jamieproctor.ca

Look, there’s just one thing I want you to know, okay? It’s all your fault.
“Sure, you can have the place,” you said.
“No really, it’s fine,” you said.
“For the weekend? Absolutely,” you said.
And then you said it: “just clean out all my stuff first, okay?”
“It’ll just get in the way.”
You rotten sonuvabitch.

So we got our party supplies and our drinks and our friends and our drinks and our drinks, and we all went out there. Because we trusted you.
And then we opened the door, and were face to face with stuff. All your stuff.
“Just clean out all my stuff first, okay?”
Well yeah. There was no room in there otherwise, was there?

Jenny, she figured it’d be no big deal. We’d get some bags, get some bent backs, get your stuff in the bags. Garbage bags’d do fine, for that stuff.
Well, the bags got filled, the backs got bent, but when we’d emptied out the whole fifty-bag box, guess what we were still stuck with? More stuff.
So, more bags. There was a store right down the corner. Got a couple of boxes.
So, more stuff. ‘Nuff said.
So, square one. Again. With more stuff.

Where’d you get all this stuff, anyways? You never struck me as that much of a packrat. But fuck me, I’ve seen hoarders with less of it. I’ve seen millionaires with less of it. So much damned stuff.
Steve just moved a few days ago, still had time left on the truck. It was a big truck, too. Steve also has stuff, you see.
He pulled it up, said we could fill it up. Just until the party was over.
So we filled it up and up and up and up ‘till the door couldn’t close. With stuff.
Now how’d you guess that wasn’t good enough, huh?

Well, Steve was real mad after the truck got full up, and we had to take out some of the party supplies and drinks and calm him down, him and Joey. So while we were doing that, Joey said that what we should do is just shovel it all out, worry about the cleanup later. And hey, we’ve all had worse ideas while we’re drunk, right? Right.
So we took the snowshovels from your garage, and we started shovelling your stuff. Out the windows, out the doors, THROUGH the window in one case…
(Steve said it was an accident, and we don’t believe him, and neither should you).
Didn’t matter. Too much damned stuff. Ankle-deep and sometimes it looked like it was rising.

We were getting desperate. Well, Bob got more than desperate. All that stuff. He said hey, your house has a metal frame, right? And stuff burns damp, right? And we could just soak down the walls first, right? And you had fire insurance, right?
So, right?
Stuff don’t burn damp.
Stuff barely burns at all.
I swear to you that we dumped every bottle of charcoal lighter fluid, oil, machine oil, and olive oil we could find in the house and in our cars all over that stuff. We went through sixteen books of matches, four lighters, and your little candle-lighter.
Stuff smouldered. And it smelt like a horse’s armpit, if that armpit were in an elephant’s asshole. The smoke could be seen for miles, but if you wanted to catch wind of a spark, you’d need a microscope.

Well, after we’d finished coughing
-and wheezing-
-and stomping-
-and smothering-
-one of us must’ve said “hey, let’s try it going the other way, and that’s why we turned on all your faucets and showers and flooded your toilets and ran your hoses.
Because if you can’t fight stuff with fire, water’s worth a try. Right?
Right!
Wrong.
The stuff thickened like concrete. A lot of it had congealed by now, and separating stuff A from stuff B was going from hard to impossible. There were no stuffs now. Only Stuff.

Steve had gone missing in the fog, I guess. I guess he did.
I mean, we didn’t notice him going missing. But then he came back in a bulldozer, so I guess he went SOMEWHERE.
Drove that thing in full throttle, foaming at the mouth. I didn’t hear a word he said, but I suspect if I’d had it would’ve driven my ears black and blue.
He hit the stuff. The stuff hit back.
That big old yellow bulldozer that looked like a child’s my-first-Tonka rumbled, roared, shrieked, and started smoking from every jowl.
We pulled old Steve out and started trying to back it up. That’s when we realized there was more to it all than smoke.
It burned a lot better than the stuff did.

Electrical fires, slow-burning fires, all that loose damp and muck from the stuff….it was one helluva brew, let me tell you that.
Especially since Karen dropped some of our party supplies in there by mistake.
We all got a little distracted for a while. And then the cops showed up, went in without gas masks, and well, they got a little distracted too.
And once we’d woken up, the stuff was set.
Dead set.
In every doorframe.
You ever try to claw through taffy with your fingernails?
Well, it’s not as bad as stuff.

The fire department got us out. Blunted six axes on the stuff and gave three firefighters chronic back pain for a week.
But the good news was there too. You know those chemicals they use as fire retardants in fire extinguishers? That stuff?
Turns out it disagrees with your stuff. It disagreed with it all the ways down the drain.
Then the fumes disagreed with everyone else all at once. Lord-a-mercy that thing did not sublimate cleanly.

So.
We’ve cleaned out your stuff.
We didn’t even get the weekend.
And we’ve all got damaged lung tissue.
And the fire department, the police department, and the department of health and safety are all mad at us.
So that’s why you’re going to step the hell up and fork over the cash for fifty-nine paintjobs on the cruiser force and firetrucks. And quit trying to pass the blame here. If you’d had more self-control when it came to stuff, none of this would’ve been an issue.

7/12: The meat shipment arrived two hours late. Demanded recompense, was denied. A full half of the beef provided was clearly aged past fit consumption, stored at inadequate temperature, filled with disturbing quantity of tendons (possibly not even from cow?). Demanded recompense, was permitted to return half of it now, half next week, must store excess in the rear freezer.
Name of driver: William Henderson. Will report him unfavourably; customer service is a priority too often disregarded.
P. Morgan asked for raise again, was denied. Gets free coffee, what more does the leech want? Should be more like T. Gordon; man’s worked here since ’79 and not a peep of it from him. Minimum wage and minimum complaining keep a body pure, steadfast, and noble.

7/13: Milk arrived five minutes late. Demanded recompense, was denied, threatened consequences, was permitted refund. Name of driver: mumbled too quickly to hear, left before clarification could be demanded. Gutless.
P. Morgan asked for raise again, told him if he was so greedy he could take home some of our unfit ‘beef’. P. Morgan complained of this. Loafer.

