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New things happen, like it or not. And you’d better like it, because everything being the same forever gets boring, no matter how nice it was to begin with.
But if you don’t like it, the complaining is fun anyways. And that’s what Scal the sorry was doing as she wandered the hills and the trees by the sea, shivering under her oldest, tatteredest clothes. “I need a home,” she grumbled, “I need a good fine house with walls and a roof and maybe even a floor to be fancy on, and there I can keep myself comfortable. Not out here, in all this… weather. I’m sorry to say it, but this weather irks me sore. Where will I put my house?” And she carried on griping this way for three days as she wandered, driving all the creatures she passed sore irked with her.
Then Scal the sorry found a tree. And that’s what caused all this nonsense.
It was a good tree. Tall, firm-limbed, with a trunk both stout and tall. Its leaves were finest green, its bark truly brown, its hue lustrous and ruddy.
“That is the finest tree in all this forest,” said Scal the sorry, “and I’m sorry to say so of all you other trees, but that’s the truth. Why, if I were a bird and had feathers and beaks and all those things, I’d be happy as a clam to take up a perch in that particular tree and roost all I pleased, with twigs and with feathers.”
Then Scal the sorry stopped and thought for a bit, and laughed too much.
After she was finished with that, she took off her left glove and whispered to her palm and picked away at one of the fingernails she kept her magic in with her teeth, then spat out a bit of a word and a bit of a cough, wound tight together, and she set to making herself a house.
Scal the sorry’s house was round and squat and the walls were sticks. Its roof was a thousand feathers from old birds she’d eaten all year, and for a floor she used their down. It was cozy and smelly and on the whole she considered it pretty fine.
“No wonder the birds like this so,” she said, as she laid herself down for sleep. “A fine view, a good view, even if I must remember not to roll over in the night.” So she tucked herself in and snored.
No more than halfway through the night Scal the sorry was awoken loud and clear by swaying and moaning, a roar and a ruckus. Her home was bobbing in the high branches of the tree like a cork in a sea, and the wind was whining through all the cracks in her walls.
“Shush!” she yelled at the wind and the world. “Shush! I’m sleeping up here! I’m sorry that I’ve put myself and my home up in your place, but it’s MY place now and it’s going NOWHERE!”
The wind laughed and roiled at her and didn’t die down ‘till well past dawn, leaving Scal the sorry red-eyed with sleepless ire.
“Bothersome blight and dreadful vex,” she snarled as she drank the strongest teas she could mix (bear-paw and old vinegary apple). “It was one night. I will sleep twice as long tonight, and make back the difference.”
But the winds came back that night, and the night after, and so on and on and on all week, every week, endlessly. It was driving Scal the sorry ‘round the bend and straight off through the mountains, it was, and she was so grumpy that she could boil water with a glare.
“A fine home,” she muttered to herself as she sat, awake, and listened to the midnight gusts yet again. “I am sorry to say so, but I believe I just might have to do something about it.” And so she gathered those bits of her brains that hadn’t been shaken and spooked to pieces by the wind, and she thought all day.
That evening, Scal the sorry put on an old, old tattered rag she had, hunched herself up small and crooked, quivering and shaking, and she sat out in the doorway of her house, legs dangling over the edge and her face hidden away by the hood of her battered clothing. She waited past sunset, and just as she heard the wind come howling down from the west she began to sob and sniffle.
“Oh! Oh! Oh no! Why have you come again, wind, why have you come to hurt your mother so, why have you done this? Did I do a harm to you when you were small, poor wind? I am sorry for this; a mother’s sins are thoughtless ones, oh poor little wind! Take pity!”
The west wind was very confused by this. “Father in the sea never told me about my mother,” it said. “But you look very small to be MY mother. I am big enough to stretch all the way from here to far away over the sea, where there’s nothing but water for forever and ever and further. I can pick up more water than a thousand buckets with one hand, and I can shove the clouds away with my littlest fingers and toes. I don’t think I could do those things if such a little thing as you were my mother.”
“Maybe you’re big and strong now,” said Scal the sorry, with infinite patience and love, “but you’re still my little son, my little boy. And I’m sorry to say that if you do not believe me, I shall prove that I am stronger than you ever will be. A test then, son! Why don’t we see which of us can throw this stone the farthest?” And she pointed to a stone on the ground, far below.
“So small a thing?” asked the west wind. “Mother-maybe, you are a madwoman. I can knock over tall trees and send waves that eat shores. This is nothing, you watch!”
Well the west wind heaved and the west wind hauled, the west wind blew up such a flurry that it nearly pulled down the trees, but the west wind couldn’t shove that stubborn little stone. Finally it gave up, spent and exhausted, and Scal the sorry tsk-tsked in her most motherly voice.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve done your best, my boy, my little boy, but I’m sorry that I must see that you’ve lost.”
“Lost, but you’ve not won, mother-maybe,” retorted the west wind. “That stone cannot be moved at all!”
“I am your mother, little wind,” she said, “and I am stronger than you. Now you just watch.” And Scal the sorry plucked up the little rock that she’d sunk into the dirt that morning, where half its bulk lay buried beneath the surface. And she did it with one hand.
“Now listen to your mother, who is stronger than you,” she told the wind, “and leave my house alone! Never come back here, and tell all your brothers and sisters that I said so!”
The west wind left in shame, and Scal the sorry slept the sleep of the exhausted for a week and five days. She slept through breakfasts, suppers, and lunches, and finally woke when she felt a tip-tip-drip-drop on the back of her neck. Water was leaking through the feathered roof of her home, trickling down the walls, making a mess in her bedding and ruining her food stores.
“A million mice mangled in a meadow!” she swore. “Ah well, rain must come, rain must go. A day indoors patching leaks hurts nobody, though I’m sorry to admit it.” So she cooped herself up and mended the roof and walls, and brewed her latest, strongest yet tea (spiky thorns and the angriest stones she could find) to keep off the chill. She went to bed with the strum-drum-drum of raindrops in her ears, lulled to sleep.
The next day her neck was cold and wet again, splish-splash-splosh. More leaks had sprung up, and still the rain fell and fell and fell.
“Two in a row?” she nagged to herself. “Bothersome!” And she brewed more tea and patched more leaks and did this for all the week before she shook her fist at the sky and saw that the clouds weren’t moving as they should be. They were stuck fast, fat and soggy, held in place by a breezeless air.
“I find myself sorry that I have no wind,” said Scal the sorry, “but there must be another way around this! Eh, having a house is such a trouble – I will find a way, yes I will.”
So she tried covering her home in resin from the tree. The rain pounded and poured and in three days it washed it all away.
“Rabbit legs snipped by snares!” she swore, and tried covering her home with dozens of interwoven branches. Pound pound pour, in two days the rain had soaked all the leaves through and filled her home with their washed-out little scraps.
“Bear-carrion in a nest of eagles!” she shrieked, and chewed on her left hand’s fingernails, spitting and hissing. She put her magic hand’s power into her house, so strong and fierce that it chased all the water away, right down to the spit out of her mouth and the tea she was drinking. It took one day for her to stop coughing and wheezing long enough to undo her mistake.
“Dirty riptides,” she sulked, washing out her parched throat with (damned) rainwater. “Those clouds need scorching. Maybe I can ask for help.” So Scal the sorry put on her least-damp clothing and set off into the rain, looking and searching for help outside the endless rainfall that surrounded her cloud-clotted home.
“I’m sorry,” she asked of a passing deer, “but do you know any animals that might help with getting rid of all my rain?”
“No,” said the deer, twitching its nose. “Water on the ground we drink. Water in the sky is not for us.” And it bounded away.
Scal the sorry said harsh words, and tried again.
“I’m sorry,” she asked a spry young sapling, “but do you know any plants that might help with getting rid of all my rain, which is ruining my home?”
“No,” said the sapling, rustling cheerily. “But isn’t it most fine? A good drink puts green in your stem and bite in your bark! I’ll be in the canopy in no time at all, barely a century, just you wait!”
Scal the sorry said cruel words, kicked the tree’s trunk, and, limping, tried again.
“I’m sorry,” she asked the nearest mountain, “but do you know any other powerful big stones that might help with getting rid of all my rain, which is ruining my home and driving me to distraction and difficulties?”
“No,” said the mountain. “But I know who can. It’s the sun. Go and ask the sun to help. She can dry things right up, but she’s proud and prickly.”
Scal the sorry said thankful, kind words, praised the mountain, and went back home to her (leaking) house to think.
“I’d best get on asking him,” she said, and clambered to the top of the tree, right where the branches were so small that she had to turn herself into a little squirrel to stay aloft. “Hey sun!” she called. “Hey sun! Hey sun! I am sorry to speak to you so, but it’s your job to keep this sort of place warm and unsoggy, and you are not doing it!”
The sun slid around in her seat and stared down at Scal the sorry. She was indeed proud; the way she looked down her nose at her left no doubt. “What is all this racket,” she yawned. “I am busy, as I always am, with important things. Why is there a little mouse in a tree shouting at me? Go hide in a burrow or something like animals do, little tree-mouse. You are boring.”
“Boring?” squawked Scal the sorry. “I am Scal the sorry, and you are lazy and ugly and fat and downright unpleasant in every which way, all of which I know because your husband told me so! You couldn’t dry my home if it was the only place in all the world, you good-for-nothing soggy-ended weasel-faced bark-skinned moosenose!”
The sun flared up like grease on a campfire at that, and some of the words she and Scal said to each other next didn’t bear speaking once, let alone repeating. When all they had to say and do was said and done, the sun was shining bright as midsummer – in October, no less – the clouds were wisps of errant water frying in a searing sky, and Scal the sorry’s home was as dry and warm as the back of a buzzard’s wings in a thermal.
“This is fine and good,” she sighed to herself as she lay down for the night in a bed that didn’t smell one bit of wet leaves. “This is how a house should be, I guess, eh? This is better.” And she slept in for one week in a row.
When she woke up, her mouth was parched, her hair felt like brittle twigs, and the leaves of her tree had been crisped to a bitter brown. The sun still glared at her, bright and early in the morning, fixed at high noon.
“What a grudge-holding stick-in-the-mud,” grumped Scal the sorry, rehydrating herself on a tea made from burnt ashes and hurt feelings. “I am sorry that I said those things to her, but that was ages ago, and they needed to be said before she would do her job properly. Now she is just as bad, but the other way around! I’ll show her!”
So Scal the sorry walked outdoors – where she winced as her skin burned in the sunshine – and chewed her left-hand fingernails again. And as she chewed, so she changed – into a little beetle, a little burrowing beetle with a dainty black coat and a pair of digging legs and jaws. And that little beetle went straight to work on the ground, digging down deep and far. Topsoil, dirt, more dirt, stone, more stone, and then through and down into the dark places under the world, where the shadows had their roots and lived out their shadowy other lives. Her own shadow waved happily to her, stretched-out and huge in its proper home.
Scal the sorry waved back. It was polite.
Finding what she was looking for took time, a long time – there was so much dark and dim, so many shades without light – but finally she spotted it: the shadow of the sun, hiding away in a corner of the always-midnight sky, where nobody needed or spotted it.
“Hello there,” said Scal the sorry. “Feeling lonely?”
“Nobody needs a sun where the shadows live,” said the shadow of the sun, miserably. “And she never casts me – everyone else gets to go up and see the world above, but I’m down here forever.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” said Scal the sorry. “I am sorry, but you are talking nonsense. I’ve got a way out right here, you look at this. A tunnel all the way up top! Come on in! Stay at my house!”
The shadow of the sun was a little worried by all this, but in the end it allowed itself to be persuaded to be crammed up the beetle-tunnel face-first, squish squish squash. They got to near the surface when it halted fast.
“I am sorry to ask,” said Scal the sorry, who was lying, “but what is the problem?”
“I’m stuck,” whimpered the shadow of the sun. “It’s too small!”
Scal the sorry sighed rudely and loudly. “Shadow,” she said, “I could use your hand now I could. Because I don’t have any this moment.”
And Scal the sorry’s shadow, who was waiting down at the far-end of the beetle-burrow and listening, reached up, up, up to the world above, and then down, down, down into the tunnel with its thin fingers. It grasped Scal the sorry and the shadow of the sun both, and it yanked them free – pop! – into the bright-burning daylight, where it took refuge once again under Scal the sorry’s foot.
“Shadow,” she said, “I owe you a powerful debt. And speaking of such, look up there little shadow of the sun! Look up at my house! Set yourself above that tree and breathe deep and happy, under the sun!”
The shadow of the sun ran all the way up the tree and sprung into the sky with the eagerness of a fledgling eagle, and glorious, peaceful, cool darkness spread itself across Scal the sorry’s home, swallowing all those scorching sunrays whole before the last words had died from her lips.
“Sweet, cool, refreshing night-time,” she hummed happily as she turned in for bed that evening – although maybe it was morning, it was hard to tell with the shadow of the sun above her. “This is more like what a house should be.” And she drifted off, with only the creeeeak-eeeek of her parched tree to whine her to sleep.
She woke up some time later with her teeth chattering. She bundled on every bit of clothing she had, she put on her winter mittens, she tore down half her roof for use as bedding – nothing worked, she remained frozen, numbed, chilled to the bone-and-marrow in the pitch-black dark.
“Blast this endless shadeshine into blisters and splinters!” she spat. “Hey up there, old sun’s-shadow – can you take a break, give me a moment to warm up? You can take turns with the sun, eh?”
But the sun’s shadow was too happy to hear her, too busy looking at all the world around and below it to pay attention. Scal the sorry yelled at it for three days before she gave up and nursed her voice back to herself with some tea made from frozen leaves and desultory fumes.
“A warm I’ll need, but not a sunwarm,” she grumbled. “Best to go asking. I’ve got friends, I do, and I’ll see them right.” So she pulled out her left hand – just for a moment, for it was perishing-cold – and chewed the right nails for just the right amount of time in the right way. Scal the sorry was a crow then, and she flew around for hours and minutes and days asking and talking.
“Grow more fur,” said the animals.
“Or thicker bark,” recommended the trees.
“What is ‘cold’?” asked the mountains.
“Splosh-swissh,” said the ocean.
Scal the sorry grumbled herself nearly hoarse. “I am sorry to bother you with my anger,” she complained to a passing raven, “but I have asked every birch-battered thing and creature that floats, hops, jumps, skips, and stands in this little part of the world that is mine and not one little thing knows where one little me could find something to keep herself warm. Are neighbours always this troublesome when your house is out of sorts?”
“If it’s warm you need,” the raven advanced, clicking his beak, “then you should ask a favour of my great grandfather. He found something powerful warm a little time ago, and brought it back in his beak from a faraway man.”
“Then I’ll pay him a visit,” said Scal the sorry, and she did, and she found that the great raven had warmth to spare, warmth from this thing he’d found.
“It’s fire,” he said. “It’s so hot it burns, burns things right up. Now be right careful with it, eh? Be cautious.”
“I am sorry,” said Scal the sorry, picking up a bit of fire in her foot, “but I can only be so careful when my house is so cold.”
“Ow,” she added on the way home. “Ouch. Ow ouch ow ouch ow ow ouch ouch ouch.”
The fire was indeed hot, as her tender feet told her, but it looked sure fine right in the middle of her floor. And as Scal found out so quick, hot tea tasted so much better than cold.
“Warm,” she said, “is nice. And this is nice, and this is a proper home now. It was a lot of trouble, but I’m not sorry at all now, not one bit.” And she closed her eyes, and sighed, and slipped away to sleepland.
And as Scal the sorry lay napping, she slept so safe and so happy that she didn’t hear her tree complaining at her, poor thing. It had been scorched to thirst, and then it had been darkened to starvation, and now it was too warm, too warm. Dry as a torch and dead all inside, poor thing, it would have asked for an apology if Scal the sorry had been awake to give it. But she wasn’t, so it couldn’t, and the best it could do was bear its death with dignity, poor thing. Trees are used to such things, and used to silent suffering.
Because of this, the moment Scal woke up was when her house hit the ground, and a good thing too – the embers were sliding up her legs and trying to make nests in her armpits.
“Ow!” she repeated, yelping. “Ow!” She stamped and spun and rolled and ran and tumbled down hills and it took three whole days for her to put herself out, by jumping into the sea.
By then her house was just a big firepit, and long-burned-out when she made her way back to it.
“A pity,” she sighed. “And I am very sorry that this didn’t work. But on the whole, I think that maybe houses are too much trouble for me.”
So she spent her days down by the seashore once more, and forgot about most of her problems.
Though she did remember the trick with the tea. That was a good one.

