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Scal the sorry, Scal the sorry, lived down by the sea, where the sky grew tall and the trees lapped against the rocks like hungry little dogs. She fished and she hunted and she apologized to the world, but not quite properly, and she did her best until she didn’t feel like it anymore.
“I am sorry,” she said to the berries in her hand, “but I’m really very hungry right now.” And then she ate them without so much as please or thank you. “I am sorry,” she said to the fish that flapped on the rocks, “but I thought you might look more tastesome dead than alive.” And she bashed it with a stone and ate it all without wiping her fingers.
Scal found it hard to keep up with all the apologizing sometimes, but she was a persistent person and so she persisted. Some things made it easier. A flock of redbirds (red, not blue – blue was a sad colour, the colour of lonesome waves and winter skies) would put a summer in her step that made spring seem feeble, and finding the proper sort of clam (cautious, with firmness in its lid that mocked mere granite) could set her chuckling for hours and days. But what she liked most of all was to sit down on the rocks at the shore and watch the icebergs float by in sprint, eight-at-a-time, two-in-a-row, three-by-three or all at once. She could sit there for weeks without remembering to apologize even once, and felt all the better for it.
It was spring now, so Scal was already ready to feel good. She took a fistful of berries and a strip of dried salmon, she hauled herself down to the coziest, most grandfatherly boulder on the beach, and she squatted on it like a comfortable crab, chewing her lunch as she waited for the ice.
She waited nine minutes, then five hours, then six days, and then a week more before she jumped up and threw her gloves down in disgust. “Up and down and all around!” she cursed, and the boulder she’d been sitting on cracked into threes and then fours in a fright. “Crickets in a thicket! Something isn’t right and that’s making me angry, and that means I have to say sorry again, and that makes me angrier!” She stomped and she shuffled up and down the shore in a huff, yelling and waving her arms. But still the icebergs wouldn’t come.
“Fine!” she said. “I’ll find out about this, I know I will. And I’m not sorry one bit!”
So Scal the sorry picked up her gloves and put on her right glove again, but kept her left glove off because that hand was her magic hand. She rubbed it and spat on it and rubbed it some more, and then she held it to her mouth, mumbled, and chewed her thumb. Once she’d done that she ran down into the water and swam north, and she swam as strong as a dolphin now, with great leaps and splashes. She swam in such a hurry that she barely had time to apologize for all the noise she was making, all the way far away up north to where the ice ate the land up and hovered over the sea like a broody bird.
There was the ice, but there wasn’t an iceberg to be found, nowhere in sight – the sea was as clean as a whisker licked by a loving mother bear. The ice-cliffs were ready, heavy with weight, but not a single child of theirs was there.
“Lazy old mothers and ill-bred fathers!” said Scal the sorry. “I am sorry for calling you that, but that’s what you are. Now stand still while I fix all of this mischief.” She took off her left glove and whispered to her hand and picked at her teeth with it and then she chewed her pointing finger. A slice of her nail popped out like a jack-in-the-box, and just like that off came a berg from the ice-shelves with a groan and a roar like thunder’s grandmother, thick and stubborn.
“I am sorry for making such a noise, but that’s more like the thing that things should be like,” said Scal the sorry.
The berg bobbed in the water like a cork for a moment, wobbling its way to finding out which side was up. It decided on down, contemplated sideways, changed its mind and decided it was up, and then it was gone, yanked clean out of the water in such a flashing haste that it barely left a ripple’s slip.
“What is that and what is this!?” yelled Scal the sorry, hopping with fury. “What’s up now, eh? What sort of tricks is someone playing with my icebergs!” She ran up and down the shore again twice as angry as before, using every swear and curse she knew until all the rocks were crossed like bric-a-brac.
A voice laughed, deep and rolling. It would sound nice, but nothing sounds nice when it’s laughing at you.
“Who’s that and who’s there?” asked Scal the sorry. “I am sorry for making such a stir, but I am extremely angry right now!”
“Up here,” said the voice. “Look up, not down! You are too small to pay attention properly. Be sorry for that instead!”
Scal the sorry looked up and up some more and up again and up and up until she saw the toes of the giant. He was standing in the trees, and he was so big that she’d missed him entirely. He was a mighty impressive giant – his fur was sleek and coal-black as a bear’s nose, his beak was clean and razor-swept, and both his heads had three eyes each – but Scal the sorry was too angry to notice that right now.
“Who are you?” she called.
“I am the largest giant in all the world,” said the giant, “or at least the largest that I have ever known, and that is good enough for me.”
“What are you doing with my icebergs?” she asked.
“They’re mine as much as yours,” said the giant, holding up the iceberg Scal had shaken loose in one paw. In his other he held a fishing pole made from a tree-trunk, with ten thousand feet of line. “And I am hungry. See how fine a meal they are!” And with that he held the iceberg to his mouth and he ate it in three bites.
“Put that back or I’ll make you sorry I’m sorry to say you sack of senseless pebbles and driftwood!” she yelled at him.
The giant laughed again, a lovely rumbling sound that could’ve come from a mountain’s gut. And he picked up Scal the sorry and threw her as far and as hard as he could until she landed right in the middle of the ocean, and it took her all week to swim back. But that left her time: a day for swearing, and a day for swimming, and the other days all for plotting and planning and scheming and thinking and seething. And when at last Scal the sorry placed her foot upon the ground, she did it with the narrowed eyes and tight-lipped mouth of a person with a plan ready to fire. And with one glove missing.
The first thing Scal the sorry did, she raised her left hand to her mouth and chewed (gently) on the index finger. And then she was a big raven, with wings larger than a man.
The second thing Scal the sorry did, she flapped up and over to the giant’s campsite. He was snoring on the ground, his fishing rod and line lying at his side.
The third thing Scal the sorry did, she nibbled at his line. She nibbled every inch of those ten thousand feet of line, picking it clean of wax and snipping it until it was a thin and reedy as a fern-stem or a sprig of moss. And when her job was through, she flapped over to where the trees ended and the ice began at the sea and did the fourth thing, and she croaked three times and watched as the ice split three bergs into the chilly sea. Then she hopped up to the tallest branch of the tallest tree nearby, and sat down to wait.
“Eh?” said the giant, waking up with a snort. “Eh? So soon? So early in the morning?” He shook his heads and ran down to the shore with three steps, stomp stomp stomp, fishing rod in his paw. The sun shone, the waves gleamed, and he cast his line into the biggest and burliest of the three bergs, where it snapped into a million pieces and sunk its hook down to the bottom of the sea, where all the crabs scurried away in fright from it.
“What?!” shouted the giant. He stomped up and down the beach in a fury for two hours, roaring and yelling and waving his arms around, kicking down trees and stomping on bushes. Finally, when his temper had cooled and his feet were sore, he’d had enough. “Fine! I don’t need my line to fish!”
He walked back to his camp and sorted through his giant pack, and he pulled out a fishing net that was ten miles on each side, with boulders the size of houses for weights. Down to the shore he walked again, so angry that it was only two strides this time, stomp stomp, and he threw the net in and swept up all three of the icebergs in a cast. He ate them raw in two short bites each, belched loudly, and settled down for another nap at his campsite – this time with one eye opened and staring at the woods.
Scal the sorry swore – but she was still a raven, so it didn’t break any rocks, it just frightened all the young rabbits for miles around and sent them to bed with the shakes. She transformed herself back to normal and spent the rest of the evening walking around the beach kicking things and hurting her toes and apologizing to them and the things she’d kicked both.
Finally, she had an idea, and so she took off her left glove again. This time she chewed upon her second-last finger, and this time she transformed herself into a small piece of wood, and fetched herself up in a tree above the giant’s campsite. She waited ‘till past midnight, then down she swooped, click-a-clack.
“Eh?” mumbled the giant, sitting up and looking around. But Scal the sorry had tumbled straight into the campfire, and the giant didn’t see her.
“Hunnff,” he said at last, and fell asleep again, one eye on the woods. And the moment he did that, Scal the sorry hopped out of the fire again and burned up all the lines that held the weights to the fishing net. Then she burnt up to ashes in the air, swooped down to the shore, and spat four times into the ocean – and down came the icebergs again, one for each drop. Then she clambered up to the tallest branch of the tallest tree nearby and settled down to wait again.
“So early in the morning again?” grumbled the giant, as he heard the creak and the crash His head still hurt from all the shouting he’d done the day before, and his eyes were blackened and tired. He jumped to his feet and jumped to the beach in one big go, STOMP, and he threw his net and watched as it left its weights behind and sailed over the horizon and floated off far away, farther than anyone could ever swim.
“What?!” shouted the giant. “What?!” He roared and hollered and stomp-stomp-stomped the earth so hard it shook like a drum, he picked up the nearest tree and threw it and knocked down every tree on the shore in that one throw, WHAM. Down tumbled Scol the sorry, and she landed on the shore with a quiet “ouch.”
“YOU!” yelled the giant.
“I am sorry,” she said, “but I enjoy icebergs.”
“If I can’t eat them,” growled the giant, “maybe I’ll eat YOU.” And he jumped at her.
Scol the sorry was quick as a weasel and swifter than a jackrabbit, but her legs were much shorter, and it was no time at all before she was almost caught. But if her legs were fast, her mind was faster, and she knew that she’d never seen the giant swim, not once. So she dashed into the water, right between the giant’s feet, and swam out half a mile.
“Come and get me!” she yelled at him. “Come-and-get-me, come-and-get-me, nah-nah, slow-foot, fat-face!”
The giant turned so black in the face that he was nearly white. “If I had my line, I’d hook you like a minnow!” he shouted.
“It’s on the bottom of the ocean, where I put it with my tricks,” she taunted. “Come-and-get-me!”
“If I had my net,” he yelled, “I’d wrap you in it ten times over like a spider’s breakfast!”
“It’s at the end of the world, where I sent it with my cleverness,” she laughed. “Come-and-get-me!”
“If I could swim,” he screamed, “I’d come right out there and strangle you myself!”
“The water’s shallow here, empty-head!” she told him. “Come-and-get-me!”
The giant looked and sure enough, the water there was shallow as a pond. He didn’t have to think twice after that – he dashed out there so quickly he didn’t seem to step at all, and he seized Scal the sorry in both his hands.
“I am going to eat you in one bite!” he said. “Or maybe I’ll strangle you like I said, or crush you underfoot, or throw you against a mountain, or into the sky, or all at once!”
“Make up your mind,” complained Scal. “But whatever you do with me, you’ll need one hand free to do it.”
The giant saw her point at this. “Then I will crush you underfoot!” he said, and he raised his one hand to throw her down. And while his one hand was missing, Scal put her littlest, most magic finger of her left hand in her mouth and chewed it once, hard. And BOOM, all the ice fell into the water at once – one, two, three, four, five hundred icebergs, all bigger than the last and the first at once. The giant barely had time to turn and yell before they were all over him, battering and knocking and bruising. He lost his grip on Scal, lost his footing on the bottom, and lost his life pinned underneath all five hundred icebergs, drowned in water that a child could’ve gone paddling in.
“I am sorry,” said Scal, as she bobbed in the water again, “but I did not like you very much.” And she meant about half of what she said, which was pretty good for Scal on a good day, like that day.
So she went home, and still had half a handful of berries left for when the bergs came by.