7/14: Bread arrived on time. Good. Heavy traffic this weekend, employees will have to volunteer for unpaid overtime. Trouble foreseen from P. Morgan, E. Cheswick, S. Nancy, the usual stockroom box-haulers and supply-shovers. Doubtlessly union sympathizers the lot of them.
P. Morgan uncommonly shiftless today, requested time off for sick leave, whined of beef being hard on delicate stomach. Transparent ruse, ordered him back to work.

7/15: Produce truck arrived six hours late and with half our load missing without explanation. Demanded recompense, was denied, demanded name of driver, was referred to “Hubert Jassol,” demanded real name of driver, was denied, demanded name of supervisor, was flipped off. Altogether unsatisfactory, a downright shame. Would change produce supplier if their prices weren’t competitive, will settle for complaining of the matter to police.
P. Morgan has absented himself from work today without even phoning in. Astounding nerve and gall. His job is forfeit, as is reputation, if that even existed.

Addendum: P. Morgan did not sign out last night. Drunk on duty? Burglarized backroom and left through a window? Possibilities numerous, outcomes revolting.

7/16: Monday, the slow day. Just E. Cheswick and T. Gordon plus myself as supervisor. E. Cheswick came to me three times complaining of rats in the backroom. Ordered more traps put down.
P. Morgan does not answer his phone.
Addendum: While placing traps and otherwise doing E. Cheswick’s job for him, T. Gordon found decapitated, gutted rat. A stray cat has taken up residence, providence be praised. Money saved on traps used to purchase a donut for myself.

7/17: S. Nancy whines incessantly of strange noises in the stockroom shelves. Informed him of our feline guardian, admonished him for timid and small-hearted nature, mocked him for attempting to explain self as having marathoned horror films previous night, chortled at his slothful childishness being the source of his workplace misfortunes. Offered to have T. Gordon do the rest of his job for him, as if he didn’t already.
A good day.
Addendum: P. Morgan’s phone is no longer in service.

7/18: T. Gordon is now the only staff member willing to enter the stockroom alone – others travel in pairs, even to move so much as a box of coffee filters. Shameful degenerates, hallucinatory nitwits. Still they waffle of strange noises. S. Nancy claims he heard breathing. S. Nancy is so fat he hyperventilates every three steps without rest. S. Nancy has had his pay docked for the evening.
P. Morgan has still not tendered his resignation, and his landlady denies having seen him or heard news of his rent. Commiserated with her on the state of the young and lazy thugs that make up this country’s next generation for three hours. Got her number.
Addendum: Woke up four times overnight in my office. A bad donut? Too much coffee? New Coke fridge too noisy? Hard to say, but sleep is bafflingly elusive tonight.

7/19: Awoke, opened office door, found a trail of what appeared to be bloodied footprints strewn about its threshold, well-crusted and old.
A shoddy prank. I would suspect P. Morgan of it were he not absent, S. Nancy is too timid and E. Cheswick too lazy. T. Gordon? An impossibility.
Shoplifting has gone up. Half our meat aisle is depleted, and our sales do not match. May yet need that spoiled meat from the back.
Addendum: On closer inspection, some of them were handprints.

7/20: Friday. A busy time. We must stock up, regardless of panic and prankage. The staff refuse to enter the backroom at all now, all save T. Gordon. May they one day know one-tenth the courage and steadfastedness of an 83-year-old blind, deaf near-mute. Nothing but some red paint and their livers turn to lilies
The spoiled meat is gone, and the freezer left wide and gaping. P. Morgan, curse him! Not only did he desert us, he stole company property! I will review our cameras so the police will take him to task.

Addendum: Our backroom cameras have been defaced with more red paint for some days. All records useless.

7/21: Saturday night and T. Gordon has gone missing. Even the most faithful desert me! T. Gordon may have injured himself somehow. E. Cheswick and S. Nancy will search for him, or so help me I will peel their hides and staple them to the bulletin board.
Update: No sign of T. Gordon.
Update II: The building is closed, and not only is there no sign of T. Gordon, E. Cheswick, the worthless lout, appears to have crept off from work without leave. The impertinence of the youth of today is eternal. A good man is missing, and they think only of their own inconvenience! Without T. Gordon, how will the Sunday stocking be undertaken!?

7/22: E. Cheswick’s roommate came looking for him. Told the filthy pothead off, I will not allow such smells in my store. The wad of spittle was a fair trade against five more minutes of his odious presence.
Oh T. Gordon! Why leave me alone in this hour? S. Nancy refuses to leave the front desk at the day and flees openly from the prospect of a night shift, and I can spare only so much time from supervision! Without you, Holbert & Holbert Grocers is less than it was. Without you, the coffee is without taste. Without you, sweeping is a chore once more.
Addendum: Have shut up my office door with a padlock. For caution’s sake. Vandals cannot prank their mischiefs upon the contents of my files! Will sleep lightly tonight, as a cat, in wait for intruders.

7/23?: Believe it is early morning. Woke to use washroom, used doorknob without thinking, found padlock missing and door already slightly ajar. Difficult to tell due to (apparent) power failure, but stickiness on floor (and small bump – inspection reveals it as T. Gordon’s glasses? How?) suggests further vandalism has taken place.
Update: Cannot exit through front door. Padlock has been affixed to it and bashed so severely that key will not enter it. Lack of power prohibits phone line (would that I had a youth’s cellphone, curse it) but 7/11 across the way still shows lights. Perhaps the fusebox is damaged?

Update II: Fusebox has been torn from the wall and violently shredded. Crowbar maybe?

Update III: Stockroom full of rats by sound of it. Unhygienic. Will remain in power closet for now. Hantavirus would not be pleasant, nor rabies.

