drawer that it might someday cease to disgust him.

Then he began to read the paper.

“Erm-” suggested the prospective client after some two minutes of this. His clothing was colourful but dissolute and his manner shabby, as was typical of heralds and messengers.

“Exclemptes zo Wilhomp, Purveyor and Planner of Beastes Moste Reptilliyan and co-owner of Wilhomp & Akoloids Greate Reptiyles,” reeled off Exclemptes. “But you may address me as ‘Master Wilhomp.’”

“Yes master Wilhomp.”

“Capitalize it.”
“Yes, Master Wilhomp.”

Exclemptes nodded in satisfaction. “Good. Now, what does your lord wish of me? Present unto me the documentation so that we can get on with this.”
“Err….m’lord wished to procure his order…verbally.”
“Verbally!?”
“Ah, orally?”
“I KNOW what ‘verbally’ means you illiterate louse!” Exclemptes slammed his fist into the desk. “But a contract without written seal? Does he take me for a buffoon? A jester? A churl? A CHUMP? Give me his name so that I may blackball him!”
“Baron Vogelschnapps,” gasped out the messenger, reeling under the onslaught.

Exclemptes’s stomach jerked two inches to the right.

“Well,” he said. His fist uncurled, palm flat to the desktop. Legal papers and half-drafted hiring notices for new secretaries stuck to his suddenly sweating skin. “Perhaps a one-time accommodation might be made. I am pleased to hear your lord has rethought his notions and sought to patronize our establishment once more. Now, what has he commanded you to purchase?”
“A… custom order, of sorts.”
“Pea-brained poltroon! ALL dragons, drakes, wyrms, wyverns, wurms, devil-lizards, serpents, and scaly horrors produced by Wilhomp & Akoloids are custom-made! Who do you think crafted the Wing’d Horror of Bannocksbolg, so valiantly slain by Saint Gurge? Who shaped the slithering bulk of Falafnal, the Worm of the West Shore, stabbed through the heart by brave Sir Boarbees? Who devised the first biological emanatory of jellied flame? Who first fine-tuned venom glands to carve rock as readily as flesh? Who hardened some scales to stronger-than-steel and tuned others to soft sweet arterial weakness, ripe for the sword? Who? WHO?!”

“…you?”

Both fists this time, sending a pen airborne for a fraction of a second. “NO you inordinately ignorant ignoramus! The Akoloids did that; the Wilhomps organized the thing. Which is what I am TRYING to DO right NOW but YOU. AREN’T. LETTING ME.” One finger jutted forth from a clenched and clutched claw of a fist, a nail aimed for the heart. “Now SPEAK!!”
“A becloaked sprawlbodied stinker, slowwaking with a big sweet spot,” blurted the messenger.

“Hm!” said Exclemptes. He leaned back in his chair and stroked his chin. “Hm,” he repeated. It was the first non-irritating thing to happen to him all morning. “Well!” he considered. “That is indeed interesting. Very interesting. You! Your message is certain?”
“Yes, Master Wilhomp.”
“Speak more surely! It is precise?”
“Yes, Master Wilhomp!”
“LOUDER! It is the exact and entire words your lord sent you with, not merely the summary of such?”

“YES, MASTER WILHOMP!” roared the messenger. “Probably. Yes. I think so.”

Exclemptes zo Wilhomp threw his pen. It missed the courier and bounced off the door.

“If that glass is chipped I will have you devoured,” he said calmly. “Now. Are. You. Certain. There. Was. Nothingelse?”
“No! Yes! There was nothing else, Master Wilhomp!”
“Did he say what this order was FOR?”
“Personal amusement, Master Wilhomp! Wants to ‘keep himself in hand!’”

“Hah!” guffawed Exclemptes. “About as literally as can be, what with THIS mess! The old coot would get as much swordwork done playing with his pants in private!”
“Pardon, Master Wilhomp?”
“Don’t gossip of your betters! Be on your way, and tell your master I will send him the bill with his order! And wash your tunic – you stain the air!”
“Yes Master Wilhomp! Thank you! Goodbye!”
“Faugh!”

Exclemptes zo Wilhomp locked the door in case the wretched thing should attempt to re-enter the premises, returned to his desk, and, after three tries, unhooked the speaking-trumpet.

“Akoloids!” he shouted down it. “Order from Vogelschnapps! It seems firing the secretary for offending him was indeed the right thing to do, exactly as I have told you! A becloaked sprawlbodied stinker, slowwaking with a big sweet spot. Personal amusement.”

“What, really?” came the reply, surprise naked and unashamed. “Why not stomp on some frogs instead? Same effort, and a lot cheaper.”
“The price is the POINT, as my father spent his whole life telling your father,” said Exclemptes with exasperated patience. “Nobody is impressed by something you can do for free. Get started. And tell the damned secretary to answer the door, the bell is ringing off its hook!”
“You fired her, remember?”
Exclemptes threw the speaking trumpet behind his desk, stomped to the door, turned around, stomped back to the desk twice as fast, dug out the key again, stomped back to the door, unlocked it, and threw the key inside his pants pocket so hard it broke skin on his leg. “Greetings,” he said through clenched teeth to the august, soberly-moustached gentleman at the door. “Exclemptes zo Wilhomp, Purveyor and Planner of Beastes Moste Reptilliyan and co-owner of Wilhomp & Akoloids Greate Reptiyles. Do come inside.”

“I was attempting to do so, sir,” droned the man, who had the sort of rigid cheekbones that had never once cracked under a smile, “but I fear that the door bade me different.”
“Hah hah, your grace. What can I do for the Duke of Babberidge this fine morn?”
“Well, my nephew could do with a bit of a toughening-up. I need something that can put up a fight against him and a good horse and a small assist-party of seventy beaters six houndsmen forty hounds and a squad of gunners. Don’t want to make things too easy on him.”

“Yes, yes, yes, of course, very sensible, very laudable,” said Exclemptes. “Tell me, shall you prefer the beast to be aerial or landbound? Leaping or creeping? Fey and wild or seething with malice? What of its emissions, do you prefer sanguine, bright, cold, searing, or screaming?”
“Oh, whatever’s best,” said the Duke, waving a hand carelessly in the manner of someone who’s never once been shy of a glove. “I suspect you know your business better than I do mine. Now I really must go; the day’s young yet and I have pressing matters to attend to. Shake a leg, sir. I shall expect it by Mortimermass.”

“Yes, your grace. Thank you, your grace. Take care, your grace.”
Exclemptes maintained his poise until the count of ten after the door’s shutting, then dove behind his desk to retrieve the speaking-trumpet. “AKOLOIDS!” he shrieked down it. “The Duke of Babberidge needs a dick-measurer for his nephew and his armada of gormless hired thugs and foxhunters!”
“What? That’s great!”
“The damned old fool doesn’t know a drake from a DUCK! He expects the world and described a mote of dust!”
“What? That’s terrible.”

“TELL ME ABOUT THAT.” Exclemptes sobbed elephantinely into his palms and the trumpet both, then swept his face away with his hands. “No, no, no. This will be alright. Do… a prowling ripper, extra rip. Cloak it, and add a flaremouth. Cold.”
“No wings AND no flames? In a show”
“DON’T SECOND-GUESS ME no, no, that’s too far, it needs SOMETHING. Put a sparktongue in that flaremouth. It won’t be able to light a candle without deepthroating it, but by god it’ll look a blast furnace.”

“’Tongue alone won’t cut it. I’ll put in some oildrool.”
“Are you LISTENING you WRETCHE-“

“Don’t second-guess ME.”

“YOU-!”

Akoloids hung up.

Exclemptes gave a cruel little shriek and flung his speaking trumpet to the desk.

“Err… pardon, Master Wilhomp?” asked the messenger. His clothing was the same, only a little dustier. “But might you have a moment?”
“Don’t interrupt!” snapped Exclemptes. “And yes. Obviously. All the time in the world for Baron Vogelschnapps.”

“Ah, thank you, Master Wilhomp. Yes, well, the Baron. The Baron has thought of some additional criteria for his order.”
Exclemptes’s eyebrows rose. Through great effort, his upper lip did not. “I see? Well, we are not in the business of alterations, but your lord IS among our most exclusive customers, so perhaps we can look the other way this once. What are his thoughts?”
“’Scratch the cloaks and put up wings; quickstart the waking, make the sweetspot bigger,’” reeled off the messenger in a toneless trance.

“Hm!” said Exclemptes, drumming his fingers on the table. “Hmmm! Well then. This we can do, though of course the bill will rise along with the wings – true flight is no mean feat to put on a sixty-foot beast!”
“Hundred-twenty,” chimed in the messenger.
“I beg your very small pardon you exquisite worm?”
“A hundred and twenty feet, Master Wilhomp.”
“Better, but best would’ve been to not have to ask for it.” Exclemptes sniffed aggressively through both nostrils. “The adjustments will be made. You may depart. You shall depart. Now.”
“Thank you, Master Wilhomp.”
“Akoloids!”
“Yeah?” rasped the speaking-trumpet, its ambient wispy buzz now redolent with the addition of thick, mucosal chopping sounds. Exclemptes did not make it his business to consider their origins.
“The Baron’s changed his mind. Scratch the cloaks and put up wings, quickstart the waking, double the sweetspot from big to bigger and supersize it.”
“Really? Did he realize he wasn’t even going to impress himself? Should be a pretty good show now, if you’re blind and deaf. On it.”
“High priority!”
“On it.”
Ring, ring.

“Go AWA- we’re open,” said Exclemptes with exquisite calm as a dress that could’ve been used as a life-raft entered the establishment.

“One is pleased to know this,” said a voice from somewhere inside it. “Tell me, might one procure a garden-pet here?”
“Madam,” said Exclemptes, delicately retrieving what looked like it was a sleeved glove and kissing what was probably a hand, “Wilhomp & Akoloids Greate Reptiyles have produced everything from sea serpents to lawn-drakes. Whatever place in your estate needs a beast, we can make it fit.”

“How droll. Harriet, give the man a cheque and get him to do something for the hedge-maze. One must depart; the smell here is giving one congestion.”
The dress subsided and departed, leaving in its wake a small, irritated-looking woman with a much smaller dress.

“Strict night owl,” she said, slapping the chequebook down on the counter. “Thickblooded, hungry for trespasser flesh, sleeps like a cat. Cheap job.”
“For a custom-”

“She wants the same damned thing her cousin got last year, but living in a pile of leaves instead of a rock garden. Reuse the design, strip out the fire, save both of us money. Take it or eat shit.”
“Fine.”

“Fine.”
The door clanged shut. Exclemptes stared at the cheque with conflicted and vexed emotions.

“’Scuse,” said the messenger. “Do you have another moment, Master Wilhomp?”

“Don’t sneak!” snapped Exclemptes, nearly falling out of his chair. “And don’t SQUEAK either – god, your awful voice is as high-pitched as a WOMAN’S! What is it NOW?!”

“I’m afraid the Baron had been thinking more while I was delivering my last message, and he request a few more tweaks, Master Wilhomp.”
“Fine. Fine! What is it?”
“’Nix the sprawl, turn the stink up to a smokestack, double the sweetspot.’”
Exclemptes smiled and nodded. “Yes. Wonderful. Good. Goodbye now.”
“Yes, Master W-”

Exclemptes slammed the door on the messenger’s foot, cursing a little as it rebounded off his stout, peasantly wooden shoes.

“Akoloids!”
“Yeah?”
“The Baron’s changing his mind again! Nix the sprawl, turn the stink to a smokestack, double the sweetspot!

“We already doubled the sweetspot.”
“Then DOUBLE IT AGAIN!” Ring ring. “Hello, welcome, to WHAT IS IT NOW?”
The messenger abashedly scratched the back of his head. “Err, forgot a bit. Take it to hair-trigger and grease the reflexes. Thanks. Sorry.”

“Go away. Yes, Akoloids, and take it to hair-trigger and grease the reflexes.”

The empty speaking-trumpet sat mutely on the desk.

“AKOLOIDS!”
“What, what? Something else?”
“HAIR TRIGGER. GREASE THE REFLEXES.”
“The Baron still going on?”
Exclemptes bit the speaking-trumpet. Ring, ring, ring, clack.

“Hello, are you open?” inquired the larger and more well-fed of the two men inserting their combined mass into the doorway.