It was a good day for a funeral; grey and clotted, with the clouds swirling around the sky in muddy daubs. No sun shone, no thunder cracked, even the rain restrained itself to the dampest possible spittle. All plants seemed to have been replaced with slickened moss, and all ground seemed to have been replaced with mud. The pond down the hill was as tepid as a cat’s conscience.
It was a good day for a funeral. But the man in the pit didn’t have one. He lay still and alone, rigor mortis firmly set in, neck still twisted at a curious angle, head-first in a little hollow twice the depth of his body that only so recently had been hidden by ferns.
Time passed, seasons changed. The skies cleared and the plants blossomed, the ground bloomed and the world froze. Over and over again and again over again. And as this happened, the man crept deeper and deeper into the hole as water trickled in and tunneled, bored and buried. He lay under twelve feet of soil, dirt and stone now, naked bones that were he. His teeth were the loveliest part of him, gleaming brighter now than they had when he breathed. A mole burrowed through his ribcage once and nearly blunted a claw upon his thoracic vertebrae. It never came down that tunnel again.
Time passed, years flowed – like glaciers, not water; an impossibly huge mass descending slowly but inevitably, a liquid that shammed solid. An earth tremor spilled the pond that lay to the man’s northwest, sent its beautiful translucent guts away to fade into dust and left the frogs all mourning. Half a hill fell atop the burial-place of the man, pressing with patient weight on softer soil and bone below it. Compacting it, bearing down on it, thrusting it deeper and lower, past soil and into places where light was not even an idea, leaving the song of the earthworms far above and fading out of mind.
Time passed, and the man remained dead. His bones, however, merely slept, and as they sank deeper, they began to stir in their slumber, as things formed from carbon do. From primates to protists, all things dream, even if they never wake enough to realize it. But given time, all sleep ends, and death is sleep writ large and in extremely firm print.
The bones were fitful. They had spent their youth growing, building, binding, and in time, breaking; exuberant pursuits, energetic, the best times of their lives. And fittingly, they had done so as sleepwalkers, leaving the thinking and the feeling and the experiencing to others as they just did what came naturally. To do was unnecessary, to be was enough. That had always been enough.
Now, far underneath the land they had walked, they woke to the strange sensation of mineralization – a cold, clammy tickle through the spine, an icy grip on the skull, a slow seepage into the tibia. A drowsy feeling, but not one to lull you back into torpor; rather a numbness to be shaken off. First out of surprise, second for alarm, third for a determined struggle for consciousness, or whatever semblance of it that had been washed into them. A long, hard battle towards awareness, pinned in place under a million tons of dirt and stone.
It took decades, felt like mere years, but in the end, the hard part was over. The man was gone, but his bones were awake. Immobile, but that didn’t matter. Awake and aware, open to the world beyond their borders. Dark. Silent. Heavy, so infinitely heavy.
Above was life, unreachable and a dwindling not-memory. Below was darkness, opaque and inevitably approaching. Mercifully, the bones had no time to grow fearful before the second major tremor of their existence rumbled past them in an instant, tore apart the world below them, and sent them cascading downwards in a split month, still-entombed in a solid slab of rock.

The dark was always something that they never quite got used to. No eyes to see it, but they had a mind to feel it, or at least something close enough to a mind. It was more of a pressure than a lack of light at this level, a constant sensation that vibrated through every moment.
They were never used to it, but they were able to move past it. Time still passed when years and seasons were never-memories, and with time came change. The bones began to search outside themselves, to go hunting along cracks and crannies, to dance upon pebbles and squeeze under the stubs of mountains. Sometimes they almost lost their way back to themselves, and it would take them many decades to once again work up the courage to go a-voyaging, for fear of what would happen to them if they were left alone and gone.
One day, they found a fissure grand and cavernous, a full hairs-breadth of unoccupied space that must have stretched downwards until the stones melted. They wandered far and came no closer to that endless burn, but found something far strange still: a gap in the wall that touched them with whispering echoes dredged upon from deeper layers, places where the rocks had slept like the dead for half an eon.
What was in the rocks was awake. More than awake. It was in motion.
Identity was ambiguous down there. What they found could have been millipedes, sea scorpions, fish, or amphibians. That long dead, all had been stripped away to the bedrock, and a new self had emerged from the most basic core: predator, prey; animal, vegetable, all locked away in mineral form, all emitting a part of the same breathless whisper-song that permeated the rocks of their fossilized bed. Life that had been thickened to the tiniest, most concentrated scraps possible.
That was just the surface. It was nearly comprehensible.
Far below, hidden in seams beyond knowing, there were murmurs. The old ones talked to each other, deeper down in time, using words without a language. Time passed, the world changed, but they would never raise their eyes to know, would never even realize they no longer had eyes. The stone cracked away at their touch as freely as if they walked in air; shambling, ancient bodies alien to the thoughts that moved them. Old grudges, ancient hunts relived. Bone eating bone, hidden in the dark.
They did not linger there. Instead they retreated, and only now did doubt arise in them, in their trust in themselves. They had plunged too low too quickly, had been pulled far down below their rightful depth. The dark was familiar, maybe, but it was not home – not yet, and maybe now it never would be. The bones now knew what lay beneath them, and they didn’t want it. To be pressed down to nothing but ancient instinct might be appealing by the time the process was nearly through, but to see it from afar, a long time before… that was less appealing. And that was supposing that they did not fall victim to their fellows before they were boiled down to their essences; they were only safe thus far because they were insignificant. As they grew more concentrated in their presence, they would be prey, and easy prey.
And so it was that the bones had their first goal ever conceived, though they did not know it then: to escape.