Update IV: Door is being scrabbled at. P. Morgan! It must be! Fool cannot possibly know my presence, must be coming back to commit further vandalism! Pocket-flashlight is ready, will catch him in the act w/red paint and all. Look on his face will b

It was an ill wind that came ‘round the cape that evening, and it lasted for close enough to a week. The waves grew teeth, the air was a bludgeon, and the rain shot down fair to stab anyone that poked their nose out of doors.
But the fish needed catching, so we all went out in the mornings anyways, or what might have been mornings under the clouds and above the whitecaps. And most of us came back on time every night. As our grandparents did, and theirs before them. Because doing things the way they must be done, that comes before safety. And that means coming back with fish.
One day, one of us came back with something extra, something more than fat greybacks and bulging nets. “Found it in a bucket,” they said. “A bucket, just bobbing in the waves.”
The bucket was black and rusted and made from who knew what, and it went to the trash heaps.
(anything placed in it slicked with oily who-knew-what. no-one dared taste food cooked in it)
The child was pale and plump, and he went to a willing couple who had milk to spare.
We named him Walter, and we called him Walt. And that was well and good enough to let him grow up properly and kindly, if not straight and tall. Stout and stubby-fingered, that was our Walt, always short of breath and ready to lend an extra hand. Not so much strength in him as stubbornness, as vast a supply of that as you could find in any mule.
He was such a small little thing, Walter Newman was. Four inches behind the other children, always scrambling to keep up, always with a bulgy belly and sunken dark eyes. With a smile ready though, held in place behind his teeth. Always ready, just waiting for the right moment to burst out from that round face. If you worked for it, he’d reward you just so. Just so.

When Walter was a small boy, but big enough to run, he wanted on the boats.
That was normal, that was fair enough. Little boys want to be their fathers and their big brothers. We all were little once, we all had grand dreams too big for our hands.
Walter reached too hard and too fast, but his grip served him well. Old Tim Hickory was eight hours offshore and seventeen fathoms deep when he heard the sneezing from underneath the old sou’wester he kept in his cabin. Pulled Walter out by the scuff of his neck and the roll of his fat, and shook him silly with cusses and threats. Told him this was no place for a fool little boy to be. Told him how dangerous the sea was. Told him about the sharks, and the waves, and the salt.
Walter listened, and Walter nodded. And then Walter stayed out there, on Tim Hickory’s boat, because Tim Hickory couldn’t turn back by then and he couldn’t spend his time minding little boys when there were fish to fish.
Walter spent his time on the bow, watching the grey bodies scooped into the sky, dripping and wriggling. He would hum to them, and sometimes sing. Nonsense songs, mashups of tunes he’d heard other children, parents, neighbors sing.
Sometimes the songs got on Tim Hickory’s nerves. But he was busy, and most of the time they would blend in with the sound of the waves and the nets.
Walter had only a little boy’s voice, of course. He couldn’t sing very loudly back then.
He got in all sorts of trouble when he got back, too. Bottom smacked black and blue, but not a peep from him, not a tear shed.

When Walter was a bigger boy, he tagged along fishing.
This was more organized, more proper. He got a longer lecture than most did, of course. Rules firmly laid, commands issued, fists thumped, threats levied.
He listened, and tied knots, and sat on the bow again, and watched the nets come in. Helped haul ‘em too, alongside his brother and father. And as he work, he whistled and sung and hummed.
His father told him to knock it off. His brother pinched him and giggled.
Walter kept on singing. And he listened hard. Listened far. Listened deep.
At day, nobody heard anything that wasn’t hull on water, grunts from lungs. At night, nobody was awake to tell. But Walter was a dreamer, and a good one. And he kept his ears open, in those dreams.
He smiled a lot that trip. And when he came back home, he sang songs to his baby sister in her cradle that she’d never heard before.

When Walter was a young man, he built a boat.
It was a good boat, firm of hull and fine of timber. Its paint was still fresh and almost sparkling when the water first enveloped it, its sails smelled of musty cupboards and dried timbers rather than salt. It was good – not astounding, not saddening, but good. Walter did a good job when he built that boat.
He took it out that day, him and his father. Came back in nets bulging, deck crammed full. Finned bodies spilling out of the wheelhouse, ropes tangled in slippery grey flesh and slapping muscled frames.
Walter didn’t pay much attention to the fish. He had an ear cocked and an absent stare for everyone, slaps on his back and congratulations aside.
The next day they went out again. Even bigger haul came with them this time. A shark was lashed to the boat’s side, big blue body writhing and wriggling as it twitched its way towards death by inches. They took the jaws and left the flesh for the gulls.
(It made them sick. Gulls will eat anything, but even they have limits).
The next day Walter left on his own.
The next day Walter came back, paddling.
A squall had come up and overturned the boat, he said, as he wrung the damp green-and-blue from his sweater. Nothing he could do. He’d ventured out too far by himself, got cocky. He’d swum the miles to shore without even a life-ring for flotation, it had happened so fast. The boat had flipped mast-to-keel and left him tangled in the nets, with just enough time to cut free and strike out before it brought him down.
It was a good story, as Walter told it in that shy, low voice of his. And we all nodded and sympathized with him – such a fine boat it had been – because after all he was a good fisherman, maybe even a great fisherman, and nobody could vouch against his skill. Bad luck and bad weather will stop the best of us in their tracks, and leave them lucky to still have their lives.
And nobody, not one person, not a one of us every spoke a word of how calm the weather had been for the past week.
Because neither had Walter.

Walter was a grown man with the bad luck of ten. But we loved him anyways, because he wouldn’t let it beat him.
A boat would be made.
A boat would be launched.
A boat would bring in one
two
three
four (once) catches.
Then it would be gone, and Walter would wash in with the tides, smiling that same rare gift of his, happy to be alive and with luck no better than before.
Months to build it. A week to lose it. At most. And how Walter did it, no one knew.
A gale.
Harsh water.
Struck a rock.
Angry shark, once. That raised eyebrows.
And we all would’ve scoffed at one of them, let alone all of them, but Walter’s smile when he came back was always so wonderful. And each time, it grew wider.
He sang in town, now. Mostly at night. Folks complained, but quietly, and soon they stopped. It was quiet, and almost too low to hear.

And then one year, not many ago, Walter and his brother and his father all got in their boats, cast off, and left without a word for one, two, three days.
They floated back in on the currents, damp and grinning, and they were changed men. Went straight down to their friends’ houses and stayed up all night talking.
The next day, six boats left, with Walter guiding the way.
Two days later, the tides fetch them back again. No sign of the boats.
The wives complained. The shorebounders complained. The children worried.
Walter smiled, and that made it all right. Walter stayed up and sang half the night as families argued and muttered and fought for hours, spend the other half listening.
Ten boats the next day
Eight the day after.
Nine after that.
Almost no boats left, but the fish came in anyways. Walter would strip naked and swim out there, come back in dragging net-fulls of things we’d never seen before. No greybacks, no fatmouths, things with too much eel in their blood and too little eyes. Slimy, but tasty.
Only really good to eat raw, though. Cooking liquefies the flesh. Disgusting.