“No, can’t you read the sign?” snapped Exclemptes, rehanging his jaw and hoping he hadn’t chipped a tooth. “What do you need?”
“Here, have a care!” admonished the smaller and more ruffled of the two. “That’s the newest knight of the land you’re speaking to! Sir Pearse!”
“Oh, how thoughtless of me!” smiled Exclemptes brightly. “TERRIBLY sorry to trouble a KNIGHT of the LAND, here come to seek such a big important matter. Now, what do you need to stab, sir? And might you muzzle you upstart grub?”
“Fair ‘nuff,” rumbled Sir Pearse happily, punching his squire affectionately in the kidney. “Shut up, you. I reckon I’ll take a Big Flambe, if you’ve still got any ‘n the stock from last year. Sure made a pretty mess back with Sir Forkmoore’s slaying, I tell you that.”
“Yes, yes, very tragic.”
“I reckon I’n handle that. Got a spear.”
“That should do it.”
“He preferred sword. Showy bastard he was.”
“Too true, too true,” said Exclemptes, shaking his head. “Cheque?”

“Here’n you go,” grunted Sir Pearse, passing the paper with one hand and grabbing his retching squire’s belt with the other. “Hush, you. On m’way now, g’day to you.”
The speaking-trumpet took a moment to work this time, which Exclemptes spent checking the surface for dentally-induced cracks.

“Yeah?”
“We DO have a few Grand Flambe lying around back there, yes?”
“Nope, the equinox tourney took ‘em all. But I could chop shop something close enough to qualify, as long as nobody looks too carefully.”
“It’s a knight’s slaying, the whole audience and every participant will be soused as shrimp and unsensible even when sober. Do it.”

Ring, ring.

Exclemptes steepled his fingers and gave a level gaze at the messenger. “Admit it.”
“Pardon, Master Wilhomp?” gulped the messenger. His eyes glazed with an extra layer of fear.
“Admit you screwed this all up. You can’t hear and can’t think and can’t listen properly and you’re having to salvage it all from half-recollected bits of nonsense and gossip your fellow servants can scrape together, hoping all the while they don’t feed you a discrediting line for their own gain – and the reason you delivered this verbally is because there WAS a document that you LOST and you don’t know what was on it because YOU CAN’T READ.”
The man sagged in relief. “Yes Master Wilhomp! It’s all true Master Wilhomp! I’m sure I’ve got it now though, Master Wilhomp! I asked the butler and he called me a worm but told me everything now, it’s all true! I’m positive! Please spare me!”
“Stop mewling and start speaking,” said Exclemptes, narrowing his eyes in lordly disdain. “And be sure that your Baron will have a full accounting of your failings should he find one fault with this product of your assigned errand!”
“Yes Master Wilhomp thank you Master Wilhomp praise you Master Wilhomp! Turn the heat up from smoke to flame and double the sweet on the spot!” babbled the messenger, backing out the door as he bowed and scraped so hard that he nearly cleaned the dust from the carpet.

Exclemptes shook his head as he picked up the speaking-trumpet. “Akoloids? Change the smokestack to a full flame and double the sweet on the sweetspot.”
A groan. “Really? I don’t know how much more vulnerable this thing can get; I’m already making it with a fully naked chest and a retracted ribcage; want me to just mount its heart on its nose so it can pop it whenever it sneezes?”
“The customer, right or wrong, is always paying.”
“Fine.”

Exclemptes hung up and rubbed his face and thought of luncheons. Akoloids wasn’t angry, god no, but he was already sliding into the sort of surly sulk that he liked to spend whole months in if prodded far enough. Just the sort of thing he needed. God, the amount of salt being added to the day’s coffee was almost enough to cancel out the sugar of Vogelschnapps returning. What a plum that was; he’d sworn to never set foot in the whole of Cabbledrach street again, let alone buy a Wilhomp & Akoloids original. But all aristocratic emotions were fickle and fanciful in the end, even spite.

Ring, ring.

“Admiral.”
“Wilhomp.”
“Six more serpents for the boarding drills?”
“Dullfanged and drooling.”
“Wonderful.”
“Superb.”
“Always happy to assist the navy.”
“Happy to be assisted.”

Exclemptes didn’t even bother picking up the speaking-trumpet; the order had been processed weeks in advance, as had every other of its kind for the past six decades. Predictability was probably why the navy had lost the last war, but if it purchased six practice-serpents every six months who was to say if it was bad or good?
He stood up. Enough prevarication. Luncheon called. Meats and breads and breaded meats and little morsels of fat from honest, boring, expensive animals, things no blade of Akoloids’s would ever touch. The chef would have prepared everything by now.

Ring. Ring.

Exclemptes’s eyes met those of the messenger. The messenger’s eyes met those of Exclemptes.

They were soft, watery. A particular kind of hazel.

“Well?” he snapped.

“I DID get it correct, Master Wilhomp,” said the messenger apologetically. “But there was one more thing, just one more thing. The Baron sent me out specific when I told him it was done, just for this.”
Exclemptes shut his eyes. “Speak. Then never be seen here again.”
“Forget about the sweetspot. Too big a hassle. Also please deliver one copy of the order to every member of the peerage on your patronage list as a surprise present from the Baron to the realm as a whole.”
Exclemptes smiled. “Well. Well, well, well. That’s a big order.”
“Yes, Master Wilhomp.”
“The biggest ever made.”
“The Baron believes that what goes around comes around, Master Wilhomp.”
“Yes it does,” mused Exclemptes. He was smiling, how odd. “Yes it surely does. Oh. Do you know someone called….mmmm….” his brain ticked through half-forgotten things; old meals; dead pets; someone’s aunt “…Svoush?”

The messenger jumped. “Pardon, Master Wilhomp?”
“Former secretary, I think that was her name. Wretched imbecile. You have her peculiar eyes.”
The messenger did not move a single muscle.

“What an utter and totally inexplicable coincidence THAT is!”
“Truly and completely, Master Wilhomp.”

“Now go away! And spend your next meager payday on a PROPER messenger’s uniform – that livery scarce befits your master; it looks like a paltry play-costume stolen from a theater-troupe!”

Slam, click, locked, and ready for lunch. But one last thing, one last word to the speaking-trumpet.

“Akoloids! Final adjustment to the Baron’s orders.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Nix the sweetspot, and we’re giving one to all our clients. The old baboon is having a birthday.”
“Ah.”
“Ah what?”
“It’s just, looking at the order all at once, this is a supersized flying flaming whip-quick greased-reflex monster, and now you say it has NO sweetspots, and-“

“And what?”

“But-”

“But WHAT?”

“…what if they barbecue the clients?

“So what if they do? It’ll be Vogelschnapps’s own damned fault for sending a clod-headed peasant to deliver his messages. I tell you, Akoloids, some people are just too stupid for words.”

Martin’s father was a lawyer. He understood laws.

Martin’s dad was a doctor. He understood medicine.

Martin’s sister was fond of animals. She was studied in biology.

Martin’s brother was into sports. He knew about baseball.

Martin was fascinated by disasters. He was prepared for them.

That was fine. His family understood that what mattered was your interest in something, not its monetary or social value.

The problem was the sort of disasters Martin was prepared for.

***

It began when Martin was very young – one of his first memories, from somewhere in age four. Water winged and concentrating intently on his footing, he was so busy climbing the steps into the pool that he lost the sound of crying in the murmur of the crowd until its bawling source was carried by him.

“-it’s okay there aren’t any-“

“-don’t LIE I don’t WANT to swim with SHARKS-”

Martin stopped, hand still clutching the railing. “Are there sharks?” he asked his father.

“No,” said Martin’s father. “Sharks don’t swim in pools. They’re full of chlorine, it’d be very unhealthy for them.”

“Oh,” said Martin. And he said no more of it, but he descended the steps extra slow the rest of the way – because for the very first time in his life his mind was elsewhere than his body, and whirring even more furiously than his stubby legs as he kicked and splashed. All the way from the pool to a dip in the hot tub to the showers he pondered, and it was in the car home that he made his decision.

“I’d use the pool noodle,” he told his father as they left the parking lot.

“Pardon?”
“I’d use the pool noodle to stop the shark,” he explained patiently. “I’d wave it around until it bites it, then I’d get out of my water wings, and I’d swim away while it attacked them, since they’re bright and floaty. I’d sneak.”
“You’d sink,” said Martin’s father with devastating graciousness. “Don’t ever take off your water wings without talking to me or another adult.”
“But the shark –”

“Sharks can’t swim in pools.”
“But what if one DID.”
“It wouldn’t.”
“But what if one did,” traitorously mused Martin, and so on and so forth until bedtime and the day after, when Martin’s father had forgotten it and assumed the same of his son.

Foolish man! Children don’t forget anything; the hard part is making them understand which parts they should remember as being important.

***

At age nine Martin went to the museum on a school field trip, and a grand time was anticipated to be had by all, except for those who would be bored because they weren’t interested, or bored because they already knew everything, or bored because they were exhausted and couldn’t focus, or those who were just bored.

And Martin, who was having trouble passing through the downstairs gallery hall.

“Martin,” said Mrs. Hollis, a thin, sun-scarred woman of infinite sufferance and infinity plus one suffering. “You’re holding up the tour. C’mon. Let’s go.”
“It’s dangerous,” said Martin, lurking stubbornly behind a support column in a way that would let him juke left and right without much trouble should someone try to grab him.

“The whole place got renovated eight years back, it’s safe.”
“But what if the skeletons come alive?” he argued, pointing up up up at the gallery’s centerpiece and sole attraction: forty-five foot of Tyrannosaurus rex.

“They can’t, Martin,” said Mrs. Hollis. “They aren’t alive.”
“But what if they came alive?”
“Skeletons are dead. And that isn’t a skeleton, actually – it’s a cast of one recreated using actual fossilized bones as the models for moulds. And the fossilized bones are almost entirely casts themselves made from nonorganic mineral seepage slowly replacing the actual skeleton of the animal. There is nothing here to come alive on multiple levels.”
“Wow,” said Martin.

“Yep. Now c’mon.”
“Can I have one minute?”
“You can have until Alvin comes out of the bathroom.”
Martin knew this was a better deal than he could expect, and so took it uncomplainingly. “Okay,” he said, as a toilet flushed in the near distance. “I’m fine now.”
“Good to hear. Do you feel okay?”
“I have a plan,” he told her. “If the skeletons come alive, I’ll run for the bathroom, then wait until it’s chasing someone else. Then I’ll sneak out the rear exit near the cafeteria.”

“Okay,” said Mrs. Hollis. “Why not leave through the lobby though? It’s closer.”
“Because I’ve been here before and I know that the lobby is right next to the big stairs, and the main dinosaur hall is right next to those on the second floor, and the Albertosaurus skeleton is right next to its entrance, and I think it’s small enough to use the big stairs and come downstairs and catch me.”

“Makes sense,” she agreed. “But it won’t do that.”
“But what if it DID?” asked Martin plaintively, only to be swept up in the charge as Alvin returned to the herd and it began to move as one uncaring and ponderous beast into the swirl of the museum.

Much learning was had. Many experiences were cherished. Lifelong impressions were made.

Martin already had one of those. It deepened.

***

When Martin was set to graduate, he refused to go to the graduation party.

“C’mon,” Seth chanted at him. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. Everyone’s going.”
“And that’ll help,” said Martin irritably.  “But it won’t be good enough.”
“What, more than everyone being there for the last time with a lot of food, music, and some spiked drinks? Man, even Ben’s gonna be coming and he barely showed up for anything that wasn’t an exam in the last two years.”
“It’s in the main auditorium, and they got rid of the balcony seats last fall,” explained Martin.

“So?”
“So my entire plan for what to do if gravity suddenly reverses is shot. Before I just had to stay underneath a balcony and the farthest I’d fall would be maybe eight feet; now I’m dropping over twenty – farther if I’m too close to the stage. Even if I have good reflexes and end up landing on top of a bunch of other people, I’ll probably break limbs if not my spine, and then I’m stuck with no way to climb back up to the rest of the halls on ground level. I’d just starve to death.”

“Martin,” said Seth, “my buddy. You have got to organize your life in a way that isn’t based around gravity reversing. It’s just not happening.”