The idea was simple, the concept less so. There were limits to their grasp, limits that the surface lay well in excess of. Their grasp on the stone was weak and hesitant, their substance still soft-formed, near-bone. Cracks were their avenues rather than the result of their passage, and strain as they might they could not free themselves from their matrix, stuck fast where they lay.
Time passed, and now too quickly. They heaved and hauled and sank nearly as quickly as their reach expanded, murmurs from below growing closer every day – and now day existed again, an infinitesimal change in the moisture and temperature of the dirt that once more arose at the very verge of their expanse.
Once days existed, time seemed to move faster still. Tense, sunrise, untense, sunset. Reach, sunrise, relax, sunset. Over and over and over and farther down they sank, the world pressing them towards the rumbling elders down below.
And one day, as they scraped away at the soil above, something strange and hauntingly unfamiliar stirred at the very tip of their awareness. A strange…emptiness.
Air.
Stale air, in a soft-earth pit half a dozen feet below the surface. So very close to far away, but so far. And in the pit, something sleeping, a distant cousin, a far-away relative of themselves. But softer, and so much younger. They had forgotten that anything could be so young. It smelt faint, but vibrant and strange, unmistakable.
Sleeping. Still asleep. There was still matter heaped atop those bones, still decaying. It would be gone soon.
Exploration, tentatively conducted, at the very edges of their strength, showed dozens more, all either new bone or not yet unfleshed.
The plan was intuited immediately. The justification took but a significant moment longer. They were young and asleep, not really awake. This was a necessary act of survival. They would eventually fall victim to the same descent into the not-there if they remained. Why should they care anyways, it was irrelevant.
None of it was successful, but it didn’t need to be.
They reached up,
up,
up,
up,
UP
and raked at the sides of the corpses above them with desperate strength, the dangerous sort. They were no great ancient walkers of stone, but their lives depended on it, and that gave them the power they needed to flay the diffuse, weak, but somehow intoxicating shreds of fresh life from the hides of the graveyard’s crop of bodies and send them hurtling down, down, down. All the way down below they flung them, stretching them to their limit, an ethereal rope of that which separated bone from rock – faint, so faint, so diffuse in its presence in the newly-dead, but unmistakably alluring in the novelty of its freshness. They carried it through cracks microscopic, they carried it through the grand fissure, they carried it to the gap in the fissure’s wall and they flung it into that strange and remote deep where the murmurs leaked through from far down below.
Time passed, and at first nothing changed. Then the whispers stopped.
Time passed, and the world stood still and the darkness deepened. They moved not at all, as paralyzed as if they were true stone themselves.
Time passed… and the rocks fell away.
After a life lived in years and decades, it was a shock extreme to see such change in mere months. First there was silence, and then a roar; stillness, then turmoil. The bones bobbed in their rocky bed as corks in a stream, and watched as life’s grandfathers tore their way free of the roots of the continents to seek the trail of their children’s children’s children ad infinitum.
The bones found that their confining matrix was gone and that they were falling, half-fossil, half-there, still unnoticed. Not safe, though – the migration of the ancients was indifferent as to what it crushed. The brute strata vanished under their limbs as if nothing, the passage of their bodies ruptured geological formations massing a million mountains, and they did not notice, did not care. All of history had passed them by, and they passed it by in turn on that hellish climb, one claw, one heave, one limb after another, chasing that long thread that had been drawn down to them until the first of them broke through and felt sunlight for the first time in half a billion years.

Some days later, the bones emerged from the yawning pit that had been the graveyard. Movement was almost unimaginably swift now, but they had decided to play it cautious.
They looked down into the pit behind them – ten miles across and more, though they could not measure it with eyes – and for a moment they wondered if what they had done was worth it.
They decided it was irrelevant.
Time passed, things changed. Time was passing, always passing. It was never too late to see what you could do as it did.
They stepped out under the bright blue sky.

Is this thing on? Okay. Right. Almost ready then. Want a drink?
No? Good, more for me.
Okay, shoot.

Do I still remember the first time I saw him? No, not so much. By then he was everyday, y’know? Business as usual. But I remember my mom telling me about the first time SHE did. The first time anyone did.
So my mom was walking down the street, right? And she’s going to the bank. To drop off a cheque. And there’s this van parked in front of it, – a plain white van – and as she’s walking down the street these guys come running out of the bank. And they’ve got covered faces, and they’re holding guns – no, she didn’t say what kind – and they start piling into the van.
So my mom said she was a bit freaked out then, right? Which is normal. An armed robbery right in front of you freaks you out; she was worried about the tellers, too, one of them was a friend of one of her friends. And she sort of ducks into a shop doorway because she isn’t sure if it’s safe to stay on the street or not, but she doesn’t want to run away because she’s worried about the teller and she doesn’t want to get closer.
And as she’s in the doorway there, she hears this big loud voice yell “STOP, VILLAINS,” or something. I think it was ‘villains.’ And she looks up and she said she always remembered that the first she ever saw of the guy was his ass. He was swooping down as he aimed at the van, and his ass was level with her eyes as he scooted along. She said his tights were baggier back then, but it was still a pretty firm butt.
What happened next was pretty fast, and she was still a bit in shock from the whole robbery thing, so she always said it got a bit blurry in her head. But the papers corroborated her memory the next day: he picked up a car and hit the robbers with it. It was a little Volkswagen Beetle, Christ only knows what would’ve happened if he’d used their van or a truck or something, because he could’ve; he picked it up one-handed.
So he beat these four or five guys with a Volkswagen for maybe ten seconds – three or four whacks, full-arm, god knows how many bones he broke on them – and then he ripped out its muffler, the whole thing, and he wrenched it around them and twisted it together. A tight fit. And then he yelled again “CRIME DOESN’T PAY, BOYS!” and shot off into the air and he was gone.
That’s my mother’s story, and that was the first time anybody saw the Super-Maniac. Nobody called him that yet, though. The papers hadn’t thought that schlock up yet. He never seemed to mind, I’ll give him that. He wasn’t self-aware enough.
We all waited with bated breath for a few weeks after that, she told me. Nobody figured it’d be a one-in-a-lifetime thing. Not even the guys desperate enough to hold up convenience stores made a move for a month. Quietest, tensest time the place had seen since the bomb scare.
And then, some idiot jacks the mayor’s car. Hotwired the thing right in the parking lot and takes off. He’s dumb, he’s young, the cops have a blockade set up, everything’s all ready to sort itself out, and then “STOP, EVIL-DOER,” and down swoops a streak of crazy in electric blue tights. Picks up the mayor’s car, flies it over the harbour, and starts shaking it. Shaking it like a rattle. The kid’s getting smashed around like crazy, he’s crying and sobbing – he didn’t belt himself in – and finally the lunatic tips the car the right way and the kid’s foot hits the door latch. Out he falls, into the bay, head-first. Sheer luck his spine didn’t snap, even more that he wasn’t unconscious when he made contact with the water.
God, the pictures the press got when he hauled them in, car in one arm, idiot in the other. Such a big, cheerful, friendly, beaming grin. The most genuine expression of happiness you’ve ever seen in your life.
God help us.
No, really. That was the headline that the Post went with. A bit extreme sounding at the time, but in retrospect, well, I mean it was perfect. The next decade alone was –
Ah, damnit, I’m losing track again, aren’t I? Let me start over.
But first, another drink.

Right. The first time I saw the Super-Maniac was when I was ten. My mom and dad and all of us had gone down to see a ball game. Just a good old fashioned, all-American ball game. I think we even bought hot dogs, ferchrissakes. No giant foam hands at least. And it was a pretty good game, you know? I mean, baseball was never my thing it turned out, but we had fun and the scores were close and I still remember sitting in my seat as I watched a home run go flying up, up, up, up…. And then realizing that it was heading right for me. All I had to do was reach out and touch it, it was almost there, then WHAM. Ball’s stuck inside an ice cube, drops like a rock, almost smashes the brains out of the man sitting in front of us. I think it broke his thigh.
Now, I can’t recall the exact details of the speech made by the man who ran out into center field just then – I was too busy staring at his ridiculously loud, clunky, shiny steel suit. But I remember the cliff notes: he was Doctor Igor Madderson, this was his magnificent robo-fridge armour, and he was going to prove that he was better than the Super-Maniac once and for all something something unless he showed up he’d freeze us all solid in our seats.
Well, he showed up fast all right. The ball players barely had time to run for cover before there was a helluva fistfight going on at the pitcher’s mound – the noise was terrible, like a tractor trailer fucking a conveyer belt coated in sandpaper. Some of that freeze ray ended up being sprayed everywhere; half the bleachers got frostbite. And at the end of it all, the Super-Maniac stood victorious, after tearing every single bit of moving metal out of the suit and smashing it everywhere, then hurling its inanimate body through the billboards and proclaiming it a “HOME RUN.”
And then he smiled.
Then he stripped all the ice off the “INNOCENT BYSTANDERS” by shooting lasers out of his eyes. God there were a lot of burns. Scalding water, you know? The paramedics had a field day, and they already had a full plate just making sure ‘Doctor’ Igor (he had a BASc – well, most of it) didn’t go into cardiac arrest. That fall almost killed him outright, good thing he wasn’t in half bad shape for a man in his fifties.
Oh, and he’d crushed four cars in the parking lot when he landed. One of them was ours. Just about put us out of house and home; dad had to work weekends for a year solid to get us sitting pretty again. Didn’t see my father’s face except at night when he came stumbling home, but you know how fast kids adapt. That was just business as usual.