Seasons went by. Walter kept us afloat as the boats were rebuilt.
(His father and brother joined him after a time. A few others later, I don’t recall who).
One beautiful day the first of the new hulls slipped into the water. And that was the day that they set hands on it and towed it away. No time for a motor, no time for paint, no time for nothing.
They needed that boat. We needed that boat.
“For mother,” Walter explained.
No-one had asked for the explanation. No-one thought he was talking about Lucy, Geoff’s wife, Jeremiah and Petunia’s mother, who’d fed him her milk when he was a little pale thing plucked from the waves.

The truth came out in bits and starts. Nobody much noticed as it did. It just happened. Oh, some people grumbled, some people muttered, but by the time we all knew anything it was already normal.
The boats were necessary offerings, of course. In the right place
(eight hours out, seventeen fathoms deep)
at the right time
(moonlight on the water, a dark starry sky)
in the right state of mind
(dreaming afloat, waves lapping on the rim of your hearing)
was where you left your gifts.
Here, mother. Take the land from us. We trust you. We love you. And you trust and love us.
Why else would you have given your son to us?

The last boat sank on the first day of summer.
Old Tim Hickory was on board. Mad as hell, he was.
We’d talked to him and talked to him, but he wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t pay attention.
Stubborn man. He set his heels to it and wouldn’t budge, not for that boat. His father’s father’s father had laid it, he would pilot it, no matter where it went. And he wouldn’t budge.
(Couldn’t, after he tied the anchor around and around and around and around himself)
So he followed his boat, captained it ‘till it was gone.
(He wore the old sou’wester. It was the first anyone had seen that happen in living memory, the faded old yellow against the dull grey of woollen sweater, tangled beard).
He must’ve been the first to see mother there, as keel met bottom.
Met bottom and passed on through it, into home.

Life is stranger now, and we don’t do as our grandparents did, or theirs before them.
We spend our evenings down in the bay and leave the beds back upon land, rot in the trash heaps.
A hall is being made beneath the bay, a hall of stones and shells with no lights, a hull timbered in barnacled wood, scraped bare of paint by tide and time.
Our sides ache for the waves, and cry salt tears in the air.
The children swim like giggling minnows, hands grown small and over-webbed.
Babes’ teeth sprout early and needling, and their mouths eschew milk for fish-lymph.
Last Sunday we burnt the last of our homes, lighting the fires with kindling from our docks.
It can be hard, to change this way. But when we feel doubt, or pain, or confusion, we look to the face of Walt Newman. And we see that smile behind his teeth, waiting to be given.
If we work for it, we are granted it. Just so.

J. D. Hudson was a particular sort of man. He wore small, black shoes with no laces but with important names stitched into discreet parts of their leather. His keyboard was bare of lint and his fingers bare of ink, for his keyboard was all he needed. He dressed with a tie whenever possible, and sometimes whenever it wasn’t. His first and middle names were mysteries to all but his closest family members, in whose presence he frowned when addressed so. He starched his collars. He wore collars.
And he lived in Toronto, where, to the satisfaction of his property values but the irritation of his soul, he owned a lawn. It was small and grassy and made rather timid by the masses of concrete about it.
He loathed it.
Oh, J. D. Hudson did his best, he did. He always did. He purchased fertilizers and pesticides (rigidly defined within legally permitted lines), he applied shears with dispassionate skill, he weeded mercilessly and without pity for the young and sprouted nor old and rooted.
And yet still the damned thing vexed him.
He watered. He trimmed. He sheared. He even, in a fit of near-madness, planted a small patch of flowers once. They bloomed, wilted, died, and were dutifully tidied away.
And yet still the damned thing wouldn’t stop growing.
The last straw came when he had to go away for a week. The trip was fine – on his favorite topic too: serious business – it was the return that filled him with horror and disgust. The fine weather of late spring had come and gone, bastard thing, and filled his lawn with vigor and delight to a scandalous degree. It had become feckless. It had become unruly. It had become overgrown.
J. D. Hudson looked at his lawn, and he looked at the clippers in his hands, and small well-used muscles in his lower jaw twitched in a most unseemly manner. This would not do. This would most patently not do. This was a Problem, and Problems required Solutions. In the name of tidiness.
J. D. Hudson was not a man who knew things about lawnmowers. But one of his brothers knew a man who did, and he recommended a company. An obscure one. A very obscure one that didn’t even own a website, and whose purchases must be conducted through mail-order.
J. D. Hudson frowned on such things. But J. D. Hudson did not frown on what was avowed to be top-notched product at rock-bottom prices, and so he committed his untrained, keyboard-reared fingers to the fumbling tool of the pen. His handwriting was unspeakable, his signature unpronounceable, but in the end, all was filled, all boxes were ticked, all stamps attached, and the lot of it consigned to the hands of the mailman, whom J. D. Hudson suspected of petty theft and inadequate devotion to his career.

A week festered by, during which J. D. Hudson’s lawn grew more riotous still, deterred not by his unbending glare. His fingers clenched, his teeth ground, he woke in the night arguing with himself and his daily zero point five cups of breakfast oatmeal (without sugar) lost its taste, which it had never possessed.
And then, gloriously, beautifully, divinely, came the mail. And came a parcel that was rather smaller than J. D. Hudson had expected. It had arrived mostly assembled, lacking only the attachment of the handle to the main body with a complicated series of ingenious bolts that hurt J. D. Hudson’s knuckles as he turned them in and made him say improper words in clipped, exact tones.
Assembled, it stood atop the lawn in brooding glory as a colossus: the Accelerationist Townmower (his illegible handwriting had apparently resulted in his receiving an older, off-brand model whose name he did not recognize, but no matter), over sixty pounds of slightly dented metal and mysteriously oily machinery. He allowed it to bask there for a time as he read and reread the manual, which was in six languages, none of which were English, French, Spanish, or Mandarin. Complicating this was the typesetting: at least one paragraph was upside down, another was printed backwards, and an entire four pages of text were printed upside down, backwards, and in increasingly small concentric spirals. In red ink.
J. D. Hudson frowned to himself and shut the manual with a disappointed thwap. Well, he’d used these before, or at least seen people use them before. You primed them – like so. Then you pulled the cord – like so. Then you moved it over the grass – like s

J. D. Hudson, as with many people, thought of his life as a series of events, each following the other. Cause and effect strung together like Christmas lights and wrapped in circles around the big confusing evergreen of your mortal coil. He could recite his history since birth as a perfect series of points A through Z, laid in order exactly as prescribed in kindergarten song.
This made the events of that day very hard on him.