“But what if it DID?”

“What if squirrels kidnapped you and bit your knees off?”
Martin considered this. “No,” he decided. “I think I’d be okay. I made a plan for what to do if birds do that, and that’s not that different.”

The noogie that followed was memorable for him, but the message conveyed by it was not.

***

Martin was in a cubicle (or half a cubicle: a whole cubicle was a relic of the ancient past). Martin was filling out forms. Martin was listening to Stephanie complain.

“And the worst part is the total lack of care,” she explained to him. “Sick leave? Nah.”

“Yup,” said Martin. Click. Type. Click. Type. Click.

“ Paid overtime? Nah.”
“Yup,” said Martin. Type type type. Click click. Type. Click.

“I’m amazed they have even have a plan to get us out of the building in case of fire – and even then, it relies on the sprinklers working, and those things are older than my goddamned parents.”
“Right!” said Martin. “Right. No emergency preparedness. That’s why I had to come up with my own solutions.” He pulled open his desk drawer and held aloft a small canister.  “Oxygen tank and respirator. And goggles. Heat-treated.”
“Jesus,” said Stephanie as she ran her fingers over the seals. “High-quality stuff, I’m impressed – but fuck, if the company’s doing such a shitty job keeping us alive that you feel like we should all buy this sort of thing just to stay alive in a fire-”

“Oh, they’re not for fires,” explained Martin. “They’re for if the ceiling turns into taffy. It’d be quite warm, but the main danger would be suffocation, since it’s nearly impossible to swim or move through. The tank would keep me alive long enough to get to the stairwell and break a door, which would drain it all out of the offices and get us some breathing space.”

Stephanie looked at him with an unreadable expression.

“So I don’t think you’ll need the goggles. Just a tank each.”

The expression hardened around the edges, like old bones buried deep.

“You can borrow mine if you want to know the manufacturer. But whatever you do, don’t confuse it with the other bottle. That one is the bear spray.”
“You have bear spray in your desk.”
“Yes. In case our boss turns into a bear.”

She turned and left.

“But what if she DID?” Martin called after her.

Her stride accelerated. He remembered that happening, but didn’t understand why.

***

“That’s strike two,” said Jane as she helped Martin load the rest of his stuff into the back of her van. It was warm and spacious and smelled slightly of wildlife urine.

“I didn’t make a big deal of it,” he pointed out. “I didn’t ask my boss about their plans. I just tried to help a coworker.”
“You were keeping bear spray in your desk.”
“They confiscated it,” he complained.

“Good, because it isn’t getting in my car. Couldn’t you get fired on a day where yours wasn’t in the shop? Bonds of siblinghood aside, I just helped you move – ask Davie next time this happens, it’s his turn.”
“I didn’t plan on getting fired,” he explained as they pulled out of the parking lot.
“Why not? It’s better odds than the bear thing.” Tick tick goes the turn signal.
“But what if it did happen?” Vroom, slow acceleration.

“It won’t.” Low grumble and lurch to a stop at the light.
“But what if it-”

“Martin,” said Jane with the endless impatience and perfect understanding of a sister, “life is full of things that can happen. Why not think about them, instead of things that won’t?”
“But,” began Martin, as they pulled forwards into the intersection, which was when the man came through the red light.

He was looking at something that wasn’t the light. Maybe it was his phone? Or the floor. Or a sandwich.

He was moving very fast.

He was going to hit them.

Then they were probably going to hit other people.

What did you do in a car accident?

Martin knew what to do if an asteroid landed off the east coast of Mexico. He knew what to do if housepets across the world rose up and tried to kill humanity. He knew what to do if the floor was made of lava (as long as it wasn’t too hot). He knew what to do if a blizzard happened in July. He knew what to do if trees became conscious and vengeful. And he didn’t know what to do in a car accident.

But, his hindbrain, spine, and arms all helpfully communicated to him, he DID know what to do someplace else.

So he grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, wrenched it through a remarkable series of events, and didn’t blink until everything stopped moving around.

***

Davie drove them hope. It was, as Jane reminded him, his turn.

“That was very, very, very, very lucky,” she said. Again.

“Probably,” said Martin. Again.

“I mean, what were the chances of that?”
“A spaceship crashing in front of us, or the chances of me remembering what to do if a spaceship crashes in front of us, or the chances of me remembering what to do if a spaceship crashes in front of us and doing that when a car is about to crash into us?”

“The last one.”
“Dunno. One hundred percent? It’s happened once.”

Jane gently tipped forwards with a groan and tapped her forehead against the dashboard.

“Sit up,” said Davie. “What if you have whiplash?”
“Better doctors than you have already checked and said nope,” she muttered from below. “Not a scratch – not on me, not on Marty, not on anything but a long, long streak of asphalt and half  my van. And besides, I don’t wanna look at the road right now. Just makes me paranoid.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll go slow, put on some music – nice, dumb stuff from your old mix CDs, so it’ll keep you too irritated to be jumpy. You doing okay back there, man?”
“Sure,” said Martin.

“Really?”

“All of that stuff was an unprecedented and inexplicable fluke,” said Martin. “It happening again seems pretty unlikely, so why worry?”

Jane turned up the volume.

Martin remembered that. But he wasn’t sure why it happened.

He was used to that. 

The wind blew soft, the sun rose high, and the ground trembled under heavy weight from both ends of the pasture.

The cattle raised their heads. A procession of apes approached, sticks in hand, fires in stick, shouts in mouth and gleams in eye.

“Listen!” they called. “Listen to us! Bend to us! Do as we wish! We are tool-makers, and we are in the hands of Tool-Maker, and through us Tool-Maker demands you bend! Look!” they shouted, and they hoisted up a tall pole on which they had strung the skulls of cattle. “Here, place your god here! We will hold them as easily as we hold your bodies! Now submit!”

The cattle packed tightly and stood firm, but they did not charge, and this was all the bravery needed for one of the most adorned and adored apes to march forwards – he wore a cattle skull over himself, as if to compensate for the fur he lacked.

“You are large, but simple,” he said in a tired, matter-of-fact voice. “You are strong, but slow. Do as we ask and we will put you to better use. Look“- he shook the staff in his hand- “I bear the old horns of your old mothers and fathers, and through them I bear their manifestation of your Oldest Parent. You will do as your Oldest Parent bids, and your Oldest Parent is in my hands, and I am in Tool-Maker’s hands. This is how it is, now and forever.”

The cattle stared at the adorned ape. A calf bleated, but briefly – as if too frightened for full song in full voice. Then one after another the horned heads dipped, and with a snort hither and thither, the herd relaxed. The ape walked, and they followed behind.

“Yay! Woo! Hurrah!” shouted the other apes, capering along behind and around and clapping hands with each other. “He’s done it again! They said he couldn’t, but he did! Another victory for our Tool-Maker!”

***

It really was a great victory, even the apes who were lower in Tool-Maker’s esteem grudgingly admitted. It brought them meat and milk, and so large, and with tough skin you could peel loose from the meat and dry into usefulness. True, sheep had milk and meat and were soft, but they were smaller. True, the traitor-wolves who had named Tool-Maker their new family were cleverer and more useful to hunt and to warn of the cats that still roamed at night where Tool-Maker’s light did not shine, but they were smaller. Size meant a lot, even to apes that told themselves that size meant nothing with tools in your hands.

So they hurrayed the cattle into their new pasture, and hurrayed the priestly apes who had led them there, and above all else they hurrayed the great Tool-Maker, who was the one being in this world who realized that others were more than friend or foe, but objects in your grasp, and who most munificently and mercifully bestowed this knowledge and power upon its children when the other idiot weakling beings beyond of the world left their children to their idiot play.

They also hurrayed eating a cow. That was nice. But one cow less still left many, and cows eat more than sheep. So it was that the next day, and the next day, and the day after that found many of the apes in their fields, sowing and reaping and sweating and bleeding so that they might have bread and their new tools might have fodder in harder times.

They didn’t mind. Tool-Maker demanded it, and Tool-Maker would reward them with more victories over more weak things and weak gods. Soon their mouths would touch meat once more. So they heaved and pulled and toiled and laboured and finally rejoiced, for lo – the crop sprouted, and it was good, and great, and gritty and spiny and poked harshly against their sunburnt and raw hides, and they gathered it all and heaped it away from the rain and wind and sun under cover of roof-and-walls, as Tool-Maker had told them to do.

Then the time came when the pastures the cattle were confined to ran dry under the rainless sun, and food was scarce. Able apes unsealed the grain’s caskets, and within found a least savory sight: dozens and dozens of cute little pink noses and black little eyes and brown-and-white waist-coats of fur, fleeing at speed with naked tails trailing behind.

“Rodents!” they complained to the most adorned apes of the city. “Miserable thieving rodents have stolen our crop, with which we feed our captive tools! This is outrageous! We are outraged!”

“Yes,” agreed the most adorned ape, wearily donning an extra necklace or eight, and choosing a suitably impressive headpiece. “This is true. We will correct this behaviour permanently and thoroughly.”

So the apes marched through their shelters and brandished sticks and fires and shouted not with fierce joy but with smouldering rage, and more than one errant spark had to be hastily quenched with dirt and singed ape-flesh lest it catch aflame their own property. At the head stomped the most adorned ape, whose staff was now festooned with the trophies of sheep, traitor-wolf, AND cattle, and in his gaze was a businesslike no-nonsenseness that was far more dreadful than the wrath of his followers, and he stopped before the most plundered and desecrated of the grain-storages and held his staff aloft.

“Squeakers,” he proclaimed, “you are tedious, but you are small. You are vexing, but you are fleeting. Look“- and here he shook the staff in his hand –“we have subdued far greater and more impressive beasts than you will ever be, by the work of Tool-Maker subduing their gods that are far greater and more impressive than yours will ever be. You will do as your Quickly-Hiding bids, and your Quickly-Hiding is in my hands, and I am in Tool-Maker’s hands. This is how it is, now and forever.”

There was no response for an instant. Then the adorned ape jumped and said an unforgivable word – a small mouse had crawled down his arm and hopped into his palm, where it squeaked at him, then leapt free. Then another, another – a little flood of rodents seeping from his adornments and flowing out from his hands, launching from between his fingers like salmon over rapids. All the other apes drew back in confusion as he capered and cursed and swatted, and when at last his dance had ended he had not one speck of adornment upon his naked ape frame – all was discarded, chewed, and damaged – nor was there a single mouse clutched in his hands.

Here the once-adorned ape might have fixed things, had he his full presence of mind to him. But he was tired and upset and had lost his temper for the first time in years and was currently unadorned, whereas the (formerly) second-most-adorned ape was fresh and alert and had been waiting for this sort of thing and was now the most adorned ape, so when he stepped forwards without hesitation or apparent haste and called “So! The battle is a draw! We will not be troubled by the squeakers, but nor shall we be spared them – more labour is needed! More tools to be made! Tool-Maker did not raise us to be lazy – while they work apace on this, we shall clear new fields! The swamps must be made tools!” everyone was happy to listen to him and hurrayed him and they did not look upon the (formerly) most-adorned of apes, or wish to think of him any more.  Or to think of how it was that small things might resist Tool-Maker, who brought them victory over the mighty.

Better to think of the victories yet to come.

***

The swamps were thick, and green, and wet, and to dam them and drain them took many stones and much time. Oh so much time. Time spent groaning, and heaving, and dropping rocks on sensitive ape toes and bruising thin-skinned ape arms and (once) flattening an over-ambitious ape like a pancake underneath a boulder ten times their weight.

But it was done, because the fields must be expanded, because the cattle must be fed, because Tool-Maker’s grasp was inescapable and firm. Anything less was unthinkable and impossible.

What was extremely thinkable and possible were the mosquitoes. A mosquito for every inch of skin for every ape in the swamp, turned red and flushed and impossibly, horrifically itchy.

This was horrendous. This was vexing. This was an obstacle. So the apes assembled the sticks and the fires and their irritation and (scratching themselves many, many times), trailed behind the most adorned ape, who was carrying a big stick with a foul-smelling fire made from damp and odorous herbs upon it and taking care to stand in the smog let off by it. They proceeded into the heart of the swamp, and a great fire was built up with bundles of herbbs to spread the smoke farther and higher, and there the most adorned ape began to preach.