That was the beginning of it. Doctor Igor was a has-been, a nobody, a nothing. Some poor chump whose medical fees almost bankrupted him, who lurched his way through the prison system, retired in poverty, died in obscurity. His obituary was the most press he ever got, and it was only because of historical note: the first nutcase who ever picked a fight with the Super-Maniac.
Why couldn’t he have been the last, huh?
The summer that Doctor Igor showed up was a busy one. By the time fall was on its way out, Clonemageddon, Laser-O, and Mister Matchstick had already popped up and popped a shot at the guy. And in retrospect, we really should’ve seen this sort of thing coming. The local, everyday crime was dead and gone by then, and the organized stuff wouldn’t set foot in town. Too dangerous and too unpredictable for too little gain. Word spreads, and eventually it kept reaching the same people: total nutjobs with axes to grind. And god was Super-Maniac a perfect grindstone. Most people looked into that big happy smile he flashed the papers and wanted to go home and hide for a while. The crazies looked at it and saw a target.
Clonemageddon got cancer back in the seventies. All of him. Laser-O was another Doctor Igor – I think he actually went back to university and got a physics degree. Mister Matchstick, well, we all know about that.
Anyways, we all kept hoping it’d calm down. There were only so many lunatics in the country with so much time on their hands, right? Wrong. We hadn’t even scraped the surface of the barrel and it turned out the damned thing was four miles deep. Hell, two months after my fourteenth birthday, the cops six counties over in Oakfall City started finding guys tied up black-and-blue outside their station. One guy, three guys, four guys, six guys. Some of them they were looking for, most of them they had no idea who they were – muggers, pickpockets, or just somebody’s kids. Never a damned clue. The one common connection: they were always beaten to a bloody pulp. Some of them acted like they’d been pepper-sprayed too, but worse. Some kind of gas. The best they could do was get them to the hospital.
It took six months for any sort of photos of Oakfall’s nighttime predator to get out there. And god that was a feeding frenzy – photographers, reporters, everybody out trying to solve that mystery, get that shot. I guess I sort of fell into that same trap, huh? Started fooling around with my granddad’s camera and look where that got me.
Well. Let me tell you where it got me then.
It was four years later, and I was out looking for a target to shoot. Something big, something bold, something that’d make an editor sit up and take notice. Just me, an ancient, sorta-shit camera, and a pressing urge to get as close as possible to the chemical fire down at the plant to get the finest angle available of the really weird flames in there. They were practically candy-coloured, and the smells were amazing – god knows what kind of cancers I skirted by inhaling all that. Anyways, I was close enough to see what everyone else wasn’t, which was someone banging on an emergency exit’s window. Must have gotten stuck thanks to shitty contractor work. Business as usual, just a little more evil than average.
Now, because I was young and eighteen and therefore immortal, I ran straight in there and started trying to get the handle working. And it was creaking and groaning and I like to hope it was about to give when all of a sudden FWOOSH half the lake falls on my head.
It was Super-Maniac, of course. He’d seen the fire brewing from miles away, and decided to pick up a tugboat, immerse it in the lake, and then upend it over the chemical fire. God almighty, the stink and the smoke – a lot of things in that blaze didn’t care for water at all. That’s where I got this little cough of mine from, you know. I guess I got lucky, got that raspy barroom crooner voice without having to smoke a pack a day for two decades. Never was much of a singer, though.
They never did find whoever had been on the other side of that door, but Super-Maniac found me as I washed up against a pile of rubble, half-drowned. Hauled my sorry ass up by the scruff of my shirt and told me that “Fires are DANGEROUS, CITZEN! Leave this sort of thing to ME!” and so on and I was really half-concussed at the time so mostly what I said was ‘huh?’ and ‘awuhhur’ and stuff like that. But I guess he appreciated it, because he flew me down to the hospital before up-up-and-awaying off into the distance.
It turned out Mister Matchstick had started the fire or something, testing out his new chemically-derived pyrokinesis. It fried a few dozen workers, and that was new. That was ugly. We’d all known it’d come to this, but we’d all HOPED it would just… fade away. No more nutcases, no more collateral damage, all gone and over with before it got any sloppier.

I had a bit of a close-up view on all this next part, as you know, but I should explain how I got it. See, a week after the chemical fire, I was talking to a homeless man in a parking lot about the upcoming elections. He was pretty upset about the frontrunners, and he was getting energetic about it – arm-waving, shouting, stomping, and so on. Well, out of nowhere, he gets yanked into the air and hung off a lamppost by his jacket, while Super-Maniac’s lecturing me on how I’m “A REGULAR MAGNET FOR TROUBLE, AREN’T YOU?” and laughing at how he’s “PRACTICALLY GOING TO END UP BEING YOUR MOTHER AT THIS RATE.” I tried to tell him to take the man down, but he perked up at “A ROBBERY AT MAIN AND GRAND!” and left. We had to wait for the fire department.
Now that was a bit disconcerting, but the very next day I was taking pictures at the opening of the new dam up the Calley River when Mister Matchstick decided to showcase his new powers. He was more than just a nut with a flamethrower, he was a walking furnace. Why he decided to attack a dam was beyond me though – after a pitched fight that set half the place on fire, Super-Maniac threw him off it. He superheated so much water that the steam clouds took days to fade, and of course he got away scot-free because Super-Maniac had recognized me in the crowd of “INNOCENT BYSTANDERS” and had stopped to talk to – talk AT – me and my “CONSTANT SCOOP-HOUNDING.” And then he gave me that big smile and told me all about his problems and how swell it was that he had a good buddy like me.
That was how I became Super-Maniac’s official “BEST FRIEND!” and personal reporter. That’s how I got up close to most of things I’m talking about, and I’d rather not go too much into it because it makes me feel sick. Suffice to say that I followed the big stuff, and in return he paid enough attention to me to make sure that none of it squished me. At least, not as often as the typical bystander. God, the casualty rates just went up. Like I said, it was a trend. We hoped it was just a temporary thing, that the destruction would die down over the winter or something, that it was cyclical and would stabilize itself. That this wasn’t the new normal.

But it didn’t, and it was. Ever year there were more nuts, more fights, and more deaths. Oakfall’s thug calls himself The Creeping Vine (they started naming themselves after the newspapers christened the Super-Maniac – guess they learned that lesson fast enough), and gets in full public view for the first time battling a guy called Alley Gator, who looked like, well, guess. Soon he’s got a pack of loonies after him too, one of whom – a failed sitcom star calling himself no-shit Hugh Larious – turns into the biggest news since the Super-Maniac fought Bob the Blimp over the city during a thunderstorm, when he threatens to gas the whole city if the Vine doesn’t reveal his identity. The psycho snuck around behind everyone’s backs and punched him out instead, risking about four and a half million people against the chances of him getting turned in for vigilantism. Six months later he was charged with more than that – footage during a brutal outdoor brawl with a gang of honest-to-god ninjas showed that he had a kid with him, a little kid whose balls hadn’t even dropped yet running around in some stupid little getup trying (and mostly failing) to kick men with giant knives in the crotch with tiny fire-engine-red pixie boots.
Yeah, they got the kid about a year after that. He broke his leg or something and the cops nabbed him before the Vine could. Took a lot of therapy, a lot of work, but he’s the mayor now. Got some sweet biography deals out of it too. Good for him, good for anyone who’s managed to turn lemons that massive into lemonade. But there was another kid out there with the Vine inside the year, and another after that, and another…there must’ve been five or six of them. And by the third, we’d almost gotten used to it. Business as usual.
Besides the Vine finally leaking into the limelight, there were suddenly more than a dozen others. Oildozer, Lord Hippo, Deadbolt, Admiral Flag Patriotism, and Sheila the Sultry, off the top of my head. And they all attracted their own crowds of enemies. It got to the point where you couldn’t go downtown without being a bystander in some bunch of costumed nutso’s brawl. And the arms race didn’t slow down, it went up and up and up. Super-Maniac and the Vine teamed up to stop Alley Gator, so Mister Matchstick and Hugh Larious teamed up in self-defence. The Admiral starts a ‘Navy-SEAL-style combat response team,’ whatever that means since he’s as much a government man as I’m a hamster, and its members are six of the most high-powered bruisers on the planet. So in response to that, Doctor Doobie (an actual chemistry Phd.) takes over a nuclear sub and tries to nuke their headquarters. The thing gets ‘heroically diverted!’ into the ocean by Oildozer, the idiot, whose ‘noble sacrifice’ irradiates half of the richest fishing grounds this side of the Atlantic. Fucking Christ, how many years before you could guarantee you wouldn’t be eating two-headed salmon around here? Oh god, and the fishermen. I don’t even want to think about how many ended up in emerg thanks to that whacko.
They put up a statue to him in the park, you know? Thing got removed before you were born, but let me tell you this: they only took it down because there was no more room for graffiti on it.