The Townmower slid over the grass like a greased pig over a skillet of warm butter, and with much the same noise. J. D Hudson planted his feet firmly to check the machine’s advance and was immediately hoisted off them, dangling from the mower’s handlebar as a fly on a fishing line. His first instinct was to hold on tight, which was unfortunate because that meant he was still gripping the Townmower as it touched the concrete of his sidewalk.
There were noises. Some of them sounded like falling rocks, some like screaming winds, and several as the calls of coyotes and squirrels. Tiny chips of cement and sidewalk screamed past J. D. Hudson’s face as the mower accelerated underneath him, screeching down the street at highway speeds. He pawed feebly at the ignition shutoff, and the shift in his weight sent it swerving wildly into traffic, where a car honked at him loudly for a little less than half a second before being mowed down.
J. D. Hudson found the courage to look back after the shock of having all his limbs still attached to himself wore off. A confused looking man – one of his neighbors, possibly – was sitting in the middle of what had been a road and was now a spry (if narrow) thicket, up to his thighs in prickerbushes and entirely naked bar a pair of sunglasses and a necklace. A tiny fragment of steering wheel crumbled from his hairy paws as he watched, silhouetted against the rambling, untidy hedge that half the sidewalk had become.
J. D. Hudson tore his gaze away from this sight and was spared the trouble of dwelling on it, because that was when he swerved onto Yonge Street and the world was reduced to many small things that flew away in his wake, captured only by his eyes.
A streetcar tumbled away, crumpling into dirt and dust.
Power cables snapped into roots that latched onto buildings that were suddenly very confused trees. Executives hooted in alarm from their canopies, ties dangling as they swung from branch to branch seeking a way down.
The street become a river beneath the blades, lashing violently out around it as dashes and dots and crosswalks were suddenly dashed, dotty, and cross ducks of varying species.
A streetlight fell to the ground, rose up as swamplight.
Streetlights to stumps.
Pedestrians went scurrying into the blossoming copses of shops in fright, hiding in the undergrowth that had once been a rack of t-shirts.
Somewhere in the midst of this, he turned his eyes forwards again and found that the mower had grown substantially, and was chewing up entire rows of housing, shredding bits of tile everywhere as it dropped the structures down to neatly levelled-off patches of mixed woodland forests. Then the Don Valley Parkway was ahead of him, and he shut his eyes again as the blades did their grisly work. Asphalt flecked his face and stuck to the moistness of his tears. Car horns sounded in alarm, then were hushed into the roars of bears and the cackle of birds. Then it all fell away again, far below and far away, leaving him alone in silence with only his thoughts.
The CN tower made a strange creaking noise in the mower’s suspension.

Morning found a slightly different city. For one thing, it now consisted entirely of a single home of modest proportions, with a scandalously unkempt lawn. In its over-lush grass lay a man, naked bar a rumpled collar, whose mute horror left him known only as John Doe.
As for the Townmower, the 401 had been replaced by a series of rolling meadows. It must’ve gone off-road somewhere, but if had, it had left no trace.
Tidily.