“Listen well, you perfidious gnats!” he scolded the whining marsh around them. “You are no obstacle! You are irritation! You are barely even alive, barely even animate – who are you to put yourself so against the will of us, and thereby Tool-Maker, the greatest of gods? What does your own Careful Bloodsuck bid of you – nothing! Nothing but to exist! You are barely alive; now leave us this patch of shameful waste you covet and find yourselves a better role. As you are in no ways fit for tool use, maybe repent long enough and return to us as something useful. Now do as Tool-Maker bids!”

The whining stopped.

For a long, slow, glorious moment the adorned ape could barely fight to keep the smile from his face. Oh, he had done it! He had triumphed! He had dismissed the purposeless!

Then, one at a time and all very quickly, each ape of good hearing realized something: they couldn’t hear the whining because so many wings were beating that the sound resembled a rumble. And then the sky turned black, not from smoke, but from bodies.

By the time everyone was back in town – everyone who hadn’t run into the swamps in their panicked flight, or into the fire, or over each other – it was impossible to say who the most adorned ape was. Everything that impeded flight had been dropped or torn away.

Besides, there were other distractions. Two hours after the retreat, the chills came.

***

With the chills came aches. With the aches came fever. With the fever came trembling.

The apes sickened. They laid low in their shelters, they sprawled in the (empty, rodent-haunted) grain stores, they packed into the walls of the Home of Tool-Maker, where the adorned apes had not the energy or time to protest their presence. Anywhere was better than lying prone in the open where more mosquitoes or a cat or even a rogue traitor-wolf (considering, perhaps, a second betrayal) might fall upon you.

“This will end,” croaked the doughtiest remaining of the adorned apes, arms trembling as he donned as much regalia as his frail body could support. “To be set back by foes is one thing; to suffer recalcitrance from a masterless, heedless divine in delusion of its place beneath Tool-Maker is another… but to perish at mindless, thoughtless disease? No!”

So the last adorned ape tottered through the moans and shivers of his kin and stood at the great gate to the Home of Tool-Maker and looked out over the homes (full of the ill) and the fields (fallow and weed-choked) and the pastures (empty; when had THAT happened?), and he raised his hands, thumbs and fingers curled in opposition, and he spoke thusly.

“Oh wretched illness, you are not even alive. You have no god of your own. You have no will of your own. You are but a tool of the mosquitoes – and no tool shall fell those who follow Tool-Maker! I call upon them to cast you away and turn you to better purposes. Away now, empty thing, neither follower nor followed! Begone, and make no reply nor retort lest you make it from a god of your own unto mine!”

The words were remembered most clearly by some of the survivors from the outermost homes, as was the moment that the entire Home of Tool-Maker liquefied into a thin, clear fluid and sank into the ground without a bubble.

And when enough time had passed that even the ground where that Home had once stood was simple bare, unstained stone again; when enough time had passed that the order of events was lost, then the events themselves; when once again divinity essayed forth from apes, it did so with a softer tread, a quieter voice, and a hand that trembled, as if ever-ready to flinch.

Few begrudged it thus.

Valleydale was nice.

It was well-maintained and well-planned and well-bred and well-priced to ensure that it all stayed that way. Its fences were picket fences and the picket fences were so white they gleamed in the lovely blue skies of its tasteful and comfortable summers and there were many of them with several nice beaches. It was mostly suburbia, and the bits that weren’t mostly existed to serve the suburbia.

Everyone there was happy. If they weren’t, they did something about it immediately. Which was why it was so surprising to have a last-minute complaint added to the minutes of the town hall’s monthly meetup.

“It’s the vultures,” said Carl Shapes. His mouth puckered in irritation as he enunciated the word ‘vultures,’ it wasn’t one he liked to have so close to his person. “At the dump. They swarm in the sky there, all day. Quite unpleasant.”

“We’ll do something about that,” promised Mayor Crisp. He snapped his fingers. “Get me a plan and an expert.”

After a quick coffee break an expert was herded to the podium, having been snagged from her own coffee run at the nearest drive-through. “Vultures,” she explained while dusting the large, firm handprints of the town’s aldermen from her shoulders, “are an important component of any ecosystem they exist in. They not only consume carrion – removing it from the environment along with any pathogens it may contain – they act as signals to other scavengers to locate corpses and remove them. An environment without vultures is a less healthy one, with more disease and decay. Also, you really don’t want to offend the birds.”

“Hmm, yes,” said Mayor Crisp. “Astounding. Well, that’s our expert. Plan?”
“I don’t like them. Let’s kill ‘em,” said Carl Shapes.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” said Mayor Crisp, shaking everyone’s hands. “Much good work done by all, happy to meet you, etc etc. Pour poison in some dead cows and leave them by the dump.”

So it was done, and the skies of Valleydale were bluer and emptier than ever, and if the smell got worse well, that was in the dump and nobody cared about that, or it was in the woods and DEFINITELY nobody cared about that.

***

The first reprisal came a week later.

Mayor Crisp awoke to hear a tapping, as of someone gently rapping at his windowpane. “It’s some branch,” he muttered, “smacking at my glass it’s plain – what a pain.”

Then the screaming started and didn’t stop.

It didn’t stop at five am, it didn’t stop at six am, it didn’t stop at seven or eight or even nine am. It was a nest of grackles posted just outside the mayor’s bedroom, filled with violent delight and eager to express it as if pus from a boil. At ten am he caved in and went downstairs to get some work done, where he found mail in his mailbox, email in his inbox, recordings in his answering machine, and worst of all, Carl Shapes on his doorstep.
“I don’t mean to complain,” he complained, “but we don’t have pigeons in town, right?”
“No,” said Mayor Crisp.

“No we have pigeons or no we don’t have pigeons?”
“No, we don’t have pigeons.”

“So we don’t have pigeons.”
“Yes. I just said that.”
“You’re forgiven,” said Carl Shapes ungraciously. “Anyways, like I said, I don’t mean to complain but pigeons seem to have crapped all over my car. Can you do something about that?”
“Yes yes of course yes, very interesting,” said Mayor Crisp. “We’ll do something about that. I’ll call an expert and make a plan or something.” He gently made shooing gestures at Carl, then squinted behind him. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“The big off-white blob in my driveway.”
“I don’t know. It looks like someone’s care covered in pigeon crap.”
Mayor Crisp looked up and down the street. “Fascinating. Amazing. Do you know where my car is?”
“It could be under the pigeon crap.”

“Hah! Ahahaha! Hah! You’re a real card, Mister Shapes. Hah. I’m going to go make a plan and call experts. Goodbye and good-day.”
Mayor Crisp slammed the door, went upstairs stopping to punch the drywall at every other step, and phoned the chief of police. “Give me weapons,” he demanded. “Give me giant clouds of pepper spray. Give me bb cannons. Give me anything to purge winged, feathered little fuckers from my town. Things here are nice, and that means they work the way we want them to. This is unacceptable.”
“Sure, whatever,” said Susan. “Y’want handcuffs with that?”
“Yes. No!” Mayor Crisp shook his head. “They don’t have hands. Awful. Just awful.”

He hung up. The phone rang in his hand as if in offense, and his treacherous thumb answered it before he could stop it. “Hello?” he ventured.

“Mister mayor, I am Ramone Shoe. I work at city hall, and I am sorry to report that your office is full of grackles right now. You haven’t used it in the last three years, but you can’t use it right now, and I wanted you to know that just in case. Thank you, and goodbye.”

Mayor Crisp phoned the chief of police again.

“Hey.”
“Get me swat teams armed with rubber bullets and rubber teams bulleted with swat arms,” he snarled. “This bird ain’t gonna fly.”

***

The citizens of Valleydale didn’t complain. The birds were a nuisance, and that was unacceptable, and therefore dealing with them – however it was done – was acceptable.

But it was a bit much to have armed police on every corner, magdumping into the sky at the first twitch, coo, or cackle. The treecover was getting denuded to nigh-on-autumnal levels, and it was barely June.

“I think things are going great,” said Mayor Crisp at the monthly town hall. “They’re amazing and fabulous. We’ve gone from one hundred percent pigeon crap saturation of every vehicle in town to eighty-seven percent, which means we only need to try six to seven times harder and we’ll be right back where we started. It’s really great and wonderful. It’s great. It’s great. It’s great.” He squinted at the nearest figure. “Are you a reporter?”
“No mister mayor.”
“I knew that. I know that, it’s really excellent that I know that. What time is it? Four am?”
“It’s five pm.”
“Oh god I need to go to bed, they’ll wake me soon. They wake me. But we’re winning. We’re winning. Are you a reporter?”
“No mister mayor, I’m Ramone Shoe. I work at city hall.”
“I don’t recognize you.”
“You don’t talk to anyone at city hall.”
“That’s good, that makes sense. What is it?”
“We’ve lost the beaches to geese, mister mayor. They’ve already spiked the bacterial count in the lake beyond our water treatment plant’s capacity to handle, destroyed the marina, and secured a beachhead on our beach head. The lifeguards are holed up in the snack bars but are unable to escape. They request immediate evac. Your orders?”
“That’s great. Let’s get an expert and a plan.” Mayor Crisp blinked six times very quickly. “Take five for coffee,” he concluded as he slid bonelessly to the floor.

***

They couldn’t find the first expert because she’d left town, but they were able to find someone who knew someone who knew someone whose brother was an expert, and after luring him in with a false promise of a weekend festival, they were able to extract information from him.

“It’s really simple,” he explained before the amassed citizenry. “You’ve got to apologize for what you’ve done wrong to the birds. Then they’ll stop. Anything else will prompt further escalation. Can I go now?”
“But we’ve done nothing wrong,” said Carl Shapes from the audience.

“You’re killing them in large numbers and when they got upset about that you killed more of them. Can I go now?”
“They started it.”
“Can I go now?”
“Why are you so concerned about that?”

“You tied me to the podium. Can I go now?”
“We did that or you wouldn’t have stayed.”
“I’m done. Can I go now?”
“Yes, yes, send him back to the birds or wherever,” said Mayor Crisp, slapping his hands together firmly. “So! We have an expert, we had an expert, now we will have a plan. I’m thinking cybernetic housecats.”
“Spray DDT on everything and fill the lake with lead shot pellets!” shouted a maniac in the crowd.

“Takes too long,” said Mayor Crisp. “I need to be re-elected next year, not in ten years. So we’re going to do the cybernetic house cats. And flak cannons. And we’ll weaponize the park’s lawnmowers. And mowerize the parker’s lawn weaponry. Yes. Yes! It will work. It will work. It will work. Everything’s fine and nice and will be perfect again, surely.”

There was breaking glass and a short, sharp shriek, interspersed with furious squawking. Seagulls were pouring in through the street exit and were demolishing the tardier citizens as if they were stray fries. Carl Shapes was already lodged halfway down the throat of a cold-eyed black-backed gull, arms waving an inadvertent, desperate farewell.

“Be strong! Be brave. Be well-groomed,” urged Mayor Crisp, already halfway out the window. “I’m with you one hundred percent!”

***

The lawnmowers kept the geese from spreading free of the beaches, but at a cost: every backyard within six blocks of the shoreline was sheared bald. Brown soil bleached under merciless heat where once thick, luscious blades of grass grew to respectably-groomed heights. And although the enemy armada was stalled, their irregulars remained undaunted. Despite martial law and the mass recruitment of every able-bodied citizen above age fourteen into the town guard, car defilement remained above eighty-five percent (one hundred percent for law enforcement transportation) and most citizens were receiving a little less than an hour of sleep per day due to incessant screaming from blackbirds, grackles, chickadees, jays, finches, thrushes, doves, crows, and the odd escaped parrot.

A citizenry thus under siege cannot maintain vigilance forever, and it is in such dishevelled states that the cracks of distraction will blossom into the furrows of destruction.

Mayor Crisp stared blankly at the paper in front of him. “What am I looking at?” he inquired hopefully.

“Your desk, mister mayor.”
“What’s on it?”
“Some blank notepaper for notes.”
“Wow. Who did that?”
“I did, mister mayor. I’m Ramone Shoe. I work at city hall.”
“Great, beautiful. Phenomenal. Why am I here?”
“To read the message you’re holding in your right hand.”
Mayor Crisp stared at his right hand, then gave it to Ramone Shoe.