In a place not so far away but a very long time ago, in a home by the sea, there lived three people: two old and tall, one young and small. A mother, a father, and a daughter. They got along, day by day, and perhaps sometimes they were even happy.
Then one day, a bad day, a hard day, the mother and the father stopped talking, stopped walking. They laid themselves down on the floors of their home and stared at the ceiling with wide frozen eyes that wouldn’t blink, wouldn’t budge, no matter how much the daughter prodded and pleaded and whined. And then came in men to take her up and take her away, far away. They brought her
through the forest
past the hills
across a river
and up the side of a windy, rocky road
to a big building that pretended to be a home when it wasn’t, all cold windows and colder floors. The walls watched you with eyes of all sizes, and you did what the men said or they put you in a box, in a hall, upstairs on the highest floor where the tip-tops of the old, dead trees could nearly reach you. They scraped and made horrible sounds on the walls, trying to reach inside with their brittle branches and twisty twigs to grab at young and small people who just wanted to sleep properly, to feel safe and sure for once.
The daughter spent a long time there, in that big building. There were other children too, but they never spoke, or the men would put you in a box, in a hall, upstairs on the highest floor. So they didn’t.
One day, a strange day, an unusual day, a letter came. It wasn’t one of the many letters of the building’s men – they spoke to businesses of business, of doctors to institutions. This was a letter from a parent to a child.
The men brought the daughter to their leader, who wore a whiter shirt than them all, and never a jacket. His thin little chin bobbed and clicked to itself as he read it aloud to her, asked her if she knew what it meant.
The daughter wasn’t sure what the right answer would be here, so she went with honesty, the easiest policy. “No.”
“Your parents have come back,” said the leader of the men. “They will come here, and bring you home.”
The daughter blinked, and remembered, and while she was remembering her mouth continued overmuch in its honesty, and it said “that’s wrong.” And so she was put in a box, in a hall, upstairs on the highest floor, and listened to the trees mutter and shudder all night. But they sounded different now – the dead, dying leaves had begun to come in on some of them, the only colour they grew all year. A new shuffling sound emerged from these: change, change. Things are going to change.