In a desert, under a mountain, above a floor thickened and reinforced so much that it wasn’t a floor, between a set of clamps designed to grasp with fickle tenderness the steel sides of aircraft carriers at drydock, lived a woman who weighed ten thousand tons. Some days she dozed, some days she daydreamed, sometimes she simply hummed to herself to make the time go by slow and sweet, like honey flowing on toast. Now and then she would shrug, or stretch her back a little, and one, two, three, dozens of the hundreds of strong, multilayered wires that tethered her to the far-away walls of her cubed room would tremble and grumble under the strain, but they had been designed to hold aloft the mightiest of telemetry towers and were reluctant to part with her even under such trying circumstances.
It was often dull, in the room, but there were ways around such things. The ten-thousand-ton-woman had tried many of them over the years before simply settling on not being bored any more, which had served her well. Her favourite had been conversation, at first with herself, and then with the woman who was ten thousand feet tall.
“Hello,” she said today again, out of friendship and habit.
Besides her, the ten-thousand-foot-woman blinked her eyes and sighed out a deep breath.
“It’s lovely today, as it is most days, isn’t it?” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman. “How are you, yourself, and your place in things? Do you have any itches? I cannot scratch them, but I can call for someone who can. Are you troubled and do you want to talk about it? Have you seen any strange things today, or later, or yesterday? How was your breakfast? Did you have any or did you skip it?”
The woman who weighed ten thousand tons looked around furtively, then bent closer to the woman who was ten thousand feet tall and whispered “how’s the weather up there?”
The air that would give the ten-thousand-foot-tall-woman the voice to whisper answers to her questions was yet twenty minutes away, but it paused in her throat for a minute as she snorted and chuckled, and her friend smiled to herself. She had told that joke the day they brought her in, wheeling in that endless gurney with her carefully strapped to it, and she had enjoyed it so much that she carefully repeated it to her every day without fail, as regular as lunchtime or even moreso, since sometimes they didn’t get lunch when there was a presidential inspection.
They’d met lots of presidents. Some of them were very important people, and it often puzzled the ten-thousand-ton-woman why they were interested in the two of them. She had been gingerly prodded and nudged with science for over a decade now, her nails, hairs, breath, teeth, tongue, gut, and toes all carefully explored down from atoms to quarks, and was quite sure that there was nothing of interest there. If her friend the ten-thousand-foot-woman remained somewhat unmapped in comparison, well, that was an issue of scale and practicality. They had still examined the bulk of her, using over ten miles of tiny tiny mirror tubes and miniature cameras on the tips of excessive ropes of wiring.
The door to the room opened, and a dramatic pause happened.
The ten-thousand-ton-woman frowned. It was her least pleasant part of the day, and so she suspected it went with her friend.
The dramatic pause ended, and a man walked into the room. He had striking eyebrows, not much white hair, and a dreadfully smooth face that was pinched in the most unpleasant expressions, like a lion’s.
“Good morning,” lied the ten-thousand-ton-woman. Beside her, the ten-thousand-foot-tall-woman twitched her left little finger in answer.
The man who was ten thousand years old looked at her with disdain.
“It is not a good morning,” he said, crossly. “I had no dodo egg for breakfast, as I enjoyed for so long. I was awakened not by the nose-flutes of the eunuchs who were my slaves as befitted my viziership, but by a rude alarm. I am forced to rely upon digital clocks rather than those sand-powered devices I personally designed, and there are no proper clothes anymore. And I still have not been given the host’s-gift of mammoth flesh.”
“Do tell,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman. She didn’t want him to, but he would do so whatever she said, and complain the same. Manners cost nothing, as her mother had told her so many times back when she weighed one hundred and thirty-three pounds.
Those had been long-ago days, though, and she scarcely remembered them, as most people forgot infancy. The taste of waffles (home-made) with maple syrup. A birthday party (seventh? Seventeenth?). Sinking through the soil to bedrock twenty feet below in a single sharp moment and sitting there in a daze until the government came and removed her with very expensive and powerful machinery, most of which she’d never learned the names for, or forgotten.
Simpler times. She wasn’t sure if she’d like them anymore, or maybe she would.
The ten-thousand-year-old-man had stopped talking about himself, crossly. She realized that he had asked her a question, and wasn’t sure what to do about that. It had never happened before. “Agnostic, verging on Catholic, or the other way around,” she said, and hoped it was a good reply.
“Hnnf,” said the ten-thousand-year-old-man, crossly, and she knew that it wasn’t. “Such a waste. Such a waste. Of course you didn’t get it right. I made all those up, you know.”
“Really?” she said. She knew, she knew.
“Of course I did,” he snapped, crossly. “I made them all up after nobody listened to me the first time. I got it all right back then, I did. I knew the secrets of Zifweedoism, and you know what they did? They laughed at me, laughed at me. So I made up everything else – scientology, Christian Scientism, Mormonism, and Judaism, and Buddhism, and Jainism, and Tolkienism, and I lied about it. And so it’s all your fault for believing something that I made up, you see?” he finished, with a spit of spite.
“Yes,” she said. This was usually when he was finished.
“You’ll see,” he muttered, crossly. “You will.” And that was how he usually finished, and he did.
He left by the door without so much as waving good-bye to the ten-thousand-foot-woman, and she grew annoyed on her friend’s behalf all over again before she let her imagined fresh breezes and warm sun comfort her. It didn’t matter what that man (the ten-thousand-year-old one) thought or said or did anyways. She suspected that it never had.
The door opened and let in a bunch of very serious men in serious suits with serious eyewear who secured the area seriously. Behind them walked another president.
“Hello,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman, politely. The ten-thousand-foot-woman twitched a finger in greetings.
“Hello, citizen,” said the president. And then he asked a lot of questions of some of the scientists with him. They didn’t look like scientists to her; they had no long white coats, most of them had no glasses, and they didn’t wear gloves. They wore suits and ties and used complicated little phones nearly as sophisticated as those that teenagers owned.
Then they were done, and they left. Lunch would come soon, and the ten-thousand-ton-woman worried about it anxiously. What if it were the mushroom soup, rather than the chicken-fried-steak? She was looking forward to the chicken-fried-steak so much, for reasons that escaped her. Maybe it was very tasty? Or maybe she was sick of mushrooms. Yes, maybe that was it. A pity. She’d always enjoyed mushrooms so very much.
Oh well. Having something new to shy away from was very nearly the same as having something new to look forward to. And that was a good thing, wasn’t it? She was sure it was.
Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong. The air was full of sirens and hoopla and ruckus. She had never heard such a natter and fuss, and she suspected the ten-thousand-foot-tall-woman hadn’t either, but she was unable to ask her opinion of it because right then the door opened and in came the ten-thousand-year-old-man. He was strutting. Crossly, of course.
“Hello again,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman, as politely as she could manage, which wasn’t.
“Hello yourself,” smirked the ten-thousand-year-old-man, crossly. “I have fixed things right up. I have picked the pocket of the president.”
“Oh?” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman.
“I did such things in my youth,” he continued, crossly. “Why, I stole Napoleon’s purse in Africa, and sold it to Sitting Bull in London. It’s all true, every word of it. And I was so good at it that I did it while I was sick, and that was true too. Vomit and bile everywhere, pus and rot creeping out of my eyelids and toe-tips.”
“Wonderful,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman. She wondered if she was rolling her eyes. She was trying to roll her eyes, but she was out of practice for it, and the ten-thousand-year-old-man was not paying enough attention to her to tell her if she was doing it properly, even if he bothered to answer her.
“I picked the pocket and I took the codes and I have launched the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that are kept in this place, and kept filled with nuclear explosives,” said the ten-thousand-year-old-man. “And because of this, I am sure now that the world will end, or at least mostly, which is good enough for me.”
The ten-thousand-ton-woman blinked in slow, total shock. That was the first time she’d ever heard him spoken something without sounding cross.
“Why, you ask?” asked the ten-thousand-year-old-man. “Because of all of it, but mostly the mammoths. We have too many people and not enough mammoths. This will correct the matter, and maybe I can finally get my host’s-gift of mammoth flesh.” He licked his lips. They were neither pale and thin nor fat and rubbery, but they were as unappealing as rotted bone regardless. “I did so love mammoth flesh. I came up with that custom, you know. And all the others.”
The ten-thousand-ton-woman looked at the ceiling (which was flashing and wailing with alarms), and then over to the ten-thousand-foot-woman, whose beautiful eyes were looking back at her. She had raised exactly one eyebrow, the right one, the one that meant she was asking ‘well?’
“I suppose we should do something,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman, ignoring the ten-thousand-year-old-man as he boasted and bragged and wouldn’t shut up about things that didn’t matter because he didn’t matter.
The ten-thousand-foot-woman nodded, twice. And then she stood up.
It was complicated. Joints acted as joints shouldn’t. Tiny restraints parted under the pressures of leverage, the kind that could move the world. Things folded, then refolded with unimaginable majesty and power. And though the cube’s ceiling was very high, the ten-thousand-foot-tall woman had pierced it with her skull long before her head had even come close to reaching her waist.
As she straightened up, she reached down with one hand whose fingers were beyond imagining, and she grasped the ten-thousand-ton-woman, and she began to push. She didn’t have the strength to lift, or even to shove, but she did have the leverage, and she was pushing her forwards at a slow, slow speed that would be enough to launch her for miles.
And even then, as the strangeness was becoming nearly overwhelming, she heard the familiar, right-on-time rumble of her friend in the morning.
“Yes,” whispered her voice, low and windy, as the long, long, long arms began to move with the power and speed of continental drift; unstoppable yet beautiful. “I am happy in all ways. I do not itch, and thank you for asking of my troubles. I saw nothing stranger than the two of us, again, and I had no breakfast because I was not hungry. And it was toast.”
She sighed as the ten-thousand-ton-woman slipped through her fingers and began her slow, inexorable slide. “I do not like toast.”
And with that the ten-thousand-ton-woman went rolling away though the halls, crashing through floors and knocking over entire floors, ceilings, and pieces of multi-billion-dollar superstructure. The missile launch tubes were merely the third thing she tumbled through, and by the time she’d left them they would’ve been hard put to launch a chickadee. She travelled on, on, on, and by the time she’d stopped rolling she was in the outside again, in the desert, by a mountain. There was a fresh breeze and a warm sun.
“This is a nice day,” she decided, speaking to the ten-thousand-foot-woman.
Her friend nodded to her as she slooowly stepped out of the hole in the ground that had been punched by her head. Or she thought she did. It was hard to see her, so high up in the clouds.
But of course she’d agreed. It was a nice day, after all.