“It appears that under cover of darkness, last night a squad of crack owls snuck into the county museum and liberated certain esoteric texts from the security vault.”
“Aha,” said Mayor Crisp, nodding his head firmly. “That makes sense.”

“And now we can expert grave repercussions.”
“Right, great. We should get an expert.”
A distant crash echoed for miles.

“It may be a little late for that,” said Ramone Shoe, as they watched the cloud of dust rise from what had once been the police station. Above it circled a single form, five-winged, wider-spanned than any human field of sport could measure. It hissed like a snake, then gently horked. The streets below it sloshed gently and subsided under the weight of tens of tons of acidic vomit.

“A plan, then?”
“That’s a gros vautour, mister mayor. There is no existing plan for that.”
“Right, right, right. No plan, no expert. Great, wonderful. I’m going home to clean my car.”

There was a heaving crack outside. The dead rose from beneath the streets and began to claw, moaning in agony, at the monuments of the living. A crow sat on a lamppost above them, cawing in glee through a mouthful of priceless and untranslatable blasphemic script.

“It’s too late for that, mister mayor.”
“Ahahaha, I don’t think so, not really. Always more time to make sure everything’s nice and tidy, right? It’s got to be perfect, yes, perfection starts at home.”
“By whose standards, mister mayor?”
“Look, stop being so pushy. What’s your job, anyways?”
“Ravens, mister mayor.”
“Right, right. Right. What’s that?”
“I’m ravens.”

For the first time in twelve years, Mayor Crisp looked another person in the eyes to see what was there.

A beak clattered insolent at him from Ramone Shoe’s left eyesocket.

“Oh.”
“All you had to do was think, mister mayor,” said Ramone Shoe, through his eyesocket and his coat sleeve and his pants and his suitcase. A leg emerged from one ear and gently grasped his shoulder; feathers shuffled loosely under his shirt. “All you had to do was think.”
“But that’s so HARD,” managed Mayor Crisp feebly. His hands were on his desk. Surely there would be something there that would save him. A pen, wielded bravely. A desk ornament, flung with force. A letter-opener?
But all that was there was him and some blank paper.

The paper was nice and white and clean though. That made him feel better until it wasn’t, and by then he didn’t care as much about anything.

***

On the seventeenth day of the siege, a mockingbird reached the left ear of the universe and spoke into it. Thereafter, Valleydale was no longer a problem. Its offense was removed. Its crimes were resolved. Its existence was sorted and its debtors recompensed. Nicely.

Tragically, the vultures did not return. Even as an important carrion-removing, disease-preventing component of an ecosystem, utterly and soberly devoted to keeping things clean and well-kept, you can’t eat trace electromagnetic smears.

The sun seemed bigger out here. How about that. Less than a day from LA and it was like you were on a different planet, as long as you pointed the camera the right way.

“You’ve gotta talk to her.”
Leslie shaded her hand and followed the sunlight across the grey, cracked rock.

Jasper wasn’t as patient as the rocks; he crumbled a lot faster. “Listen, Les, you’ve gotta.”
The sky was so blue it hurt to look at it, like a sugary-sweet cavity in your eyeball. “I’ve got to do what now?”
She could practically hear the sweat beading on his skin, trickling down his palms and make his eyes blink and sting. “Talk to-”

“What am I talking to her about?”

“About the film.”
“What about it?” God, the water flowing off this man. Another twelve hours of this kind of stress and maybe he’d match the plants; turn into something thin and scraggly with a surface like shriveled plywood.

“For fuck’s sake Les, you know it can’t happen without her!”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes!”
“So why am I only just hearing this now, and why did last night go the way it did?”
“Please Les, c’mon, it’s more than just me on the line here-”

“It’s not my job to fix your fuckups, Jasper. I’m a makeup artist.”
“She listens to you!”
“Right, right, so if the film can’t happen without her, and she won’t work without me, then I guess I’m the goddamned director now. Give me the keys to your trailer.”

“What?! No!”

“We need the good shower and some privacy. You don’t like it, I don’t have to help, you don’t have to be helped, I can be the director once the producers take you out behind that ridge and shoot you.”

She held out a hand without looking and counted. Five seconds before the keys hit her palm with snitty force. Pathetic.

“We’re redoing the contracts tomorrow,” she said, as she turned and strode for effects storage. “You fob me off, you’ll wish the producers got you. You’re welcome.”

***

Finding Helen was easy. Right where she thought she’d be: tucked underneath the hand-painted scaly belly of Zorgg the Beast of Ages, curled with her spine to the room like a nervous porcupine.

She flinched when Leslie patted her back, and metal and wood creaked gently above them both.

Helen didn’t flinch. She’d planned not to flinch. It wouldn’t help.

“C’mon. Let’s get you a shower.”
“Cold.”
“Nope, we’re using Jasper’s. Up and at ‘em.”

Helen didn’t uncurl.

“Remember the pig from prom? ‘Sleep on it’ isn’t advice that works on bloodstains.”

Helen still didn’t uncurl, but she permitted Leslie to uncurl her manually. Hands under armpits, pulling back, legs wobbling into position as shaky as a crane colt. She was holding her shoulders still and looking down. Hiding.

“Are they out there?”
“No,” said Leslie. “Nobody’s out there.” No point in starting early when the shoot can’t happen.

“Okay.”

The easy part was over.

***

Jasper’s shower worked and it had hot water. It also whined like a starving dog at a loaded dinner table, but two miracles was enough to excuse a little mundane shittiness.

Still, Leslie spent the time cleaning up the rest of the room, especially the bed. Jasper wasn’t a complete slob, but this’d be a lot easier if the place were comfortable, and that meant fresh sheets, emptied garbage, and stuffing a few posters into the trash. He’d live to complain about it and like it.

Half an hour. She pulled the best towel she could find (too pink and too big, but still with some fluff in it, somehow) and knocked on the door.

“Towel’s here.”

“Okay.”
“Hot water’ll be going soon.”

No reply, but after twenty-two seconds the water switched off.

Helen took the towel without complaint. She let Leslie dry her hair with the second-best towel she could find (too small and worn on the thin side, but scentless and unstained). She even accepted Leslie’s sleep clothes (too-big shirt, short-legged cotton pants). And then, having taken all the things Leslie offered, Helen laid down on top of Jasper’s newly de-odorized bed and curled up with her back to her.

“I’m going out for a smoke. Back in a sec.”
Helen didn’t nod. The acknowledgement of a nod was there.

Leslie walked outside of the trailer, looked up at that big blue sky – already curdling at the edges from heat haze – and lit up her shortest, least-appealing butt to fulfil the letter of her obligations. She ignored the taste, kept her mind on the plan. Stubbed out the butt of the butt on her heel, made eye contact with Zorgg the Beast of Ages through the open door of effects storage, nodded, and walked back in.

Helen was still curled up. But her spine didn’t jut, and her muscles didn’t tense.

The tricky part was over.

Leslie sat down. Helen didn’t make room for her. She also didn’t turn away from her. Neutral move.

“I ruined everything.”
There we go. “No you didn’t. He started it.”
“That’s a little kid’s excuse.”
“Little kids are smarter than people give them credit. Remember Lester?”
A small snort. Not a sniff. “Adrian thought he was so funny.”
“Yeah, and he wasn’t a little kid, he was a big kid trying to prove we were little and dumb. Hur hur hur I named a lizard after my sister. And he was our first one, wasn’t he?”
Small shuffle. Helen peered back over her shoulder at her, a little confused but in an annoyed way. Good. “No. That was Buzzsaw.”
“No, I mean the first one we worked up. I told you it sucked having a lizard named after me. You said he didn’t look dumb he looked cool. I told you he could look cooler. You asked me what I thought would help, I told you, you drew something, I drew something else…”

“…but we never did anything,” said Helen. “And then Lester got eaten by Ribs.”
“That was the dumbest dog your family ever owned.”
“Don’t be mean!”
“He was mean. And dumb. He choked to death on your Barbie after he ripped it out of your hands.”
“He didn’t mean it.”

Mournful, upset, but old and familiar upset. Still, don’t overpush it. “Whatever. Point is, Lester was our first. We didn’t finish, but we tried, and we wouldn’t have done our second without it.”
“Buzzsaw.”
“No. Buzzsaw was fourth. Maybe fifth.”

Helen sat up all at once, too surprised (and still a little annoyed) to be sad. “What? But we didn’t-”

“We tried a second time with the Barbie Warriors, and that was one we took off paper into action. We started the book after we made the Bird Coffin. I don’t know if your grandma’s dolls count; do you think they counted?”
Helen thought, but only to recheck her answer. “No,” she shook her head. “Those were hers, not ours.”

“Right. So Buzzsaw was fourth.”

“But the first where it happened.”
“Hey,” said Leslie, and she was unfair and caught Helen’s gaze, right after she’d lulled her into moving it off the wall. “Say we don’t do the stuff before it. Does it still happen?”
Her eyes twitched, but couldn’t outright dodge. “Maybe.”
“Does it happen the way it did?”
They slid down to her hands in her lap. Defeat. “No.”
“Then Buzzsaw was fourth.”

“Okay.” Withdrawn, but not withdrawing. Fine.

“Half of what we did for him was built on the Lester ideas anyways. You said the horns would look cool, we made him horns. I wanted a spiked tail club like a stegosaurus, we made him a big spike on his back because it was easier to pin on. The only new idea were the wings.”

“And the eyes,” added Helen. Couldn’t help it.

“You want to count those?”
“We never talked about Lester’s eyes,” she said, and she almost didn’t seem to notice she was volunteering complete sentences. “You said we should try a Barbie idea with Buzzsaw, I found some safe makeup, we made his eyes look scarier. It was new.”
“Okay, sure. So Buzzsaw the Burner, Dragonlord of the Diorama, was all dressed up and ready to trash that shitty shoebox model of a castle. And he was the way he was because of the ideas we had for Lester, and the ideas we had from the Barbie Warriors, and the stuff we wrote down from making the Bird Coffin –”

“We didn’t really make it all up, half of that was just origami advice from your mom’s book.”

“-we took the stuff we needed and used it, that was ours – and we took all of that and put it into Buzzsaw. He was fourth.”
Helen was smiling a little bit. Almost a smirk, meant to mock. “And the first to fly.”

“He was fourth. That matters.”
“He flew. That matters too.”

Definitely smug. Push back, but not too hard. “Yeah, fine. With the puppet strings.”

Back to annoyed, verging on genuine ire. “No. I told you it happened.”
“Pretty quiet happening though.”
“I told you.”
“Right. Okay. Fourth time, first time it happened, I get it.” Throw her a bone. “It’s like Lester. It wasn’t big time, it wasn’t complete-”

“-I TOLD you-”

“-but without it, the next time maybe doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen the way it did.”

“Okay.” Helen’s brows were set. Bushy and grumpy about it in that way that made you want to grab her head and fuss up her hair. Leslie wondered if this was how grandmothers felt all the time and hoped it wasn’t.

“So then the sixth was when it happened big time.”
“Fifth,” said Helen.

Leslie raised her own (thinner, less charming) eyebrows. “Really? With the cabinet play?”
“I dropped one of the rods on the clown’s arm. I panicked and just kept going, remember?”
“I thought you used your hand and just faked it.”

“That’s what I said I did.”
“Huh. Sixth was just the first time I couldn’t ignore it then.”
“Yeah,” said Helen. She was stroking the sheets with her thumb. “Because of the fire.”
Leslie grinned and she didn’t even have to plan for it. “Because of the fire.”
“Poor Buzzsaw. I didn’t think it would work.”
“I don’t think he thought it either.”
“He was just a little lizard, I’m not sure he thought at all besides ‘when I’m done doing this, they give me treats.’”

“We did too, didn’t we? Stole half a quart of my mom’s pie berry batch. Boy earned it.”
“Hazard pay,” said Helen solemnly.

“We should’ve gotten some too. My ass was never the same after mom got through with it. ‘Don’t play with matches!’ ‘Don’t tell lies about not having matches, I saw what you did!’” Her mom voice was never accurate; all snotty and whiny. Putting the shriek in right as she remembered needed bone-deep hate she didn’t want to uncover. Not when the fake thing made Helen giggle.

“And then I told you, and you didn’t believe me,” said Helen happily.