For a week, nothing changed. And then, as the daughter sat in the downstairs dining-room, she heard the sound of crackling, rumbling gravel on the windy, rocky road that the big building sat upon. She quit her seat – risking the inattention of the men on duty, who were speaking of things – and pressed her eye to the bars that ate up the windowpanes.
A car had come in. It was very shiny and very new, and quite red.
A hand tugged at the daughter’s ear; one of the men had noticed her inattention. She was towed from the room, down the hall, round the front, up to the base of the stairs, but before she could be taken up, up, up to the highest floor, other men spoke to the one who grasped her ear.
“To the lobby with her,” they said. “Her father is here.”

The daughter’s father was as tall as the tallest of the men – taller, she thought, than she’d remembered, though it had been so very long since she was home. His face was long and thin and faded, as though a pencil had sketched him out sparsely, saving the main-rub of its lead to fill in the great enveloping mass of his dirty-brown coat. She could not see his face all the way up where it lay, under his hat.
He spoke with the leader of the men in the quick, gruff, tiresomely neverending grumble of their ways. Then he pulled out an envelope, battered and pale, and stuffed it roughly into the leader of the men’s hand.
He turned to the daughter and said “come.”
So she did, and followed her father into the shadowed sunshine. For the first time in a long forever she saw the big building that wasn’t a home from the outside. It was smaller than she’d thought – even the highest floor was nearer to the ground, its dreadful trees smaller and stubbier than she’d ever believed. They were still and limp now; their night-winds absent, their branches silent; defeated and immobile.
The inside of the car was stuffy and musty. Her father would not open the window. So the daughter coughed, and her father turned to look at her as though she had said something. And that is why the daughter asked the first question to pop into her head, which was “what was in the envelope?”
The father’s mouth was most indistinguishable up there so high on his head, but even so the daughter saw it go through a disconcerting little jump into a nearly-smile before it went smooth again. “Dirt,” he replied. And then he started up the engine, grind-grind-crunch-cough, and the red car went rattling away down, down, down.