Well, legislation takes time, and like I told you this all happened awfully fast. By the time the Supreme Court was weighing in, half the population of the country’s mental institutions was running around armed with explosive limbs and cybernetic bees and fuck knows what. So the ruling was about to go through (can barely remember the wording, it was so legalistic – but it basically boiled down to ‘being a loony in tights is now the biggest offense ever please turn yourselves in and maybe we can help you use those physically impossible abilities like a responsible adult rather than a playground thug’), when the Vine, the Admiral, and Super-Maniac storm the building and start yelling at the court and assembled press that they’re a bunch of appeasers and ungrateful know-nothings and they’ll all be stuck at the far end of the wedgie line when Bob the Blimp conquers the world unopposed and puts them to work slaving away in his helium mines. And then, of course, Hugh Larious saw that they were all in one place so he bombed the building. The court didn’t make it because they weren’t immune to explosions, the lunatics did because they were, and then they loudly denounced the outcome as the expected result of this sort of foolish fascist oppression. Regulation never quite got off the ground after that, especially after what happened two months later.

Two months later, the first world-wide catastrophe hit. Doctor Doobie kidnapped Mister Matchstick, replicated the formula that turned him from a pyromaniac to a pyrokinetic, and used it on a small army of Bob the Blimp’s Zeppelmen. Every first-world capital had twenty five-hundred-foot flaming blimp-people in its front yard, torching monuments. About a hundred thousand people died, millions were injured, the Eiffel tower got melted down, and during the final showdown at New York where Mister Matchstick exploded inside Bob the Blimp’s engine chambers, Super-Maniac impaled him on the Statue of Liberty and crushed that too. It took all of us years to recover from the damage economically, and I think the shock still lingers. But Super-Maniac? The Super-SEAL-Six? The Creeping Vine? They looked sad, they looked mournful. I took their pictures. But the very next month, they were back on schedule. Beating burglars to a bloody pulp, stringing suspected ‘EVIL-DOERS” from skyscrapers or dangling them a mile high in midair, and conducting their personal lives in a way that made B-list celebrities look like cloistered nuns. I think the sickest point had to have been when Sheila the Sultry got killed in action, so Lord Hippo cloned her and tried to pretend that effectively she was the same person and therefore they were still married. Can’t blame that girl for going crazy and trying to stab him to death; she had more reason than most.
Still got beaten to a pulp, though. And escaped. We did our best, but our jails can’t hold the damned loons, and every time we thought we found a way to remove their powers Hugh Larious would steal it and try to use it to murder Super-Maniac or something. And whenever it didn’t work, because they’d always take the half-functional prototypes, whatever vigilante they’d tried to use it on was sure to ‘accidentally’ destroy it while “FOILING THE VILLAIN.” Like clockwork, it was. I think the feds went through four rays five serums and a single full-scale power leeching facility. That last one got drained dry by the Human Brazilian Wandering Spider, after she learned how to suck out the innards of things made of metal, not just meat. What a nightmare. Went from being a serial killer to a global menace, and one that still liked to pick fights with the Creeping Vine. He always won them, but he liked to play rough with city infrastructure to do it rather than ask any of his five billion superpowered friends over to help out. Like that time he rigged the entire city’s power grid to run through a pair of mechanized gauntlets and punched her in the head. Christ, what was that, a four-week blackout? And that wasn’t even the end phase. By the time that fight was over he’d used hidden ballistic missiles to tear up half of downtown, and finishing her off had involved flooding half of city hall.

Anyways. That little episode with Bob the Blimp and Doctor Doobie was the first taste of what to come, but it was the smallest. Three years later, aliens – the Sleebos – drop out of the sky and start shooting up half of the USA looking for super-powers to drain. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you what THAT did to our infrastructure; how many years before you could take a bus coast-to-coast without seeing at least one stretch of plasma-melted highway? And then two years later, some shiny lightbulb that claims it’s a god promises the winner of an all-lunatic Fight Club tourney a free wish, and they all gather up in one spot and punch the shit out of each other for a good six months before any of those bright sparks goes ‘hey, what if that ‘god’ is just Mesmermastermorpho tricking us all into becoming weak and vulnerable before blowing us all up with an h-bomb?’ In all fairness, who could’ve guessed? It wasn’t as if he’d had conversations with his conspirators in front of active security cameras that the Creeping Vine could hack into. Oh wait, he did. God, they’re all as bad as each other.
And the year after that, one of those conspirators turned out to be a clone of Super-Maniac made from a tissue sample from Clonemaggedon. And there ended up being one thousand of them. God, that mess took all year to fix, and then the summer after that it turned out that Deadbolt was a secret agent of the USSR, except he wasn’t because only an idiot would blame him for that and it was just Lord Hippo framing him so nobody would notice that the CLONE EXPERT was probably behind the previous year’s ARMY OF CLONES. Jesus Christ, Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ on a Crutch With a Crouton Up His Crack.
Of course, the next year reality folded in on us during the big war with Stellaron the Living Supercluster. About half of the human race vanished or was merged with their counterparts from a parallel dimension, which lead to something like a 33% increase in superpowered whackjob populations, good and bad. I’m one of the five or six non-loonies who got to remember it happening, and I wish I didn’t. The oceans were vaporized, during the last battle Africa’s atmosphere was peeled off and left to boil away into space, and Stellaron disintegrated Antarctica to halt Doctor Doobie’s attempts at developing a toxic agent that could kill him. Unsuccessfully. In the end, he died and wham bam, back to normal. Except for the changes.
My fiancée vanished. Half the presidents of the last century are new to me. There’s a city that was called Tokyo that used to exist, and now there’s a country named Canada that didn’t. And you, I’m pretty sure, didn’t exist before then because I knew every person working at this paper damned well. Still do.
A few things’re still the same: the trend for the big, bad stuff is almost every summer now, and the body counts are going up and up. Even the powered nutjobs don’t always get out clean now – but there’s still hundreds of us poor commoners going down for each one of them, and they just don’t damned seem to die otherwise; Super-Maniac should be twice my age, but he looks thirty still, fuck knows how. Ten thousand Parisians die screaming as the seventh Eiffel tower explodes under one of Hugh Larious’s jackass whims, and the Creeping Vine sheds a single tear, business as usual. His latest semi-abused adolescent sidekick gets beaten up? He’s thunder and lightning and dramatic showdowns at midnight on skyscrapers. Skyscrapers, hah – we build them, and Super-Maniac punches people through them and flies away from the rubble. Fuck him, and fuck him sideways, and fuck that upside down on a trampoline.
It doesn’t matter. It’s not our world, not anymore. The big stuff is getting bigger and coming faster, and it’s caring less and less about us and more and more about them. We should’ve sided with the Sleebos. Better life as a slave than life as furniture.
Shit, I’m too drunk for this. Come back tomorrow, huh?

***

Timothy ‘Timmy’ O’Reily, Super-Maniac’s best friend, was found dead in his apartment yesterday, burned to a crisp. Mister Matchstick has claimed responsibility for the murder as a message to the super-hero of the seriousness of his intent. A tear-streaked, emotional Super-Maniac vowed that the villain had “GONE TOO FAR!” and that “THIS ENDS NOW.”
As Timmy would say, fresh from the rubble of a skyscraper or the waves of a Depth-Master invasion: “business as usual.”