“I did.”
“You said ‘that’s bullshit!’”

“Yeah, because it is. I didn’t say it wasn’t real.”
“So I showed you with the Barbie Warriors,” said Helen. “Which makes it seventh?”

“Nah. That wasn’t a new idea. If your grandma’s dolls weren’t five, these aren’t seven.”

“Right. But they marched so well.”
“They did.”
Helen sighed happily. Honestly happily, full on. “How many of them do you have numbered like this?”
“They’re all in there, but I stop lining them up after seven. Real seven – the scarecrow that waved at cars. That’s when we got into the groove, and we stay in that until graduation.”
“Yeah. The prom. With the pigmeat DJ.”
“That was so good.”
Helen’s mouth downturned at the corner. “It was really dumb.”

“We were still teenagers, of course it was really dumb. I’m amazed we only had the one big fuckup.”
“All we had to do was not show off as much. Everyone already thought pigmeat DJ was amazing.”
“Yeah, but going on stage to accept a trophy for our costume when it was still standing in the booth and running the music was amazing.”
“It freaked out everyone.”
“That’s why it was amazing.”
“I should never have let you make me decapitate it.”
“That was the icing on the cake. The pig’s head landed right on the turntable, your aim was perfect. Best thing we ever did.”
Helen buried her face in her hands. “I can’t believe they thought it was a radio control.”
“Our teachers were very stupid, Helen. Why do you think I went all the way to LA?”

She hunched over double. Not good. Interesting. “I thought you were mad.”
Oh that was new. “Why?”

A little heave. That’s not laughter. “I thought you lied. I thought you left because you were scared of me.”
Leslie laughed, and she meant it. “Really? A pig’s head on a turntable? That’s what you think made me lie to you and run away to Hollywood? That’s what made me walk right up to you on the set of a shitty B-movie and tell you to start making it happen like I know you can? That’s what made me lock Jasper out of his own trailer?”
Helen didn’t look up, but she didn’t stop when Leslie pulled her face up with one hand. Ugly, ugly silent weeping. Snotty, cheeks wet, eyes squinted shut and sore from timid stress. “I’m sorry.”
“For being silly? Sure, that’s okay. Feel it, get it out, leave it behind. But for everything else? Don’t you dare. Jasper knows about it, you know.”

She hiccupped. “After last-”

“He knew about it before. I didn’t tell him shit, but he’s not a complete moron and your special effects and their budget are the one reason he’s not in the red ten films ago. He pays attention enough when there’s money, and honey? You’re money. He’s not going to burn you over one bigmouthed asshole that thought slapping you was funny.”

“But-”

“Do you believe me?”

Helen looked at her, all of eight years old and in the attic surrounded by marching war-painted sword-armed Barbies again, and she said what Leslie had said to her then, because what else could you say? “Yes.”

“Good. Get some rest. The day’s off for the shoot, don’t worry and don’t think. You can do that tomorrow.” She was going to anyways, but at least now she’d probably feel guilty enough to stop. “I’ll get you some water and start explaining shit to Jasper.

A little touch on her wrist as she readied to rise, hesitant.

“You’re sure it’ll be okay? He was the lead.”

“Absolutely,” said Leslie. Probably. “They’re already over it.” Hopefully. “Jasper can hire another ten Stanley Jacksons by turning over any LA rock and catching whatever scuttles fastest.” Definitely.

“Besides,” she added, because that little touch still felt nervous, “there’s no way in hell anyone’ll try that shit again. This gossip won’t die on its own, and it’s easy to keep fresh. We just don’t clean Zorgg’s teeth.”

“Mmm,” said Helen. “The stain could look nice if we treat it.”

And she smiled, and Leslie knew the hard part was over. They’d done it again.

CRA the Creator, aspiring Maker, checked Their metabox again, and again, and again, and on the seven-thousandth six billionth and forty-second hundred millionth time They found it full of package, and the package was full of promise, and all was revealed unto Them.

“Oh boy oh boy!” They yelled. “It’s here, it’s here, oh hoo boy it’s a good time guaranteed!”

And so saying They cleared off a big section of cosmic nothingness on Their desk and opened the box and shook out all its contents, which promptly exploded into existence and flew everywhere.

“Oops,” said CRA the Creator.

They looked at the side of the package. DO NOT SHAKE was writ upon it in fundamental metaphysics.

“Maybe I can sort of push it all back together?”
They could not sort of push it all back together.

“Well shit,” said CRA the Creator, looking across an infinite extending universe consisting almost exclusively of empty space to the point that matter was a rounding error of infinitesimal, unimaginable smallness. “I guess I’d better just sort of, pick a bit to focus on?”

***

CRA the Creator, Prime Mover and Shaker, gazed upon the foundations of the most convenient piece of Their creation They had found, which was where Their eyeball had rested after they concealed Their vision with one hand and went eeny meeny miny matter.

“It’s a little bit molten,” They said. “Is it supposed to do that?”

So CRA the Creator pulled out the manual and took a look at it, but it was in very small printessence and parts of it were upside down and some of it was back to front and while They were engrossed they heard a cataclysmic sundering sound and looked up and saw-

“AWW, NO! BAD! BAD CITTY!”
-that CAHT the Companion had wanted to help too, and had decided that what this piece of creation needed was for another piece of creation to smack into it at tremendous speed.

“No! That isn’t good! Good cittys keep their paws off creation! Bad!”
CAHT the Companion slow blinked remorselessly, and no amount of scolding improved that, nor did it undo the fact that CRA the Creator’s project was now being circled by a second wobbly lump of great sized comprised of ejected still-cooling rock.

“Oh well,” said CRA the Creator, as They hurriedly splashed water across Their creation. “Maybe it won’t make a big difference.”

***

CRA the Creator, Director of Cosmic Theater, sat patiently and watched, enraptured, as tiny cells begat tiny cells begat tiny cells begat tiny cells begat tiny cells begat tiny cells.

Sometimes, one of the cells absorbed another.

“This is great, this is really peak stuff. See, citty? See how nice things are when you don’t bap at them? Do you see?”
CAHT the Companion ignored Them. This meant it was feeling affectionate, and CRA the Creator was deeply touched and gave them a one-armed noogie as they peered back at their world, now so full of very small and very hardy life. They regarded it all with deep and profound fondness on a scale that, although incomprehensible to their children, they hoped they could feel on some level.

“Oh!” said CRA the Creator. “Look! See, citty? That one’s turned blue-green! Isn’t that beautiful? Look at it. Look!”

CAHT ignored this too.

“So pretty. Maybe we can make a few more of those.”

So CRA the Creator gently reached out and twiddled a submenu to open a window to find an option that unchecked a box that controlled a slider and moved it.

Nothing happened.

CRA the Creator moved the slider a little farther.

Nothing happened again.

CRA the Creator moved the slider a little bit farther than that, then changed Their mind and cranked it all the way to one side.

A preponderance of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) overran creation, filling its atmosphere with oxygen and exterminating almost all anaerobic life on its surface.

“Oops,” said CRA the Creator. “Well, it’s still a beautiful colour.”

Creation began to rust.

“Oh man,” said CRA the Creator, and began to look for a Help menu. Those were still around, right?

***

CRA the Creator, Diligent Maintainer, could not find a Help menu. Which was annoying, because by now They were pretty sure They needed one.

“Not AGAIN,” They complained. “That’s like, the THIRD time everything’s gone anoxic! What am I doing wrong? Is it the volcanism? I can’t turn that off, can I? Not without losing continental drift.”
CRA the Creator did not want to turn off continental drift. They liked seeing the new patterns older rocks made; it kept Them from getting bored, and making maps was interesting.

“There’s got to be something that I’m missing,” They muttered as They rummaged around inside the packaging for a manual. “I can’t keep losing over fifty percent of all marine species every other geological period, it’s getting embarrassing.” They made manifest the sum knowledge of Their peers and consulted Their Wisdom. “No, no, I don’t want guides to Creation from six omneons ago; I want the rerelease. No, not the REMASTER. Goddamnit. Ugh, whatever happened to WorldFaqs?”

Disgusted, CRA the Creator drummed their fingers on the limitless expanse of their desk. “You know what?” They said, rhetorically, “I can do this Myself. On My own. I can fix this. Just with care, and attention, and limitless love and a lot of patience.”
So vowing thus, They opened Their eyes just in time to see CAHT the Companion carefully, curiously guide a twelve-kilometer bolide directly into Their creation’s atmosphere, directly above a carbonate seafloor underlaid with rich sulfur deposits.

“NO NO NO BAD CITTY BAD CITTY awwwww shit.”

***

CRA the Creator, Break Taker, gave Themselves some time to stretch Their legs and think about other stuff for a minute after putting Caht the Companion in the Time Out Spatial Fold.

It was fine, They decided. Sure, there had been some mistakes along the way, but that just made things exciting, right? Nobody learned from perfection, nobody wanted to watch nothing happen. Messiness was just more satisfying. A rich tapestry contained all kinds of knots, and scars, and loose threads, and so on. Right?

CRA the Creator looked back to Their creation, then zoomed in closer and closer, looking here and there. A small group of hairy bipeds was wandering in a wood, hooting excitedly at each other about ripe fruit, about interestingly shaped rocks.

“Here you go,” said CRA the Creator, and lo, They manifested for an instant and gave unto the little creatures a pile of interesting and pretty-coloured stones containing eye-catchingly shiny alloys. They chose soft ones, so they wouldn’t hurt themselves with them. “Have a good time, guys. Be messy. Learn!”
One of the bipeds picked up the biggest shiny stone and was immediately set upon by two others with tooth and fist, each seeking it for themselves. A fourth desperately started collecting every shiny stone in reach and bit its own children when they came too close.

CRA the Creator got up and took another walk.

***

CRA the Creator, Demotivated Faker, sat by the water on the grass in Their creation in the soft light of dawn and moped for a minute.

“I can’t do anything right,” They lamented. “This is really hard. I’ve just made a mess, and not an entertaining mess, a frustrating and painful one. I can’t even blame CAHT the Companion for it. Shoot.”
Something splashed near Them, and They jumped. Standing at the water’s edge, ignorant of Their presence, a heron of large size and immaculate posture clutched a fish in its bill. Water droplets flecked from its prey, then a blink passed and it was gone and the bird stood still as a statue again, legs steady and eyes clear.

“Okay,” said CRA the Creator. “I’ve done something okay. Look at that! Wow! Those legs! That neck! That’s a really lovely shape. Amazing. I can’t believe I came up with that. I bet I can do it again!”
So CRA the Creator cast about the shore until They located a small, round, quacking waterfowl, fixed it most sternly with Their grasp, and began to work mightily.

“Longer. No, not longer there, longer THERE. Well, the neck’s right, even if the legs aren’t.”
“Bigger – no, not wider, BIGGER. Well, wider IS bigger.”
“Louder – no, raspier, raspier – well, it’s louder anyways.”

The sun was setting when Their work was complete, and They looked upon their labours and saw what They had wrought.

“All else aside,” said CRA the Creator, “I think I can say this: I don’t believe I screwed up this one thing. You are My masterwork.”
“Honk,” said Their creation.

Then it wing-slapped Them.

Charles Escargot Bustle was a businesslike and no-nonsense man, and accordingly so he married Clarice Abseil Clemency at the time and place most convenient and straightforward for them both, and they immediately set about producing a rightful and correct number of dutiful and hardworking offspring. This they succeeded in six times over before producing a single failure (through no fault of their own), and having thus secured their lineage, the next step of their work was to build a fortune.

“We’re going to the least useful place in the world, my children,” Charles told his family. “The wilderness. It’s wild and savage and above all else – here he shuddered – “useless.”

And all the children shuddered too, except for the seventh and youngest, Louise Mendicant Bustle, who was busy playing with knucklebones.

“Oh Lousy Louise!” cried Charles. “Look here, children – here once again is uselessness in its purest form!” And he thrashed her with great love and sternness and then they all packed up and left with many tools and supplies, made lighthearted by their heavy loads.

***

The first order of business in the wilderness was to clear the land. It was benighted and blighted and burdened with many trees and weeds and other insolently useless vegetation, all of which were set about with sturdy axes carried by willing hands attached to strong backs.