For maybe a little less than a minute, the daughter’s world was comfortable. Oily-smelling, bone-jarring, and too warm, but it was a place that she was happy to be in. And then she heard the groan and holler of other engines, other cars, the big steel-doored trucks that the men drove to and fro in to get supplies for food and wander to mysterious places.
“Are they going to catch us?” asked the daughter.
The father’s mouth did that complicated little jump again, like a skittish roach. “No,’ he said. He put his hand in his coat, and he pulled out a keyring, a big iron keyring. He plucked the smallest of the keys, and he twitched it about in his dirt-brown coat for a time. And he held up his hand to the window and pushed out a bag.
The bag burst open on the gravel behind them with a spray like fireworks, but it crawled like centipedes and flew like locusts. Little bugs – hundreds and hundreds of little bugs with little legs and little eyes. They swarmed and swooped and were covered with spines, and the daughter heard the paf!-paf!-paf! of car tires puncturing one after another as they wound their way down the bends of the windy, rocky road.
Something stirred at her foot, and she looked down. A single, half-squashed little bug lay against her shoe, wings trembling with exhaustion. It looked so small, and she felt so sorry for it. So she picked it up.
“Be careful,” it whispered in its little buggy voice.
The daughter didn’t know what to say to that. So she nodded, and tucked it into her coat where her father couldn’t see it.

The rattle and rumble of engines faded for a while, then grew louder – and another sound vied with them: the splash and swish and swirl of water. The river was approaching, and the little rickety old bridge of rust and hope that stood over it. It looked three times frailer to the daughter than it had when she’d been taken over it to the big building that was not a home, oh so long ago (how long ago?).
There was a screech and a honk behind them. The car of the men was drawing nearer.
“Are they going to catch us now?” asked the daughter. Underneath them the bridge creaked and groaned and coughed like a dying horse, all bones and tears.
The father did not smile this time, or if he did, it was not with his mouth. Instead he chuckled – a short, thick, sulphurous sound. “No,” he said. And as he said that, he wrenched the steering wheel of the car hard fast to the side and pulled it over so that it sat in the middle of the center of the bridge, breaks whimpering in pain with short gasps.
“Come here,” he told the daughter, and he took her up in his long, long bony arms and ran with huge slow steps, like a heron hunting frogs. The cars of the men hauled into view as the daughter looked over his shoulder, pulling up short and sharp at the shiny red car where it blocked them in. They cursed and waved their fists and were climbing over it as she and the father reached the other side of the bridge.
The father gave that chuckle again, and the daughter felt his chest bubble against her legs as he did so. He reached inside his coat and he pulled out a sack, a great bulging sack that surely seemed too large to fit inside that coat, big as it was. It glistened unhealthily in the midday sun. The father pulled loose that same iron keychain a second time, and he undid the old, old rusted lock that held it shut. The mouth of the bag unpinched, and then he spilt it far and wide across the bridge, splaying its contents to the air and noise of the world. Crabs – hundreds and hundreds of big sleek black crabs, with iron-shod shells and pinchers that put steel to shock and shame. They were resistant to boot and quick to anger, and before long the charge of the men across the bridge was nothing but a chorus of dismal hoots and angry yells in the ears of the daughter as the father carried her up, up, up and away as the road rose high into the hills.
There wasn’t much to look at, as she stared down at the dirt. Then something stared back.
A crab, barely yet fresh from its larvael forms, dangled precariously at the heels of her father’s coat-hood. It was a shiny freshly-minted black, like a more pleasant tarred road.
She reached down and plucked it free. Its claws held no bite, only a meek thankfulness. As she brought it up to her own coat pocket, it whispered as it passed her ear
“Don’t let him know.”
in a voice that smelt like sea-salt and soft things.
She nodded. And she didn’t let him know.

The hills were high and hard indeed, and her father’s steps lagged now out of necessity, though his breath did not shorten, did barely draw at all. He did not put down the daughter, though, and she made no request that he do so – even if his shoulder grew awful bony against her stomach. She counted bounders and rocks and pebbles as she hung up there, and wondered at how long it had been since she’d seen stone that had not been cracked down to gravel.
And then, as the sun wore the sky down into the idle blue of late afternoon, she heard once again the angry holler of the men, raised in song above the grunt and snort of an automobile’s engine.
The daughter thought to ask her father of the noise, but she felt him stir already.
And besides, she didn’t know if this was something she ought to let him know.
She could not see his face, so she didn’t know if he almost-smiled again. He didn’t laugh, though he did quiver. And he turned about in his stride as smoothly as a scarecrow, fingers splaying every which way as straw while he dug inside his coat.
“Ah,” he grunted, fetching out a mysterious squirming box. Its sides heaved and shuddered as he hefted it and worried at the lid with his long, long nails and the iron keys of his chain, even as the shouting of the men turned the corner of the trail below them. They had acquired the shiny red car that the daughter’s father had used, somehow, and they were riding it mighty hard, all those men packed into a car meant for four-and-a-half.
Her father shrugged, and her father tossed the box fast and low. It was harder than it looked, and smashed straight through the windshield and into the lap of the driver with a thwack and a thud and a yip-yipe-yap, for it was full of coyote. Then as the coyote struggled itself free and into the face of the man, it became apparent that the box was full of coyotes. How many the daughter couldn’t count, nor could she say how all those coyotes fit inside that box in her father’s coat, but it made an awful loud racket awfully louder than before. The car swerved and swung and smacked into a tree, spilling angry men and frightened coyotes everywhere.
Her father turned and moved along, not bothering to speak. And just behind him, bobbing along in his shadow, trailed a little coyote pup, barely big enough to walk without tripping.
“Stay calm,” it whispered, keeping a wary distance from those big boots.
The daughter listened, and she did as she was told.
And she scooped the pup off the ground when the hills grew steep, because she was kind.

Evening was in the air, with the sun painting the world all sorts of rare thing as it filtered through the branches of the trees in the forest. The air tasted like bark and dirt and growing good greenness, and just a hint of cinnamon fear. The daughter had bit her tongue by mistake too, but that was some time ago and she wasn’t sad about it anymore, and besides she couldn’t taste it.
“Mmmmm,” muttered her father, deep inside his dirt-brown coat. “Mmmm.”
She didn’t ask him what it was. She knew before she could feel it. The tramp-tramp-tramp of feet on the road behind them, a horde of bustling shoes on angry legs. The men had been lazy, but none of them had been fat. They were not as steady as her father, but fury gave them speed that steadiness could not match. For now.
This time it was a little can, a little sea-grey can that reminded her of the waves behind her home. Her father unscrewed the top left, then right, placed a key from the iron keychain in the top and twirled it, took it in his palm, shook it thrice, twice, once, held it firm, and whipped it straight into the dirt at his feet. Then he brushed his palms and walked onward as though nothing had happened.
The daughter watched what happened behind her. They passed a curve before the first man appeared, but she heard the shrieks and screams and knew what had caused them. She saw the coils in her head, winding and unwinding, endless loops of muscles that could wrench trees loose from dirt and grind down rocks to rubble.
A small worm crawled upon her father’s lapel. It was segmented and strong and moist and it smelt of the deep dark down where life is made into good things for more life. She bent her ear to it.
“Be ready,” it told her. Firm, sure.
She felt safe because of that, and not just because she tucked the worm into her coat.