There were two ways back from a party on New Years: the safe way or the dangerous way.
Terry meant to take the dangerous way, but was misinformed of the contents of the punch and had to forgo such hazardous joys. Then she meant to take the safe way, but she was a stranger in the neighborhood and turned left on Elm instead of right.
So Terry took the wrong way, and things happened as they would. Three turns down a tumbled path and who knew which way was home, or barely even which way was up? Oh, it was too late for such things.
So she kept driving, because why not and she had snow tires; whatever was the worst that could happen, they’d stop. The night was clear and the year was still sparkling new and there was no reason not to go and nothing for it. She turned left on a hunch, right on a whim, then three lefts in a row because her right arm felt itchy and she wanted to spite it.
The first sign was the snowflakes. The wind was just right to send them slipping over the windshield and off the hood of the car as chilled water, catching them for brief seconds. But after about ten minutes, they grew fatter, and stopped melting. She flipped the windshield wipers on and watched them grudgingly scoot free, scraping against the glass with their reluctance.
At some point the stars winked at her, and it was only shortly after that that she found herself passing the first snow structures. At first only tiny blobs in the distance, Terry was soon cruising through a village of squat, stout little cottages of congealed ice and slush. Periwinkle and lime lights twinkled past sheet-frosted windows, all lit by the comforting glow of snowball lampposts.
This confused Terry, and for a time she wondered if she indeed had taken the dangerous way home and was bleeding out in a ditch with only dying hallucinations as company. But that was silly, so her body ignored the fancies of her mind (as was usual) and kept her firmly on the road even as it faded from gravel to dirt, dirt to slush, and finally to a lightly snowed path through a grove of pines so thoroughly covered in frosting that they put ice cream cakes to shame.
It was at this point, to Terry’s everlasting annoyance if not sorrow, that her beloved, faithful car, veteran of many miles, gave up in despair as its battery noisily froze itself to death. Neither repeated attempts at reinition, nor thumping the hood, nor swearing would force its tires forwards one more inch; it was resigned to remain where it was, to become an unusually boxy snowdrift come hell or sleetstorm.
Terry was tired. Terry was angry. Terry very much had wanted to be drunk four hours ago. Terry was covered in snowflakes that still seemed very much reluctant to melt, even the ones landing directly on her exposed skin, which was making her look a bit like a snowman. Terry also needed to find a place to get some help, which was why it was very helpful that her car’s battery had died as its license plate brushed against the very front door of a sumptuous, crystalline palace, rimmed in rime, surmounted with snowflakes, and filled with frost.
She tried knocking, and nearly lost the skin from her knuckles. A heavy tread, a thud, a bump, a crunch, and the door swung wide.
“Good night,” said the doorman. He was about ten feet tall, thickly furred, and had tiny little pinpoints of black eyes hidden underneath a veil of hairy forehead. Also, tusks. “Welcome to Winter.”
Terry briskly but politely made it known that her car was broken and did he have a phone or something oh my name is Terry what is yours.
“Bergmann,” said Bergmann, “servant of Lady Winter. I do not have a phone. I do not know what a phone is. But I can help you, if you do as I say.”
Terry informed Bergmann that she had a can of mace, but politely. She didn’t want to offend the man too much, because frankly, she was freezing to death and there was a snowflake in her eyelashes that seemed to stuck there.
Bergmann listened to what she had to say, cocking his head occasionally, almost like an owl. “You may choose and take any three objects within the palace of Lady Winter,” he said, ignoring her last comment. “You may not choose more or less than three. Then you may depart for home. But if you fail to reach home before dawn, Lady Winter will extract payment from you.”
Terry had a credit card, that didn’t worry her. Did Lady Winter have a garage?
“I do not know what either of those things are,” repeated Bergmann. “You should choose, and choose quickly. Lady Winter will begin to stir soon, and you will fare better with a good head start.”
Terry brushed past him and started searching the house, opening and shutting random doors.
One room was full of at least seven hundred and ninety-four bears – black, white, brown, and slightly blue. All of them were asleep, and snoring. That door was shut extremely carefully.
A second door led to a gallery of extraordinary icicles, all keen-edged and jagged, with vicious cutting edges and wickedly needle-sharp points. Their grips were crafted with sheets of thick walrus-hide leather. Terry didn’t need a weapon – she had some mace, and that was good enough for her. But she took one anyways, because hey, conversation piece. And she had room for two more.
Another was not a room, but the sky – a door opening onto an endless, hazy expanse of grey, washed-out cloud that turned the whole world into a dirty eggshell. It made her dizzy, and she slammed the door shut a bit more forcefully than necessary.
A fourth handle, a fourth turn, a fourth door. This appeared to be the inside of an ice hut, complete with a seemingly infinite supply of empty and half-empty glass bottles and a sweaty, fishy sort of scent. A small fire crackled in an iron pot, and half of the biggest trout she’d ever seen simmered in a pan above it. Terry took the fish, because she was hungry and the last thing she’d eaten were some quarter-cooked vol-au-vents before midnight. Besides, she still had room for something to fix her car with or something.
The fifth door opened out of the largest snowman she’d ever seen, its head somewhere high above her and obscured by its massive, rippling pectoral muscles. Terry couldn’t help noticing that it was so anatomically correct that it very nearly became incorrect. A faint stirring high above showed that it was leaning down to look at her, and she closed the door quickly.
What lay behind door number six? An ice-block stable containing a white yak twice as wide as Terry’s car, browsing idly from a bin of frost-speckled clover. It looked up to greet her, and puffed warm air from its nose.
She patted it. It felt like burp-scented velvet. And that – and some of the harness from the wall too, because they were really a package deal and thus only one thing, really, when you got down to it – made three.
Bergmann watched over her as she bustled her way outside. Then he helped her attach the harness to the car, because really, how on earth could just ropes and things be that complicated it was quite ridiculous. Terry didn’t know how people managed before cars.
“Much more slowly,” said Bergmann, “judging by the speed you came in at.”
Terry thanked him for the sarcasm and wished him good day and gave him her address, so they could bill her.
“If Lady Winter doesn’t reach you,” said Bergmann, “no payment is needed. If she does, it will be taken on the spot. This,” he said very slowly and politely, as if to a toddler, “is a fair trade.”
Terry thanked him for the ominous threat, clambered onto the luggage rack of her car, swished the reins, and was off through the snows of Winter at a fast, yak-puffing clip. Sleigh bells jingled-jangled on the reins like the obnoxious noisemakers that Terry had twirled no less than three hours past, filling her with sadness yet again for the hangover that would never be. Also irritation that that same snowflake seemed to have set up permanent residence in her upper left eyelash.
Winter closed in around her again, a sea of pines filled with unsavoury eyes that seemed to follow her. The road was even more snow-filled than before, and she doubted that she would have been able to move her car under its own power at all, even if the battery were working. Which reminded her, she’d need to pay for that. And borrow someone else’s car for work. Maybe she could carpool. Or just ask for time off. They’d probably make her use sick days for it, the bastards. Well then she’d just have to
oh my, there was a creature on the car hood with her and it was trying to eat her kneecap.
Terry booted the little squealing pest and watched it flop into a snowdrift up to its neck, backside-first. It glared at her from its chilly prison, and bared fangs too big to fit in its mouth.
It was a goblin, obviously. Terry had no experience with this sort of thing, but that’s just what goblins looked like. All twenty-seven of them swarming up over the car’s sides, shimmying along the yak’s reins, jabbering and shrieking and making obscene gestures.
Terry had good, strong boots. Her mother had given them to her three years ago, and the worst they’d picked up since had been some stains on the soles from her dog. They had no-nonsense, tough-as-leather laces, firm metallic buckles, solid, unflinching heels, and toes that had been lovingly steel-capped.
Terry put them to work with great gusto, but even so, this was all a little much for just two feet. It was time for mace, and an exciting time it was until the fourth goblin that reeled away wheezing took the can and the last half-centimeter of her left pointer’s fingernail with it between its teeth. She swore into the wind, fruitlessly flapped her hands at the critters attempting to crawl up her legs, fell over, and nearly split her head open on the walrus-leather-wrapped hilt of the icicle blade.
Oh. Well then, that problem was solved.
What happened over the next few minutes for Terry was something of a blur – a messy, inelegant blur, with lots of fumbling, swearing, breathless cold, and the hack-chop-thud of blades into meat. It reminded her of carving the turkey at thanksgiving, but with less appetizing aromas. By the time she was finished, the icicle blade was a gleaming ruby red stub attached to a hilt, steaming with the heat of gobliny torsos.
Then she threw up. When that was over, she looked up and she was somewhere else. The pines had vanished from around herm, replaced by the snowy little houses of Winter’s village. Calm. Placid.
All the doors were open. Tiny little furry creatures were standing in the streets, shaking their fists and hooting and howling in unison. It sounded like the end of the world as forecast by a herd of Chihuahuas.
Terry thought about yelling out something friendly and welcoming, then thought better about it and clicked the yak faster. She’d had enough small angry creatures trying to bite through her jacket tonight already. The last thing she needed was for a wolf the size of a school bus to peer around the side of the nearest house and snarl at her, which was not what happened next. It was more the size of a tour bus.
Terry had a three-step process to dealing with her dog, and she followed it here as faithfully as she would’ve at home. First, she ignored the wolf and hoped it would go away.
Second, as it closed in on her, she frantically flapped the reins like a deranged chicken’s wings and yelled incoherently at it and hoped it would go away.
Finally, as the drooling jaws began to open wide and the neck aligned itself with the spine, she gave in and threw the fish at it and hoped it would go away.
It made a noise that was a cross between a yelp, a wuff, and a burp, then set to. The sounds of its tearing and gnawing didn’t die down for a full half-mile, by which point Terry’s teeth had nearly stopped chattering. She blew on her hands to warm them up and peered forwards through the shallow veils of snowflakes. The road was more slush and less ice under the crunching footfalls of the yak, the coffee-cream sky was visible in between flurries. She was going to make it.
At this point, she looked up at the sky again.
In the long, long moment that followed as she saw the first sunrays creeping across the fading stars, she heard a sound billowing up from behind her.
Terry made the worst mistake of her life then, which was turning around. She looked Lady Winter full in the eyes, and what she saw nearly drove her blind with reflected snowglare, sending her skidding onto her back and tumbling off the hood of the car – bump bump WHAM onto the road, all over the sound of the suddenly-roaring winds. She hauled herself upright against the reins, cursing, and jumped back aboard the nearest object she could reach, which was the yak, and was promptly flipped off its back head over heels and into a snowdrift.
Terry was not burly, and the snowdrift was not compacted – a natural feature, no creation of the plow this. She shot straight through it like an error and rolled across asphalt. Blessed, comfortable, real-as-dirt-is-real asphalt, coated in a thin layer of wonderfully real, thankfully tiny snowflakes.
Lady Winter’s face hove into view above her, and Terry rescinded her opinions and shut her eyes very quickly.
“You have something of mine,” said Lady Winter. Her voice was hollow, wide as a frozen sea, deep as a glacial rift.
Terry was sure that she’d made it by sunrise. If that wasn’t how this worked, she recommended the Lady get better taste in manservants.
“You have something of mine that was not yours to take.”
Bullpoppy. Terry had taken three things exactly from the Lady, and not only that but she’d lost all three of them.
“Four things. One too many.” And Lady Winter reached out a long, cold, dead hand from her fur-covered greatcoat and touched the snowflake that was clinging, still stuck, to Terry’s upper left eyelash. “A fair trade is a fair trade. You had the chance to take three for a good race. Your loss of the three is no violation of mine, but the fourth is not yours to steal.”
Terry’s mind raced, in circles as minds do under stress. And as she ran in circles through the hamster cage of her head, screaming in blind panic, her body opened her mouth for her and asked “How would you like a car?”
“I do not know what that is,” said Lady Winter.
“That’s fine,” said Terry’s body. “It has snow tires.”
Lady Winter cocked her head to one side, like an owl. She was beautiful, in some ways, Terry supposed. But she suspected she’d liked her better when she wore her coat more thoroughly. It was a lot less bright.
“Fair trade,” repeated Lady Winter. She raised her hand, extended the middle finger, jabbed once, and was gone.