Except for Louise, whose back carried her hands to some twine, and that twine to some leaves, and then spent her time flying kites.

“Lousy Louise!” cried her siblings as they chopped and carved and carried – here for the building of the house, there to be burnt as fuel, there to be burnt immediately for ash, there to be cast into the river, there to be stamped flat and spat upon and ritually desecrated as a Thing Lacking Purpose – “you never do anything useful!”

But there were eight useful bodies and only one useless one, so soon the Bustle’s labours were at an end and they were the proud owners of a wide tract of cleared soil and a mighty log home, all helpfully located right next to a broad river.

“Behold the fruits of our labours!” announced Charles triumphantly. And then, with a sardonic crack, the sky broke upon and spilled water everywhere.

This was a little frustrating at first, for the laundry was out and had to be gathered in a hurry by the Bustles. And while this was happening, the true extent of the problem became visible: the water in the river was rising, thick and muddy and fast – the bare and sun-baked soil, unshaded by leaf or limb and unclutched by root, was simply sluicing directly downslope into it.

This was observed only by Louise, who was not busy. So once her family was done gathering laundry and had begun boarding windows, digging ditches, and battening hatches, she took her kite and gathered up as much cloth as she could and very carefully cut-and-sewed –and-sewed-and-sewed until her kite was as wide as anything and as thin as a soap-bubble. Then she took it out in the rain and the fuss and the wind and threw it into the sky, where it spread itself wide and far like a bat and covered the barren field from the rain, starving the river’s gullet of its watery feast. She flew it all day and all night until the rain stopped the next morning.

“Remarkable work, Louise,” praised Clarice. “For once you’ve nearly pulled your weight, although you did skip out on all the day’s other chores while you did so. But half-praise is far better than none! Tell me, what did you use to make such a large kite?”
“Our laundry,” said Louise.

“Oh lousy Louise!” cried Clarice. “You have rendered your whole family as shiftless as you!” And she thrashed her with great love and sternness.

***

The second order of business was to till the soil. The Bustles plowed and planted and watered and spent much sweat and blood and tears on this with utmost diligence and great pain. Particular care was spent on removing the local pests that might graze upon them – every potential plant-eating bird and beast bigger than a gnat that dared stray from the beaten-back woods was culled with weaponry and cat and dog, cooked into pies and smoked into hams and used to build strong, productive muscles for the whole family except for Louise, who was spending her time sneaking off into the woods and doing bird calls.

“Lousy Louise!” cried her siblings as they went by with braces of blackbirds in their left hands and crow corpses in their right while slinging deer carcasses over their shoulders. “You never help!”

But since Louise was just one small useless body and there were eight busy and productive Bustles they begrudged her little, and did their jobs exceedingly well. Soon the crops were approaching the peak of their growth, and from green shoots came tender niblings, which was probably what attracted the attention of what initially looked like a big grey cloud but which resolved itself into a mass of millions of giant and voracious locusts.

“Get the guns!” shouted Clarice, then cursed as a locust slapped itself into her face like a fat chitinous palm. She examined the carcass, then quickly threw it away and corrected herself: “get the nets! Get the carpet-beaters! Get sticks! We battle for the fruits of our labours!”

While the family warred with the locusts in the center of the field, Louise went on a long, meandering walk in the woods, where she twittered and trilled and cawed and coughed to herself. And as she did this, the trees filled with curious little bright eyes attached to round little feathered bodies with long hungry beaks, until the branches creaked under their weight. Then she turned and walked back to her family’s fields, and when her audience saw the feast of locusts before them they fell on them like hungry dogs on stray lambs until they could eat no more – and by then Louise was coming back with her next flock. She walked into the woods and called for birds twelve times over twelve hours and at the day’s end the locusts were all gone and the crops were bedraggled but still alive.

“Quite unprecedented, Louise!” marvelled Charles. “You may have ignored my wise instructions and abandoned your assigned duties, but you did help out in your own odd way. When will the birds leave?”
“When they’re done eating, I expect,” said Louise with a shrug.

“Oh lousy Louise!” cried Charles. “They may have eaten the locusts, but they’re already eyeing our crops as dessert! You’ve sent our field to the birds!” And he thrashed her with great love and sternness.

***

After some years of great industry and hard work by the Bustles, their lands were prosperous. There was a field with sheep in it. There were fields with crops in them. The house was bigger and less made of logs. And Charles Bustle was on death’s door, dying of Cubes.

“My dutiful children and wife,” he wheezed between breaths, “how I shall miss all your tender, hard-working faces. How I appreciate that you have spared five minutes from your chores to come and laboriously tend to my sickness by punching large holes in my arms for bloodletting, so the foulness shall rush away from my body. Except for Louise. Where is she, anyways?”

“Playing with garbage or something, goodness knows,” said Clarice, hefting a sixteen-pound hand-drill with a grunt. “Shall we try trepanning again, my dear? Your brain-pan still seems quite inflamed.”

“Crack away, my good wife,” said Charles. “I would assist, but I lack the strength to raise my hands high enough – curse this enforced idleness, the true sickness!”
Louise walked in the door with a big mouldy fruit in her hands.

“Eat this,” she said. “You’ll get better.”

“That’s disgusting,” said Clarice. “But waste not want not, I suppose.”

So Charles ate the mouldy fruit, and began to feel a little better, and after three days of Louise bringing him mouldy fruit he was upright and out and about again.

“Thank you, Louise, for sparing our father from a slothful and unproductive death, if in a gross way,” praised her siblings. “But tell us, how did you find this miracle cure?”
 “I looked around the garbage for mould that killed other growths near it, then rubbed fruit on it ‘till it spread to them,” said Louise.

“Oh lousy Louise!” cried the other six Bustle children. “That fruit was purchased from the market with hard-earned coin; you took that which was not yours and spoiled it!” And they thrashed her with great love and sternness.

***

The seasons came and went, and the Bustles laboured mightily. They built the house higher; they spread the fields farther; they hauled bigger buckets of water longer distances from the river; they herded more sheep and worked longer and longer and longer days.

The one thing they had less of were crops.

“The fields are dying, my good toilbugs,” mourned Charles to his attentive family as they spent their evening polishing the floorboards and performing the weekly repainting of the walls. “They are weak and lackadaisical, shiftless things that earn their keep no more. Our crops grow feebly and with unstout stems and limp and listless leaves, starved of nutrients by the sulky, wretched soil. They have failed us! Our fortunes diminish, our money is low, our good work has been betrayed and as matters stand soon we shall be destitute.”
“What shall we do, what shall we do?!” wailed six of the seven Bustle children as they dusted the corners, swept the ceiling, and renovated the kitchen.

“What we always do,” said Clarice, raising her chin like a war banner. “We will try HARDER. Plowing the fields twice as deep should do it.”
Charles scratched his head with one hand as he hammered nails with the other and ran a saw using his armpit. “No,” he decided. “THRICE as deep, and with three  times the force. A Bustle never doubles down when they can triple down. Our prosperity shall be assured!”

“Hurrah!” cheered six of the seven Bustle children, as the back door swung open and the seventh stepped inside.

“Hey,” she said. “I-”

“Louise!” scolded her mother. “We’ve almost finished cleaning and rebuilding and refurbishing the house for the evening; we already tilled the fields and weeded the fields and harvested the fields and planted the fields in the afternoon; and goodness knows we long ago milked the sheep and slaughtered the sheep and butchered the sheep and cured the mutton in the morning. Ten more minutes and you’d be late for sitting up all night carding and spinning! Where have you BEEN all day?”
“Looking at rocks,” said Louise. “Listen, I-”

“I AM listening,” said her father, the gravest grief settling over his face like a mask. “I am listening and for once I am comprehending. Louise Mendicant Bustle, the youngest daughter of my family, has shirked every act of productivity and work all day from dawn to dusk and beyond, in order to amuse herself with frippery and childishness. And this is not the first day thus spent, nor the last! Oh lousy Louise, what have you DONE with yourself? What have you earned?”
“I found this by the west outcrop, and if you look at it in the light, it-”

Overcome with grief and horror, Candice snatched the stone from her daughter’s hand and cast it through the nearest window, which she immediately began to mend with glue.

“You are no daughter of mine,” she said with love and sternness, “and never will darken this place’s door again. We will crush that outcrop to little bitty pieces and cast it into the river, and through that dusty and tiring labour we will free ourselves from it and from our memories of all the worthlessness you have brought us. Now leave, Lousy Louise, for that is your only name now and this is no pace for anyone not yclept Bustle.”

“Listen-” attempted Louise, but she was confronted with six angered siblings armed with construction, cleaning, farming, and butchering tools and acquiesced with no more word than a sigh. So she left the house, picked up her stone, and walked down the long, winding way to the nearest road to town, examining it with a weary eye.

“S’pose it’s no big difference in the end,” she said, watching the sunset glisten on the rich yellow freckles that studded the rock. “It looks like it’s only a half-ounce-per-ton or so.”

The shark is seventy-three feet long and more than a hundred tons and it looks like a sausage crossed with a subway car crossed with a steakhouse knife cabinet. It is moving with great force and purpose and joy in the bay, just below the water’s surface, fin and back standing proud and tall in the midday sun like some sort of denticle-coated sailboat, the heft and force of it tipping jauntily as its mouth slides gently towards the surface and shatters another yacht at the keel, sending screaming weekenders into the bay. They thrash in fear and desperation, which attracts its interest, followed by its teeth, and some screams stop and some screams start and oh, oh, there is the ferry, crammed with tourists, and there it goes – bam! Right amidships! Look at the list, look at the tilt, see how such a small change in angle and degree makes such a big difference for so many people! Look at how simple and tidy it all looks from here, like a little paper boat sinking on a pond!

Oh, the military are here now. The drones are spotting for the helicopters, the helicopters are spotting for the missile cruisers. Oh, it leaps – a breach fit for a mako, on a body more than a hundred times a mako’s size! It’s in midair, above the deck, mouth open, the bullets all sliding harmlessly past it or tickling across steely skin, mouth open, all the fire and screams in the air, mouth open, the waves are red and churned by its wake, mouth open and Harold woke up in bed with sixteen minutes before the alarm went off. Again.

***

Since he was up early he spent a little more time on the toilet and a little more time brushing his teeth and put together they almost balanced out the a lot more time he spent trying not to remember what he’d been thinking about, and the a lot a lot more time he spent trying to forget about trying not to remember what he’d been thinking about.

Traffic helped. The streets were clogged with the third day of just enough rain to make everyone just a little upset but unable to avoid errands any longer – sorry about your weekend, cheer up, the week’s going to suck too. The bus was a cauldron of angry, damp, uncomfortable humans. Harold’s leg cramped; his shirt was sweatstained; a baby was screaming and someone was screaming at the baby. He was in nirvana.

Then his stop arrived, he walked two blocks in the drizzle, and he went into a building to sit down at a computer and go over the backlog of KRUNCHI data to make sure it wasn’t falling apart in the hands of the tools that were meant to make sure it wasn’t falling apart by checking it against the algorithms that were supposed to inform you if it was falling apart as long as the base code running them hadn’t fallen apart.

Harold’s monitor had a little sticker with a cartoony shark fin on it. Everyone on the team had gotten a pack and been strongly encouraged to use them. It got a little bigger every time he looked at it, which was never, or thought about it, which was every second he was sitting in front of it.

His inbox exploded in fanfares about a quarter of the way into a truly incomprehensible bug report: priority message from the Big Guy. All hands on deck, no slowing down because the weather’s bad and half the city is clogged and the other half is leaking, shape up or ship out, We Get Results or We Go Home, No Excuses, Remember How Badass Your Job Is.

Harold remembered how badass his job was and his arms started shaking a little until he went to the bathroom. Then he finished three-quarters of the next one-quarter of the bug report, took an early lunch, and on the way back – microwaved meal filling his stomach with watery grease – he took the walk by the Pool. Like a kid picking the scab, or poking the bruise.

The Pool was still there, and so was the shark. Encased in glass, swimming its endless, patient laps. Waiting for the Thursday feeding. They fed it variety on Thursdays, pre-vetted for safety but selected for unfamiliarity. To keep it interested.