Dark was there, real dark by the time they came to the daughter’s home. The air was clotted with night-taste, the sensation as cool and clean as a spade on a stone.
“Here we are,” breathed her father. The daughter looked, and looked, and looked.
There was a house in front of her. There was the sea behind it. And there were the stars above it.
It looked like home, but it didn’t feel like home at all. And not least because of the big sad bird above the door-light, head hooded, leg shackled to the light-stem.
“Home!” called her father, and his voice croaked unevenly as he raised it. “Home! I have brought our daughter home!”
A head poked out from behind the front door, the screen-net nearly fell loose from it. It was her mother, hair long and tangled with briny water, face drawn thin and with her teeth all showing. “Wonderful! Good! A good thing! Come in,” she creaked, “come in!”
“I don’t want to come in,” whispered the daughter, in spite of herself. She looked at the doorway, and she saw no lights, no fire in the building.
“Come in, come in!” said her mother, sliding through the door to hold it open, a mouth into the building wide and dank. “My daughter is home, here to join us! We missed you, daughter! Come! Join us! Come in!”
“You left me alone,” said the daughter, and her hand crept to her coat pocket.
“Only for a little while,” whispered her father. “Only for a little while.”
“We didn’t mean to go away,” said her mother, teeth still smiling in perfect white. “We had to leave unexpectedly. But we missed you so much where we were that we had to come back, and we had no small trouble with that, daughter! So many nasty creatures tried to stop us, horrid things.”
“Bugs,” said her father, and he made a face.
“Crabs,” muttered her mother, and she shook herself, sending the seaweed dripping from the bottom of her dress.
“Nasty,” said her father, and he spat. The spit wriggled.
“But we’re back now, daughter,” said her mother, “and we want to bring you home. Now won’t you please come in?”
“No,” said the daughter, but her father was already moving, long, thin legs as sure as a spider on its web.
“You really musn’t grumble so, daughter,” her mother admonished. “They have taught you bad manners at that nasty place. Now come in, and we’ll-“ Her mother frowned, and how she did that, lipless as she was, was a rare sight. “What’s that sound?”
It was footsteps again, and angry yelling. Down the path were shining fierce flashlights, bobbing with the frenzy of fireflies in midsummer heat.
“Them,” said her father, with distaste. One foot lay across the threshold of the home, one hand secured the daughter in her place on his shoulder. The other reached into his coat, searching for a thing.
“Ruffians,” said her mother, voice iced. “Turn the bird on them.”
“I shall,” he said, and he produced the keychain’s greatest denizen yet: a great iron key, burdened with rust and the age of years. It seemed to wriggle in his hand as he lifted it to the perch of the hooded bird, clenched in his fist with its jesses.
The girl’s pocket wriggled, and she felt four tiny heads lift themselves up and all at once shout as loud as their little lungs could “NOW!”
The daughter yanked out her pocketful of friends and thrust them into the air, as hard as she could, and things happened.
Her father screamed as the key stuck in the lock, with the bug in his eye, burrowing, needling. Snip-snap went the jesses in his flailing hand, turned loose with the claws of the crab. With a flail and a snarl the coyote-puppy caught the key in its teeth, tugging that last half-inch ‘till the lock snapped open and the keys fell loose in the wind. A yank of the worm’s tail (or maybe its head?) and the hood slipped loose.
The vulture is a sad, silly animal, and a slow one. Its head is bald, its demeanour is meek, it defends itself by throwing up its breakfast, and it eats that which no one else will. It lives a life on the warmest and slowest of winds, waiting for misfortune to occur so that it may have a meal.
This vulture was very old, and it bore that misfortune on every inch of its old, old bones. And right then, as it straightened out its wings and unbent itself from that little perch, unchained, it looked very, very angry.
“Good girl,” it croaked, low and steady. “Good girl.”
“Good girl,” agreed the crab, the bug, the worm, the pup. “Good girl.”
Her father swayed there where he stood, one hand on his daughter, the other on his leaking eye. He looked to the mother, but she stood silent, half-torn between hate and fear.
The father made up his mind. He dove for the door, a hiss without breath leaking through those teeth.
The vulture is not a fast animal. But when all you have to do is drop three feet, you do not have to be.
Her father made a noise, as the vulture fell upon him. It was not a scream. A scream needs lungs and a heartbeat to drive them, a mind behind it that can think and feel. But whatever was making that noise was gone in a flash as the vulture’s great beak tore through that dirt-brown coat and sent it back down where it was meant to be in a single snap of its jaws.
The daughter fell in the dirt, and some got in her mouth. It was the best feeling of her life.
“Carrion beasts!” shrieked the mother. “Bearers of blight! Away with you!” and then after that there was no more sound as all the bugs and all the crabs and all the coyotes and all the worms ploughed down through the road and into the home, trampling over the rags of the dirt-brown coat and the glistening ruin that used to be that iron keyring as it was trampled into the dust.

The girl lay there for a while as the house that pretended to be her home but wasn’t was being destroyed, looking at the stars. They were the same as they’d been here, as they’d been at the big building. The men from it had not appeared, and the flashlights had run the other way as all her friends had come.
A tingling on her fingers told her that the bug and worm had come back, a cold claw at her ankle heralded her crabling. The coyote pup nuzzled into her lap, and they all sat there for a while until the vulture came down from the sky where it had thrown the last bit of the weathervane away, chest heaving, head bobbing as it landed upon her knee.
“Girl,” it said, “you have done a very great deal for us, who have done very little for you.”
She nodded.
“What do you want most of all?” it inquired.
“A home,” the girl replied instantly. “A place for me to be.”
“Where would you like to be?” it asked her.
“Where can you take me?”
The vulture shrugged, its old wings bent again, tired from the night’s struggles. “Anywhere.”
The girl took it in her arms. “Then take me everywhere,” she said, “and I’ll decide afterwards.”
And they did. And she did.
But not for a little while.