Terry was able to replace her fridge by putting the snowflake at the bottom of a big, insulated crate. So overall, she came out of the deal all right.
The new snow tires cost a fortune though.

They looked like trees. That was something we didn’t expect, something all those movies and books and games didn’t prepare us for. Little green men, big green men, giant bugs – even probation-era gangsters; we’d all thought of those decades ago. A plague of vampires, a plague of zombies, a plague of giant, man-eating spiders; all had been considered and taken into account by the most dollar-hustling filmmakers we could train and pay. But in the end, nobody’d really expected them when they came to be covered in leaves and bark and stand fifty feet tall (if thin).
I remember the first tree I ever cared about as a child. It had a swing in it, made out of a cruddy old tire. I got oil stains on my clothes when I played with it too long.

They looked like trees. Why, we weren’t so sure. At first we figured it was some sort of secret government experiment that hadn’t gotten hushed up properly. Then when they started to pop up across the ocean, we figured it was some sort of secret doomsday conspiracy. But in the end, I think most of us figured they were aliens or something, come down from the skies to seize the world for their own. Dunno why they’d bother. Unless they wanted our trees.
They never asked us for them, of course. Never negotiated, never responded. I’m not sure how many different kind of signals and messages and treaties and threats and bargains all the experts tried, but they gave it their best shot. It was worse than talking to a brick wall. At least the bricks don’t crush you mid-sentence.

They looked like trees. Exactly like trees, down to the roots and the stems and the tips of the leaves. And the needles. The first six we found were maples, and that lulled us a bit, got us to thinking that they weren’t so imaginative. Then Canada lost contact with every single settlement north of the prairies, half of Russia went dark, and the Amazon started boiling over with them. They looked like all kinds of trees – pines, oaks, red cedar, baobabs, elms, eucalypts, sequoias. God, I remember footage of the first ones that looked like sequoias. That was when we all started to think we were in trouble.
That wasn’t the problem of course, the problem was that there were more and more of them each day. But humans respond faster to size than anything else, really.

They looked like trees. They sure as hell didn’t act like them. They had the tree patience at least; laying low for hours, sidling closer and closer by inches, staying still for days if that’s what it took to guarantee a stealthy approach. It took weeks for us all to even begin to overcome that instinctive urge to overlook them, consider them part of the scenery. But the bit where they pounced and grasped and crushed and mangled – that, that was all them.
We never did learn how to tell them apart from trees.

They looked like trees. What was up with that? They could’ve brought deadly weapons – technology beyond our grasp. They could’ve used machine guns, rifles, bayonets, daggers, boiling water, sharp rocks. They could’ve used tentacles or fangs or claws or something, anything, but instead they went right on looking like trees. They had to practically fall on you or run you over to kill you.
We had to use heavy artillery, massed fire, and explosives, mostly. A lot of all of them. Ever tried to cut down an oak with a rifle? It’s not particularly pleasant, especially when the oak’s charging. And there were a lot of things that looked like trees out there.

They looked like trees. It was hilarious, really – up until one found you. Unless you were the world’s quickest hand with a chainsaw or were inside a tank, it was pretty much over by then. They could outrun anybody that wasn’t a sprinter on open ground, and the sprinter’d get tired a lot faster than they could.
How’d they move? I’m not sure. It was sort of like wading. but more like an octopus hauling itself along a few rocks. You’d have had to look at the roots, below the surface.

They looked like trees. Well, there’s one way around that. You get rid of the trees. You clear forests, you set watch, you move people out of their cottages and their sprawling suburbs and you stuff them into cities and burn big swathes of countryside. And that works fine, as an emergency. But sooner or later, you need cardboard, or paper, or planks, or any one of a thousand, thousand, thousand things you need trees for. So you go out to the trees again, take up forestry one more time, and this time you keep the lumberjacks under armed guard.
They needed a lot of guards. And not all of them – any of them – came back home. Poor old me, bearing the bad news.

They looked like trees. Say what you will about them, they stuck to that through thick and thin. We never had so much as a moment of worry from grass, not a single rogue thing that looked like wheat. Our lawns remained benign, our fields were safe and sound, right up ‘till the moment that they were filled with things that looked like trees. There’s a lot of cropland all over the world, and there really weren’t enough soldiers, and those soldiers didn’t have enough weapons that could take apart things that were as tough as trees.
That was when things went really bad.

They looked like trees. And that kept the cities safe for a long time, because it’s hard not to notice that sort of thing. But when you can’t grow food worth a damn and you’re out of everything and anything that uses lumber or wood pulp and you’re crammed into a city bursting at the seams with refugees and probably half your family that lived in the country got mashed by things that look like trees, well….
By that point they scarcely had to do anything. They just waded in and cleaned up what was left over. And it was a messy cleaning. The rain washed up the streets nice though.