Scal the sorry, who often wasn’t but said she was, she sat down near the water’s edge on the shore and stared into it and frumped.
“I’m getting oldsome,” she grumbled as she looked at herself. “Look at that, all wrinkles and grey hairs and who knows what now. I’m sorry to say it, but I’ve been neglectful for sure and lazy at that; I should’ve been wed years ago before all this came along. I’d best find me a husband, and soonish rather than latish, or I’ll be sorrier for sure! Maybe when I’m married I can put all that behind me.”
So Scal the sorry went and looked all over the place. She splashed out into the surf and was knocked over by waves all over the place, dragged up and down the beach like a piece of old driftwood.
“I’m sorry for making so much noise,” she yelled out into the sea, “but is there anyone out there who would like to marry me?”
A shellfish by her foot coughed. A gull yawked.
“Fine then,” she snapped. “Sticks and stones to you all, see if I care.” And she flounced inland, where she tripped over roots and twigs in the forests and waded through boggy swamps and almost fell into a bear’s den face-first.
“I’m sorry for sounding so annoyed,” she called out through the woods, “but is there anyone out here who would like to marry me?”
A deer ran away in fright. The trees sighed in the wind.
“Take water and snort it sideways,” she swore. “Burn to cinders and snuff yourselves.” And she stomped away very noisily and angrily until the air grew cold and clean around her and the sky was at eye level, with stone underfoot and all the world spread down around her ankles underneath the big blue sky.
“Is there not anyone in all of this place,” she called out, “who will marry me, right now, right here!?”
“I will!” called back a voice from far, far below. “I will do that!”
“One moment,” said Scal the sorry, and she took a very long moment to climb herself all the way down the mountain again so she could talk to the voice properly.
It was waiting for her, and belonged to a man. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but did you agree to marry me just last moment?”
“Indeed I did,” said the man. “I am a great hunter and a great fisherman and a great eater. I can make things and I can break things, and I have so many muscles that I had to give some away to make space for the others. I will marry you, because I need something new to become great at.”
“This sounds like a good thing,” said Scal the sorry. “We’re married, then, and I need not be sorry any longer!”
“Wonderful!” said the man. And so they were.

“Married life is stranger than I thought it’d be,” Scal said some time later. “There is more snoring than I’d imagined.”
“I am indeed the greatest of snorers,” agreed the man. “And my elbows the sharpest and largest in all the places I know, as well as the most energetic.”
Scal felt this wasn’t ideal, but she was not sorry anymore, and so she said nothing but grumbles.

“Married life is odder than I’d imagined it to be,” Scal said to herself and the world at large a few days onward. “There is a great deal of yelling and strangeness.”
“I yell most fervently when I am ired,” confirmed the man, “and I grow ired when drunk with a speed that any other man I have met envies. Why, last night I out-growled a bear so grizzled his grizzles had grizzlies, and nearly kicked down four trees!”
Scal had rather liked those trees, but she felt she shouldn’t be sorry about things that way, and so she contented herself with grousing.

“Married life is peculiar in all ways,” Scal said loudly and aggressively and with a good deal of annoyance. “Today I went out to watch my icebergs float down the coast – bump-bump-bump as they go – and I found my husband peeing on one, and I would very much like to hear why he would do that sort of thing.”
“I am possessed of the mightiest urine of all beings in this wide world of ours,” boasted the man, “in both flow and strength of stream. I proved I could cut an iceberg in two, drown a whale, and dye whole waves with my abilities! Truly, I am indeed a superior individual!”
Scal liked the icebergs, as you recall. Scal liked watching them float by. Scal did not like any of those things her husband had said one bit – not even half a bit – and Scal might not be sorry about THAT but she was damned sorry she’d married him entirely and thoroughly at that very moment.
“I’m a sorry fool again to be sure,” Scal the sorry whispered to herself as she plotted, “but I’ve faced worse troubles and trounced them. I just need to get rid of him and it’ll all be fine, it’ll be fine for sure.”