Morri, Morri, little boy Morri; the middle child, the one that wasn’t expected to fail or succeed. He did what he was told – sometimes – and he told the truth to his elders – sometimes – and mostly – all the time – he spent his days watching his father’s cattle to make sure they didn’t wander off anywhere interesting, which he was expecting to do all his life. Sometimes he picked up rocks and looked at them.
One day, as Morri was looking at a particularly dull and evenly-shaped rock, he heard a very strange and sudden lack of sound. A cow had stopped rustling and huffling and snorting its way along the pasture. Instead, there was a thud. A heavy, meaty, bloody sort of thud.
Morri took his rock and his feet and wandered – cautiously – down the pasture, where he found half the cow. The other half was being wedged into the gullet of something he’d never seen before, which regarded him with annoyed interest. It looked sort of like a hyena, but a bit taller than he was at its shoulder.
It made a noise at him somewhere between a growl and mrrruph.
Morri pondered the meaning of all this for a minute, weighed the balance of what his parents told him to do against what he thought he should do, and reached a compromise: he whipped the rock into its skull at full tilt, poleaxing it, but then he ran home and told his parents afterwards.
“You are obviously not working hard enough if you have enough time to come up with these stories,” said his father. So he smacked him – lightly, with love – and sent him out again the next day with a reminder to be more careful.
The body wasn’t there when Morri checked, and another cow was missing. Just bloodstains remained – cow and something else – and a nasty smell that was emitting from a pile of feces. Morri compared the size of those feces to those of his family’s dogs, then thought for a bit.
While Morri was thinking, he was also listening, which was why he heard the grass rustle and the birds go quiet, which was how he was able to get up the tree before the big, angry hyena-thing ate him. It snarled up at him from below, enough drool to fill a bathtub spilling over its rancid gums, feet shaking the tree to and fro as if it were barely more than a sapling. One eye was staring fixedly at an eighty-three degree angle, just below the very large bruise Morri had given it the day before. It made a very nice target for Morri’s second stone, which was delivered by Morri’s older brother’s sling.
His aim was poor: instead of going through the thing’s eye socket and into its skull it skipped off it, removing eyebrow, eyeball, and fur, but not brain. Morri accepted his failure and ran home again, where he once again informed his parents of the day’s events.
“Your carelessness is as inforgivable as your falseness,” admonished his mother. “Two cows in two days? What are you DOING out there?”
Morri explained himself again, and received a brief smacking. He accepted it, because when you’re family that sort of thing happens, and he took his father’s spear without permission when he set out to pasture the next day, because when you’re family that sort of thing also happens and can come in handy.
This time no cows were missing. Four of them, however, had been partially disassembled and spread around the landscape with considerable effort. Morri had obviously annoyed something.
Morri knew all about annoyance. His little brothers annoyed him, he annoyed his older brothers, and they all annoyed his parents. It was the way of family, which is the way of the world, that the smaller shall always annoy the older. And it was upon this extensive and full knowledge that Morri drew when he swaggered nonchalantly into the middle of the bloodied, cow-strewn killing ground, sat down with his back to the biggest patch of fly-buzzing grass, scratched himself, burped, and laid down casually with the spear dangling loose in his hands.
Two minutes and four seconds later he sat up very quickly without looking behind him, spear overhead, and was immediately buried underneath nearly a thousand pounds of Hyaenodon. This put him in a position for reflection.
“Father,” he said when he finally came home that night, staggering in late, “I have lost four more cows and now understand what I wish to do in my life. And I need your help getting your spear back.”
“You shouldn’t have taken that,” his father sighed. “Where is it?”
“Stuck in a monster’s ribs, through the heart,” said Morri. “It was too heavy for its own good.”
Morri’s father gave another sigh, the sigh of the annoyed, and was preparing to smack Morri again before the boy showed him the tooth he’d brought home.

When Morri ran away from home five years later, it was not much of a surprise to anyone. His mother had packed him some dinner, and he’d taken his father’s spear without permission again. He would be back someday.
“The world’s a big place, but there’s only so much to see in it that’s worth seeing,” said Morri’s father. “He’ll come back soon.”
“Besides,” his mother added, “he’ll miss the cows.”

Morri, Morri, Quick Morri; jogging across the plains and through the forests and into deserts, always looking for new people, new places, new things to hunt. He wandered north from the far south, and he found that some of what his father said was true: there was an awful lot of world out there, but not so much that was truly strange. He saw leopards and lions, he saw elephants, he saw hippopotami. He met a lot of new people, and killed many things that attempted to eat him (their hides made up his clothing, their teeth covered him like hairs), but he didn’t find anything like what he’d found in that cattle pasture as a little middle child.
Then he came up to the town on the lake by the sea one day, all alone. Some bits and ends of furs and teeth from his hunts gave him a dinner and a half, and an open ear gave him an interesting story: a monster lived in the lake, a creature that ate whatever came too near for water or for fishing. A few sheep a day had placated it, but it grew more restless and hungry of late, and they found themselves contemplating a change.
“Maybe the headman’s daughter,” suggested the farmer Morri was conversing with. “That might do it.”
“Why?” asked Morri.
The farmer shrugged and scratched his beard. “Well, it’s angry with us or it wouldn’t keep on trying to eat us. It’s got to be angry at someone, and he’s the most important person around. It’s got to want him to pay for this, and what he values most is his daughter.” The farmer gave another shrug, arms akimbo in the culturally universal gesture of well-that’s-about-it.
“When does this monster feed?” asked Morri.
“Around the evenings and mornings, usually. And the nights. Not too safe down there come daylight either, so you be careful.”
Morri listened to this advice, borrowed one of the farmer’s sheep without permission, and trussed it next to the lake. Then he took his father’s spear in hand and waited, waited, waited all night, with a little ember in hand and a torch at the ready.
Finally, he heard a crunch, and that was all he needed to ignite the torch. The sheep was gone, and for a moment he thought without a trace – ‘till light shone back at him from the lake. Two beady eyes looked back at him, ghostly-glowing in the dark from the water. He’d seen that reflective gaze before: crocodile eyes. But they were just a bit too big, and that little moment of confusion was all he needed to feel before they came hurtling at him faster than a blink, quicker than the sound of the slapping waves that formed beneath its body.
Morri was quick, but not quick enough: the jaws found him. Morri was strong, but not strong enough: the beast’s teeth grasped tightly around his midsection. Morri was cunning, and that was just barely enough. All of the teeth of his prey that coated his turned and tore at his enemy’s mouth as fiercely as they would’ve in life, forcing a flinch and a start just as the thing in the lake was ready to bite down, shrinking away from its prey with a rattling hiss.
Morri flung his father’s spear prone, at a bad angle, left-handed. He was quite proud of this because it still sunk straight through the thing’s right foreleg and into the mud, clean as a whistle. It bellowed and snapped its jaws, and it was just when it was mid-snap that Morri grabbed hold of its mouth and began to squeeze.
There are ways to overcome crocodiles with your bare hands, difficult though they are. Keeping a firm hold on the animal’s mouth to keep it from opening helps, which was good for Morri. Being able to blind it is extremely useful, which was good for Morri because that was what both his feet – wrapped around the animal’s neck – were attempting to do. Fighting it on land is helpful, which was good for Morri. Having some way to prevent it from spinning about and over upon itself is necessary, and Morri’s father’s spear was a great aide in this. Finally and most importantly, many if not all of these careful tricks are used on crocodiles that are less than thirty feet long. This was not good for Morri, and that was why when the villagers came down to the lakeshore in the morning they were not surprised to see his legs sticking out of the animal’s mouth as it lay on the shore, spear still-embedded in it.
Then the legs kicked. That spooked them pretty good.
Morri never did remember too much about how he won that one – a long, hard, struggle in the dark that wavered from muddy shore to solid ground and back over and over until somehow he lost his grip and ended up half-in and half-out of a mouth that didn’t want to bite him in half but was just fine with squeezing the air out of him. All he had left to do was put his hands on whatever flesh they could find and squeeze ‘till his fingers were bloodless, and when they pulled him free he still had a death-grip on the thing’s air-pipe.
The thing was twenty-eight feet long, give or take a bit. Its teeth were strangely rounded and blunt, leaving Morri’s coat-of-teeth sadly lacking for repairs. They made a lovely necklace, though.
He stayed for a week, then left when they started talking marriage. The headman’s daughter was nice, but she was interested in someone else and he was interested in something bigger. The world was indeed a big place, and mostly empty, but that just meant you had to look harder.