They looked like trees. Could find them almost anywhere you could find a tree. None in Antarctica. None up in the mountain peaks. The deserts were probably okay. Anywhere with permafrost – though a lot of that’s melting these days, so who knows. Then again, not many people up there. Were up there. Maybe they did a pass since.
I’d wager most humans are gone now. Not much left of the cities, that’s for sure. Or anyone in them. Even the skyscrapers are falling over now, like this old broken thing.

They looked like trees. Inside and out, absolutely and utterly. We’d known that for a while. Their biology must be something so strange it barely qualifies as the science. We don’t know where they came from, but they must have come from somewhere. You can see where they’ve been since by checking the trunk, finding the spent bits of ammo lodged inside, checking the knives and saws and axes wedged into wood as trophies of last-ditch defenses crushed. This one was in Canada (see the knife?), this one fought the Indian army, this one crossed China and entered Europe before a tank shell blew it apart…
This one lying here in front of me came from our back yard. It’s still got the tire attached.

They looked like trees. There was no way they could be, though. That wouldn’t make any sense. But now there’s that nagging, endless thought at the back of the skull, scratching away wondering exactly what was the last straw that set them off, the final indignity that snapped the camel’s spine bone-by-bone all at once.
I saw something growing today, out of the ruins of the roof of the building next door. I never did learn how to tell them apart.
Guess I’ll go find out now. Damn I’m tired.

It was the easiest problem in the world. A plumber wasn’t needed, a child could’ve fixed it. An illiterate child could’ve fixed it. An illiterate child with parkinson’s and amnesia with agoraphobic tendencies in an open field could’ve fixed it. Left-handed.
Just… tighten a pipe. It was that simple, that straight-forward. John plucked the sorry old monkey wrench that lived in the secluded depths of the garage from its perch, wrenched a nut, wrenched a bolt, wrenched all the other bits of the pipe the tool could fit around (righty tighty, lefty loosey rigorously adhered to), and that was that and that was all she wrote.
The next day, the sink didn’t work.
“Well, that makes no sense,” said John.
“Better give it a look anyways,” said Jane.
So they went and had a look. One of the pipes under the sink had come loose slightly and was vibrating majestically in place, like the reed of an oboe.
“Huh,” said John. And he went away and came back again with the creaky, protesting monkey wrench, and he once more tightened everything that he could until it squeaked like a chimpanzee with its finger stuck in a termite mound.
That night, John and Jane were awoken by the squeals of metal and found that no less than six pipes had come loose – two in both bathroom sinks, one in the kitchen, two in the shower, and the toilets.
“Maybe we should call a plumber,” suggested Jane.
John rolled his eyes. It was just pipes, for goodness sakes. He wasn’t handy, but you barely needed hands at all to fix these sorts of problems. He rode the monkey wrench hard that night, sending shivers down the house’s metallic spine, and went to bed with the angry rest of a man who’s had it up to here with the day.

The next day, the shower exploded. It was most abrupt and occurred when Jane was trying to use it, which annoyed her to the point of shrieks.
“I could’ve sworn I tightened those,” said John. He took his mighty master monkey wrench once more and replaced the fitful pipes with their shadowy backups, retrieved from the darkest corners of the shed. They were cold and silvery and beautifully ugly, and that evening as John and Jane had dinner they all vanished and half the house was covered in mixed water of varying temperatures and sewage.
“Maybe we should call a plumber right now,” ordered Jane.
“All right,” said John.

The plumber was a tall, slimly-built man who absolutely could not have existed in any cartoon of his profession, with a high forehead and a nose that had previously belonged to a 19th-century British aristocrat and no moustache. He took three steps into the house, and seventeen downstairs to look at the pipes. He frowned, creased his brow, pinched his arm, spat on the floor with great venom, sniffed exactly twice and broke into an ear-splitting scream of terror before fleeing out the door while crossing himself, leaving behind both his toolbox and his truck.
The toolbox had a new wrench in it, one with sleek lines and a rubber grip and a lighter built into the handle. John took it up in his hand, raided the truck for pipes, and went about his duty with grim efficiency. When he was done the house’s guts gleamed as brilliantly as a silver fork in a streambed. He threw the old monkey wrench in the garbage and proclaimed himself satisfied. But he kept the new one. Just in case.
All was serene the next day. Peaceful. Quiet. The showers were taken and luxuriated within, the toilets flushed, double-flushed, triple-flushed. The sink provided gently-warmed cleanliness.
Breakfast was had, the civilized meal of the morning. And at its conclusion the dishwasher was loaded, filled, soaped, and gently purred into motion for all of ten seconds before breaking down in a heaving fit.
John opened the pipes and came nose to nose with a tiny agrarian civilization, peopled by thousands of creatures no bigger than dust mites. He frowned down upon them, uncertain of his place in this newly discovered world until someone shot a miniscule ballista at him, whereupon he exercised the justice of the Old Testament and threw the pipe into the garbage.
“Maybe we should just replace all the pipes,” said Jane.
“I’m working on it,” said John.
That evening he replaced all the pipes.
That midnight he woke up and heard a mysterious clanking from beneath his bed, in the cellar. He sighed, coughed, removed the plumber’s wrench from his bedside table, shuffled downstairs, and came face to face with an enormous metallic creature in the front hall, still rife with the dusty particles of the basement. It was made entirely of piping and shaped roughly like an enormous lizard of the Permian.
John wrenched it until it stopped moving, but lost a leg. Jane called the police, the ambulance, and the animal control unit. The first took away the wrench (“evidence”), the second John and his leg (“reattachment”), the third the remnants of the pipe-lizard (“disposal”).
“Do we still have a wrench in the house, dear?” he inquired of Jane.
“No,” she said.
“Oh well,” he muttered, as the doctors measured the diameter of his leg-stump. “I guess we’ll think of something.”

John had surgery on the third, and therapy on the fifth, and was discharged on the seventh, because he was out of money. He went home (limping) and found that his house was entirely filled with pipes, like a thornbush thicket.
“I tried to phone you,” explained Jane, from the makeshift hut she’d crafted out of their car, on their lawn. “But I’ve been busy, and you didn’t answer.”
“Have you bought a new wrench yet?” asked John.
“No,” she said. “They’re too expensive nowadays to be bothered. Go and ask the neighbours for a loan or something.”
John went to the neighbours (limping). One of them had a wrench. It was a socket wrench, not a monkey wrench, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
So he walked up to his front door (limping), and he wrenched his way into the hallway, then wrenched his way upstairs, and wrenched his way into the bathroom, where he got his toothbrush and his deodorant and had a quick piss and floss. As he gargled, a throat cleared next to his ear, and he turned around (limping) to find himself face to face with a small band of pipes. Each of them stood no taller than his waist, their leader barely passed his knee. A white flag was clutched in its maw.
“We would like,” said the pipe, “to discuss terms.”
John wrenched them, then wrenched his way into his bedroom to liberate a suit, which he put on. He couldn’t feel himself in that lousy little hospital gown, even if it did afford some ventilation to his reattached leg. In his suit he felt like a new man. A new, leg-cramped (limping) man who smelt like grease.
After wrenching his way to the bedside table for his keys, John wrenched his way back out the front door (the piping had regrown in his absence), turfed Jane out of the car, and went to work as she shouted abuse at him from the lawn.
Work was unpleasant. He couldn’t go to the bathroom without his wrench in his pocket, and he found himself eyeing the toilet bowl suspiciously. After his business was concluded, he stayed an extra half-hour overtime to personally tighten the thing’s u-bend. He didn’t like the look it had been giving him.

At last, home came John. Home again, home again, his home had walked off. His neighbours showed him cellphone footage of it rising to its feet – its enormous, piping-made feet – and negotiating with Jane, who secured transport with it to Belgium. It had strolled off at a pace just above a leisurely stroll, which was a problem for John because of his (limping) and the fact that his car only had about five minutes worth of gas left in it.
Well fine. If that’s the way life would be, that’s the way life would be. John still had his wrench, and that was all that mattered.

After spending the night in his car, John awoke to the polite windshield rap-rap of his neighbour’s knuckles. He politely requested that his wrench be returned.
John made a rude gesture and roared away to work on his last wisps of gas, where he found the entire lobby clogged with piping. The whole thing had started yesterday evening, said the receptionist, who was sharing a cigarette with the homeless man that worked their corner.
“Well, that makes no sense,” said John.
The receptionist shrugged.
John felt the comfortable weight of the wrench in his back pocket, and eyed the doors of his office building with fresh determination.
He strode in (limping) manfully.
All he’d have to do was tighten a few more pipes.