“Husband dearest wonderfulest kindest gentlest man,” simpered Scal the sorry, “perhaps you could go a-fishing for us, and catch us some fish?”
“I am the finest fisherman I have ever known, and I have known them all,” said the man. “This is thus a thing that I can and will do, you wait here and see.”
So the man jumped in his boat and rowed away at great speed and enthusiasm. And Scal the sorry smiled happily to herself and began to rub and whisper at her left hand, because that hand was magic, and she became a little sea-lion, and followed after the boat of the man.
“Ahhh, here is a fine place to fish!” yelled the man aloud, and he threw down the oars and began to fish like crazy, yanking up fish after fish after fish after fish, big and small, fierce and quiet.
Scal the sorry snickered to herself underneath his boat, and she lightly nipped the left tip of her flipper. And as she nipped, the boat sprung a leak that sprung a crack that spurted water like a lovesick streambed.
“What’s this now!” said the man, as his ankles got wet and the horizon shrunk down. “But I know already, for I am a boatsman without peer! I can fix this with but spit and a snap of my fingers!” And he spat violently into the hole and snapped it shut with a moment’s work. “Better than new!” he laughed, and under the boat Scal the sorry cursed to herself and began to tickle her left flipper.
The seas roiled, the seas rumbled, and up from the depths charged a huge shark, an old shark, a shark that could eat small whales. Its eyes were deadest black and its teeth were whiter than snow and it shot for the man’s boat like an arrow to its target only much larger and more frightening and also a shark.
“Hrrm!” said the man, squinting ferociously. “Now THAT’S a fish!” And he pulled out his fishing spear and threw it three times. The first cut out each of the shark’s eyes, and the third its heart. He lashed it to the boat with one hand, and chortled mightily at his luck.
The underside of his boat was home to many muffled words, and the furious scratching of Scal the sorry’s left flipper with her right. Before moments had passed the sky turned dark, then green, then red and orange and purple. Thunder screeched and lightning howled, the wind made noises like a raccoon in heat courting a mockingbird. Water began to fall from the sky fit to double the ocean’s depth.
“Ah, a breeze to sail home by!” cheered the man. He rowed until the oars broke in half, then rowed with the stubs of the handles, and touched foot to shore just as the last bit of his boat broke into splinters apart underneath him and sank down to the bottom of the ocean forever.
“Wife!” he called. “I have brought you your fish for our dinner, and a great fish indeed it is, as befits my greatness at fishing, which is one of the many ways in which I am greatest at a thing!”
“Wonderful, husband,” said Scal the sorry. “But we need berries now, or dinner will be duller than dirt in a deadfall. Go a-berry-picking and fetch us some from over the hills, and we will eat happily!”
“I can pick berries in ways that put bears to shame and bugs to flight,” said the man. “This is yet another thing I can do, and I will return here afterwards to make you see that this is true.”
So the man hurled himself into a great long bounding run with mighty strides and outthrust chest. And Scal the sorry frowned to herself, licked her left hand three times counterclockwise, and was a little bright jay-bird that flitted from tree to tree in his wake all the way to the far sides of the hills where the berry bushes were.
“The picking shall begin now at this time and place,” decreed the man, and he began to fill his pack with them at a most alarming pace. Up in the tree above him, the little jay-bird preened its left wing and watched, eyes twinkling. In mere instants a whole family of bears came lumbering out of the woods – mother and cubs – and came charging for him, teeth-and-breath-first.
“Such fun!” whooped the man, and he whooped with the bears for a full hour with kicks and punches and bear-hugs. He stopped when they were all too tired to wrestle, shook himself off, and began to fill his clothes with berries twice as fast as before, laughing to himself.
Away in a bush behind him the little jay-bird ruffled the feathers of its left wing and watched, eyes hardening. Right away a swarm of bees rose up from the berry-bushes, stingers a-bristle, swarm a-flutter, and they fell on the man with the fierceness of animals a million times their size.
“Ah, a honeying-time!” observed the man with good cheer and great enthusiasm. He started a fire quick as anything, and in the clouds of the dense and billowing smoke he evaded the bees and swatted them, pat-pat-pat. A minute’s work and he was done with them, a minute more and he was at their hive, a minute after and he had their honeycomb well in hand as he was busily stuffing his cheeks with berries, twist as fast as before, when he had done so twice as fast.
From under a leaf the little jay-bird snapped at its left wing and watched, eyes sharp. The trees sparked, the brush alit, and in no time at all the forest was a raging wildfire with hungrier teeth than a wolf and a fiercer heart than a wolverine with a cavity.
“How much faster can such a thing be?” asked the man of himself to himself. “Why, as fast as anything – except for me!” He laughed and ran and sprang and leapt and made it home with only the very tips of the tufts of his hair singed, smouldering like little coals.
“Wife!” he bellowed. “I have retrieved the berries you wished to have as part of our dinner, and they are the finest and also the most numerous of all berries, as a result of my impressive berry-picking, which is one of the most impressive skills of my many impressive skills, all of which are equally impressive!”
“Good,” said Scal the sorry. “Wonderful. Excellent.” And then a thought struck her. “But husband-dearest, I am afraid that after dinner you will need to pee, and we have no place suitable for you to do so. Dig a pit, so that we’ll be prepared.”
“I shall do that incredibly well,” vowed the man.
“Make sure it’s deep,” said Scal the sorry.
“This will be so exactly,” promised the man.
“And pile up all the dirt neatly, so we can fill it in properly,” suggested Scal the sorry.
“Perfectly!” swore the man. And in less than no time at all he’d dug a massive pit, with all the dirt he’d torn through stacked up neatly next to it in a careful pile.
“Are you through?” asked Scal the sorry.
“This pit can hold anything in all the wide world there is,” bragged the man.
“Anything at all?” asked Scal the sorry.
“Anything at all,” replied the man.
“Nothing won’t fit in it?”
“Nothing itself COULD fit in it,” proclaimed the man. “Nothing, anything, AND everything can fit in this pit, even myself!”
“Are you sure of this, husband dearest kindest?” asked Scal the sorry.
“Utterly!” said the man. “Look, I’ll show you!” And he leapt down into the pit and there it fit him perfectly. “See?” he said.
“I see, dearest wonderfulest kindest gentlest,” said Scal the sorry. “And I’m sorry about this, but it is absolutely necessary.” And she gave the dirt-pile a shove, and it filled up the hole perfectly, leaving just the man’s head sticking out.
“Oh what is this now?” shouted the man. “What is this now, eh? What is going on?”
“I am sorry to say that you are very good at many things, but a very poor husband,” said Scal the sorry. “Marriage may not be for me after all. But you may stay here, and become the best in all the world at being planted.” And she walked away.
“A fine idea!” said the man, although no one was listening. “A fine idea! I’ll beat the other plants to it, just you see! A fine idea! I’ll beat them hollow at their own game. A fine idea!”

And this is why we have poison ivy.