Morri, Morri, Iron Morri; the wanderer of the world, the man who couldn’t stop moving. They even said he twitched in his sleep, Morri did; ever alert to the prickle of fangs on a sleeping neck or the brush of soft air from a claw hovering above a bed. He had so many names now in the prime of his life, a new one in every village, every town. He’d tried using his own, but people kept mispronouncing it, and now whatever title that first landed on him tended to stick – at least until he started walking again, and let it peel off behind him like an old snakeskin. But other things tended to stick.
Around his neck was his old crocodile-tooth necklace, expanded upon inch by inch, tooth by tooth until it looped four times around his neck in a sort of spiky gorget. A bear that had stood twelve feet tall upright had contributed several canines to it, and a lion of ten in length had helped finished it off.
His body was wrapped in the tanned and battered hides of a half-hundred kills, from the small to the massive, selected carefully by natural wear and tear until only the most durable remained. Claws and teeth were studded throughout it, peeking through as surprising, sharp-edged whiteness against sun-darkened hides and darker skin.
On his body he carried scars, many scars – so many that he looked as though he’d been sewn together. For greater wounds, he’d acquired a few. His nose was half-missing from the charge of a giant furry creature that walked the frozen lands that lay behind him. He walked as strong as ever, but a limp in his left leg marked the passing of a creature he still didn’t know how to describe. It had stalked him through Mongolia for days, on and off, each of them all that the other could find to eat for miles around in the desolate paths they chose. It had taken a bite from him in the end, before the end, snarling. He had been hard-pressed to find more than that from it himself; it was as lost as he had been, as hungry, and as tired.
On his head, carefully modified and hollowed and balanced, he wore the skull of that creature, as a memory and as protection both. It was a full three feet long, and had once held the power to crush bones like twigs.
In one hand he carried his father’s (borrowed) spear. Its shaft had been snapped four times over – once in six places at once by a maddened thing like an elephant but far furrier, a peaceful god that had gone crazed with brain-fever and turned upon its flock – and replaced dutifully each time, on the last occasion by the carved and shaped bone of the giant furred elephant. Its head had been replaced more times than he could imagine, with good, local stone here, with a sharp piece of bone there, once (in desperate times) with simply a ground-down wooden point and a quick fire-hardening. Currently it was attached to his body with a long, long length of rope whose origin was unknown to him and whose toughness was beyond question, affixed into a small, carefully-bored hole in the shift. But it was still his father’s spear, and that’s why he took care of it instead of replacing it. Because he had to return it someday.
In the other hand, he gripped a twin-bladed paddle with whitened knuckles, and he cursed the sea softly in his heart. It had made sense at the time, so much sense. He had gone north, and as far north as he was able. He had travelled west, and as far west as he were able. He had gone east, as far east as he were able, and then as he’d stopped on those cold forested shores he’d learned of stories and mumbles and mutterings of the land that lay just a few horizons away. How could he stop there, and go back to where he’d already been?
Well, very easily. And now Morri cursed that he had to do things the hard way, as he looked down into a blue so deep it was nearly black and sought with frantic eyes a shape that made his little skin-boat (he’d traded three teeth for it, one of them an old one from the crocodile) look as tiny as a piece of wood a child had tossed in a puddle.
It was the silence that unnerved him most, as the shape underneath him grew. On land your prey panted, it gasped, it growled and snarled and hissed as the grass crackled underfoot and the wind whistled through lungs and ears. Here the waves moved as they would, and it was only at the last – at the very last – that sound arrived to mark the attack from below, as the shark seized his boat in a full-body breach, whirling through the air with force beyond imagination. The crash of waves in a giant’s wake as its body left the water.
Morri clung to its nose as it rose, felt his body grow light in the air. No eyes met his gaze: the shark’s sockets were filled with empty white, rolled away and tucked back for protection from stray flippers and sweeps of tails. It did not look upon its prey as they died, and that assumption cost it dearly because its other senses, miraculous as they were, were incapable of detecting Morri’s father’s spear as it drove inside its eye socket and dug deep into the flesh of its cartilaginous skull.
The shark spasmed, and it dove, taking Morri’s father’s spear with it. And as went Morri’s father’s spear, so went Morri, both as a matter of the practical – the tether at his waist yet anchored him to it – and by principle. After all, he couldn’t return the spear if it sank to the bottom of the sea in a dead shark’s head.
This, at least, was soon revealed to be not a worry: the shark was far from dead. Its flight was conducted with the steadfast determination of a long-time survivor, for whom the matter of life-and-death had become an hourly dilemma centuries ago. Flee deeper, its experiences whispered into its tiny mind, flee deep and far, and they will not catch you. Flee deeper.
Pull harder, whispered Morri’s own mind. Larger though it was, it was no less simple at a time like this. Pull harder, so that you can see the sun again, taste the air again, feel a world that isn’t weighing down on you from all sides. The rope is all that matters now – ah, see how it has led you back to your father’s spear! Now you must reclaim it, you see?
Morri gripped the sides of the great shark with one hand, and that was no easy task. He gripped the shaft of his father’s spear with the other, and that nearly unbalanced him. He adjusted, shifted, and shoved with all his weight.
Flee deeper, whispered the shark’s brain. Flee d p r.
Flee d .
F e .

In the end, there was enough intent and purpose left in the shark to keep it steering forwards until it reached the end of its world, and there was enough oxygen left in Morri to hang ahold until it took him to the brink of his. Not enough to wake him, though – no, that happened later, much later, in a seaside shack where a man had kept him alive with fish broth for a week. He spoke a language that Morri didn’t understand, but it was a language he hadn’t understood before, and a cautious sort of trade of debts and repayment took place. On the one hand, the man had kept Morri alive for a week. On the other, it had largely been done with flesh from the shark Morri had killed. And its teeth were valuable, so… they were even. Roughly.
Morri took one of the teeth. His father’s spear, it seemed, needed a new head.