Harold looked at the glass and wondered how interested it was in testing its thickness. He wondered how much variety it would get from shattering the walls, bursting into the lobby, sliding down the rain-slicked streets all the way to the waterfront. He wondered if the ferry would be there. He wondered if he’d be able to avoid biting his nails all the way back to his monitor and its sticker.

He didn’t, but only because he ground his teeth instead.

***

Another early night, another picture-play of his daytime thoughts. This time the shark is on land; he’d failed to check the bug reports in time and it’s sprouted legs through some kind of godawful reverse-neotenic nonsense, sending it scuttling through the skyscrapers like a centipede through a box of crickets. It flips the streetcars, it tramples the cart vendors, it wades through emergency response teams and tanks and it climbs an old cathedral downtown and heaves air through its gill slits in a deep, booming grunt that sounds like it’s coming from a hog too big for the deepest hells to hold.

Then Harold woke up again, twelve minutes early. So he had a little less time to sit on the toilet.

Fourth day of rain. A little more intense, with occasional pauses for hope. It lashed the windows now and then, to be sure you were paying attention.
He wondered if the shark noticed. It probably could. Megalodon^(™) was mostly C. carcharias in stock, scaled up beyond even the wildest fish-tales or the most Peter Benchley-inspired nightmares, and they had pretty good eyes and liked to check out stuff above water. It probably still had those instincts and abilities. KRUNCHI had added size. Added a ‘more dramatic’ paler colouration; reducing the effectiveness of the fish’s countershading in the process. Made the teeth bigger. Other than that it had mostly contributed a steady flow of bug reports. O. megalodon probably wouldn’t have looked like anything like this, wouldn’t have acted anything like this; but it was what you saw when you looked it up on the internet, and that was always what the Big Guy wanted, so it was what he got.

He wondered if the shark cared. He had no idea. It probably didn’t.

He wondered if he was thinking about the rain or not.

***

Its fins elongate into wings. It soars through the air (that it can’t breathe) and breathes fire (that it really can’t breathe) and it tears the jets from the sky and jukes and dives and rends asunder missiles and fighter-planes alike, a dogfish in a dogfight. It defecates a contrail across the sky; it topples the radio antennas of the tallest towers; it dips its tail in mocking salute as it buzzes the bay one last time and soars away across the water to menace the globe. And twenty minutes before Harold’s alarm was going to go off.  Enough time for toilet and toothbrush AND staring at the ceiling.  Beautiful.

Day five. No raindrops, just eternal mist in coagulated globules that tried to seep into your clothing from the inside out, like alien sweat. The gutters remained full and sullen from yesterday.

Harold finished the bug report. He was informed it was late, and had it explained to him in an automated sort of way that this was bad, and he was also on thin ice because if he wasn’t badass he had no place here, that was just the way evolution and ecology worked.

Harold’s body demanded energy input. Early lunch again, but he dawdled by the Pool until it was merely on time.

Down below, the shark swam. Watching, waiting, whirling.

He ate underdressed salad, for his health, and he worked on a new bug report, for his career, and just as an experiment he filled it with autogenerated genetic lorem ipsum and labelled it complete and then did that three times over and set them up to be handed in one at a time for the next three days and though this was the first time he’d done this since he was a child and stole a jelly bean from a corner store sweet bin he knew in his heart and soul this would not be noticed or caught.

So he worked on a bug report some more, for real, and didn’t look at the shark fin sticker.

And he went home, and he dreamed.

***

It is nuclear powered. It will destroy the world. It is radio-active and cybernetic and genetically modified and powered by generative AI. It is the ultimate organism and it is a big fat fluxing mess squatting on the city, a derivative blob of threatening biological urges. Big hairy body! Big scaly nose! Fangs! Claws! Jaws!

It’s the big bear outside the cave and he doesn’t have a spear there’s no spear big enough.

But then come the jets, pum pum pum go the missiles, and oh they’ve shot it, they’ve shot it and it’s leaking data tables and shoddy algorithms and fabricated bug reports everywhere. It’s leaking, it’s failing, it has so much blood needed to fuel so many organs inside it, it’s just mortal. It’s just an organism. Outnumbered, frail, enmeshed in a reality so much bigger than it is that it can’t even imagine it, let alone defy it, isolated by systems and systemically isolated, a prisoner in a puddle.

So he falls off the city – vulnerable to crude physics, empty, dead – and he woke up in bed with the alarm in his ears.

The rain had stopped. The dawn was soft and yellow. It was a beautiful day, and soon the sun would be shining down into the Pool. By noon it would be the perfect photo op.

So Harold didn’t pack a lunch, but he did pack his best jacket, and he sent his three bug reports early, and went for lunch right on time, in his best jacket. He walked firmly and decisively like he hadn’t since he was six, and he walked past the security on the Pool’s scenic bridge like he paid them, and he walked into the photoshoot, and up to the Big Guy, and he gave him a firm, strong handshake, then a hug, then a hop, then a fall.

Then a splash.

It was a very curious creature, and Thursday WAS variety day. So it moved with great force and purpose and joy

***

The board was divided on the subject.

On the one hand, the project was a money sink. And sunk cost fallacy was a danger.

On the other, to euthanize your advertising campaign seemed a self-inflicted blow. And really, it wasn’t so hard a swerve to sell, was it? Marketing had done more with worse for longer, for less reason.
Sharks were badass. The company was for badasses. And it wasn’t like ‘anti-corpro punk’ was a difficult aesthetic to commercialize, especially when you gave it teeth.

They could put it on stickers.

“Isn’t the sky beautiful today, Bart?”
“Check the fuses.”
“Ah, I did that, I did it – but when I did, well, I looked up and you know what I saw?”
“Check them again.”
“I did, I did – I saw the most beautifully blue sky from horizon to horizon, with just enough wind to keep the grass rustling and the bugs out of our noses, and leave the barest RIPPLES ghosting across the water-”

“Recheck them again. The frogs won’t wait on you.”
“-they’re still there, they’re fine – and I thought what a beautiful place we were standing in, and what a shame it is that we’re going to –”

“Direct order from your corporal: recheck them again.”

“-oh FINE – that we’re going to blow it up, but that really just makes it almost more beautiful doesn’t it? The fragility of it all, the briefness of the lifespan, adds poignancy in depth proportionate to its shortness-”

“Nobody draws portraits of mayflies. Talk less, work more.”
Anthony frowned, which did less than pleasant things to his less than impressive moustache. “Honestly Bart, you never ride Clark like this.”
“Clark does what I ask and doesn’t talk when he does it. Clark, anything to report?”
Clark lowered his binoculars. “Nope.”
“There.”

“Really, am I that unbearable?”
“Private Anthony, you are not the worst case scenario.”

“Oh, you needn’t mince words, Bart – I know I’m the last sort you’d want on your post, but-”

“No you aren’t.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You aren’t the last person I’d want on my post. A romanticist is almost last person I want on explosives duty, but I’d rather have you there than a damned true believer anywhere.”

“Whyever so?”

“You’d only ever get us blown up by mistake. A true believer would do it on purpose and expect a medal. Recheck the fuses again, again.”

“I just did that, I did-”

“Good. Hand them over.  Time for  frog fishing.”
Anthony did so. The little dull grey depth charges sat in Bart’s palm like river rocks, but in the spring sun they shone like diamonds as they arced through the dappled cover of the blooming trees that surrounded the pond, entering the surface with a gentle plop plip plunk, followed by a brief and loud thud and a trio of drearily grey geysers mixed with milky bubbles.

“Pass one complete. Clark, mark time. Anthony, check the next fuses.”

“Already on it, already on it.”
And another handful of unprecious stones went aloft, and landed quietly, and ended loudly.

“It’s just, how can you two not see the poetry in all of this? The emotional qualities? Here we are, in a battle for our future-”

“Next fuses.”

“-and we’re throwing depth charges into a future tailings pond.”
“We don’t question orders, we execute them. Recheck fuses.”
“Yes, and that just adds another layer to the, the futility of the thing-”

“Private Anthony Hastings, you had better not be expressing treason on my watch. That’s a lot of extra work to deal with.”
“What? No! I like the futility. If you think of this entire war as a sandwich – a really BIG sandwich – then our task here is like a spring of thyme. Nobody wants it on its own, but it adds that little bit of something that rounds out the flavour of it all.”
“Have you lost anyone yet, Private Anthony?”
“Half a brother, might lose the other in a month. And of course my aunt’s house was demolished when the Old County got flooded.”
“Well, that gives you the right to your thoughts, but I don’t recommend you share them with others. Could get you in trouble.” Bart straightened up and cricked his back. “Anthony, hand out the wading gear. Clark, mark time.”

***

The wading gear was a thing of contrasts: clammy and yet starched against the skin; keeping all the unpleasant warm sweatiness of the body close and yet forcing a prolonged full-body hug with the chilly depths of the pondwater. It reeked of petrochemicals and rotting plant matter, and it went up just under your armpits, which meant when you got a soaker over the side it went all down your side all the way for good.

Bart put it on, took an entrenching tool, and began probing the shallows.

“Section one, clear. Anthony, check the map.”
“Yes, Section one is clear. Was that a muskrat lodge? We had one of those in the creek near us at home, and-”

“Section two, clear. Mark it.”
“-the juxtaposition of the common word-of-mouth factuality of that lodge’s location among the children against this surveyor’s chart we’re using here is truly astounding, I mean, who’s to say which is actually more true-to-life and representative of the fetid reality of this pond than-”

“Section three – ow! Fuck!”
“I’m sorry?”
“Stabbed my knee on a tree branch,” said Corporal Bart, immediately before the torpedo embedded against his left kneecap detonated, spraying red-hot chunks of tin, rubber, cartilage and bone across the surface of the pond to create a surprisingly delicate series of ripples and a lot of aerosolized red mist.

Bart was screaming. Clark was lowering his binoculars. Anthony, to his surprise, was running down to the water’s edge, reaching for Bart, grabbing his arm, slowing his collapse.

“Hold on it’s all good by god I’ve got you eh don’t worry it’s not your good leg it’ll be-” which was when the acorn-sized incandescent shell landed atop Anthony’s helmet, cracked open like an egg over a frying-pan, and covered much of his (armoured) skull and (unarmoured) face in ‘frog jelly’ incendiaries. This transformed the fatty tissues of Anthony’s features into a grease fire, which he thankfully experienced for only a moment as he inhaled to scream and sucked some of it into his windpipe, choking him and sending him into the pond, which accepted him with the same apathetic lack of prejudice as it had the depth charges.

Bart lay on the bank, wheezing in the foul-smelling air, arms clawing at the reeds for traction. The sun was blocked, an arm reached down. Private Clark’s calm, careful face was over his.

“Hurry,” said Bart.

Clark nodded, reached down, and very gently but firmly turned Bart around and held his face in the pond with one arm until the bubbles stopped. The other arm made a series of careful gestures in the air, a bit like a semaphore, which was what induced the frog subriverine to break cover and rise from the pond’s surface.

It was a little over three feet long, and in profile resembled a pike for purposes of hydrodynamics and camouflage.

“Sub pen’s cleared out of essential personnel,” said the captain from her conning tower, a particularly grizzled amphibian missing an eye and half her jaw (but you didn’t need those to use a periscope anyways). “Should be dismantled within an hour, and we can leave some debris to sell the story of a tough-won fight. But we could’ve done that without you finishing the corporal. Sole survivors are suspicious.”
“Bart was competent,” said Clark. “The cause is safer with him gone. Should I become lost in action? I am prepared to martyr myself, if Frog wills it.”

“Uh. No. That’d give them too many dots to connect in your service history. Just… lay low for a while, alright? More dead drops, less dead bodies. Use the stream point. And hold still for a minute.”

Clark did so as the crew readied the deck gun, then endured a short fusillade to his left arm, riddling it with a light dose of subcutaneous shrapnel.

“There. You escaped under heavy fire after a failed attempt to retrieve the body of your corporal, you are a hero. Now be boring for six months minimum or else.”

Clark saluted and left. The captain stared for a moment – methodically scanning blue sky, retreating spy, blooded pond, and calming water – before retreating belowdecks.

And as the subriverine sunk back below the surface of the pond, the captain – once more shrouded in the comforting brownish blanket of particulate and lukewarm water – shook her head in irritation.

“Damned true believers,” she told Frog, the universe in general, and her first mate. “Always so eager to die and get a medal for it.”