Morri, Morri, Old Morri; the one-eyed crack-shot, the limping man who could outrun a horse. All that muscle still there, just dried close to the bone by endless sun and hardened by the wear of a lifetime travelling against the fiercest winds, tanned in the saltwater spray of half the seas the planet could hold.
He’d walked the world now, Morri had, and seen the corners of the new as well as he’d seen the old. At first south, then east, then south again, and south on and on and down and down past mountains and plains and deserts and forests whose lushness unravelled your senses with a single glance. And everywhere Morri had walked, he had hunted. Oh had he hunted. His father’s spear had been repaired so many times over and over again, it had sunk into so many chests, through so many guts, pierced so many skulls. He had killed lions that made mockery of his conquests in Europe, fought a great bear with a shortened snout and lengthened legs for three days running, duelled with cats with teeth like giant knives and necks like tree-trunks. He had even once stood against an attack of wolves – creatures with stocky limbs and massive bodies, fierce and clever in their assault. His face had met the pack-leader’s jaws that day, and they had left a warning from ear to ear and into his right eye, wherever that was.
Old Morri had seen the world in all its vastness in those fifty-and-then-some years of his, he had. And there were still things he hadn’t yet seen in it, and some things that he had seen that could suddenly turn brand-new in your eyes, at the right moment. For instance, the sky above him had never seemed more intensely blue in his life than it was right now, pinned down in the dirt beneath an angry ten-foot bird. Talons crushed against him, a beak that put an axe to shame hewed against his father’s spear, and the clouds spiralled above so lazily and sparsely in that big blue sky. It made the ocean seem a shamefully small thing.
The bird lashed out with its foot again, ready to land a hit that would turn Morri’s ribcage into grist, and he rolled and struck, too out of breath to swear and out of any words strong enough to work. The shaft of his father’s spear cracked against the thing’s ankles and made it wobble – oh, it wasn’t the first blow he’d landed there, not by a long shot – but not tumble or hesitate. It was on him again as if he were a snake in the grasp of a secretary-bird, hissing with every jab, every kick, every darting, flittering motion, a creature that massed more than a quarter-ton moving like it weighed ounces. Wherever its legs didn’t dance its beak swooped, a beak that Morri would’ve needed both hands to lift, a killing spike with the sharpness of a stiletto backed by a muscled neck that could thrust it with the force of twenty men of the sort Morri had been in his youth.
Now Morri was Old Morri, and he was not as strong, maybe. He was not as fast, surely. But oh, but oh, but oh was Morri still cunning, more than ever, and he could think and fight at the same time, all the time.
Morri stumbled, on his bad leg. The bird struck, hopping forward – all that weight, all that weight balanced with perfect precision, undettered by bruising of bone and flesh. And finally – just then, with the timing he’d been hunting for – did Morri’s father’s spear strike home as one leg was completely off the ground.
Now, that made the bird wobble. But its leg was strong and its balance was fine, and it was a mere wobble on its own, when all was said and done. Which is why Morri’s spear rebounded from its shin, loose from his hand, and shot straight at its eye.
The bird dodged that, like it or not – instinct would accommodate no less, and its neck moved without thought – and in doing so, it leaned the wrong way at the wrong time, and fell flat on its back, legs kicking. Undignified, bruising, perhaps even bone-cracking – and thus as good as dead. It would never know, because before it could try to rise Old Morri was at its throat, far away from the kicking talons, too close to the beak for the neck to drive it. His hands were armoured in rhinoceros hide, his gauntlets gripped with sharkskin, and though he was sunk to his wrists in greasy, blood-smeared feathers, he would not relinquish his grip, would not release the pressure as he sunk the full weight and power of his body down into those ten fingers underneath that big, blue sky. Another hunt, and another kill, and all the same, new and old, all the same. Nothing new happened under that sky, for Morri.
They watched one another closely, bird and man. Old stains from past meals caked the tiny crevices of its beak as it breathed and began to stop, inches away from Morri as he strangled it, as they stared into one another’s eyes. Mad, furious eyes, of the sort he’d thought had long ago become a common sight to him, a natural thing. And yet Morri could not look away from what he saw, from what was hiding there in the depths.
There was something very old there in the eye of that terrible bird, oh so much older than Old Morri was; something that stared back strong as it died, completely unbeaten. Something that hated him and everything like him; every daring ape that had once been a rat, every elephant that once had aspired to the stature of a mouse. Something that was waiting and watching and ready for the moment when the hairy things would slip and fall and drop the world into their talons again, forever.
Old Morri looked back into those eyes, and he knew then what it meant to grow old and hard and hateful.
And as soon as he knew that, he was done.

Morri, Morri, a children’s story; a name that wasn’t even his across much of the world, a hundred different people with a thousand different deeds. He was in Europe, in Asia, he’d come conquering again to Africa, he was under the sea battling the greatest monsters ever to slither its waves, he was in a land where no man or woman had ever walked, hunting the very god(s?). Wherever he was, he was hunting, because what else would he ever do?
Morri was out there somewhere, that was sure enough. And if there was an old man living on a long-abandoned piece of pastureland somewhere who happened to share a name with him, an old man with a broken, beaten (but well-repaired) walking stick; well, the world was a funny place, and for all its bigness, you’d often see the same thing more than once.

Sometimes he did miss those cows.

The dark was not a stranger anymore to Small-five. She’d swum the seas of nighttime with her glowshine gone for many days, lightless and nearly sightless, as cautious predator and savvy prey. She knew the dark now better than any of her kind ever had, she was sure, and she thought that was well enough.
She knew the dark. But she’d never know it could grow like this.
The water at this depth was leaden, an infinitely heavy weight of purest cold that seemed to subtly press from all sides at once, deadening sensation and crushing down on sound. Sometimes Small-five couldn’t feel her heartbeat, and for a moment she would wonder if this was what death was like after all.
Then would come the soft luminescence of life, and she would recall what she’d been searching for.
Many of the things down there had no names that she knew, no pictures filed away in othershine, no reports filed by far-sweeping, Safety-led expeditions, no warnings in dry, academic voices filed away with fifteen citations. Sometimes it was all she could do to guess at their relatives, or even to tell if they were still-alive or floating carrion.
In the end, only one thing mattered of them: they were edible. Mostly. Except for one strange thing with too many fins and too little skull that Small-five had speared a short time ago; her entire body had gone numb within seconds and she’d been rendered near-paralyzed for the rest of the day. Pulsing-point had gone into fits sixteen times over by the time Small-five was well enough to swim normally, if sluggishly.
A glow of light. A smooth cruise forwards. A snap of the proboscis. Done, another piece of unseen dead flesh in her grasp, glowing lure already guttering as it was shoved into her mouth. Thankfully small; it was always something of a gamble as to whether her quarry would be tiny and filmy-boned or larger than she’d ever imagined. Sometimes she heard sounds that were too low-pitched to be truly noise anymore, from the very bottom of the blackness underneath her. Adolescent Gruskomish perhaps, still a few centuries from leaving the ocean’s floor? She could only hope so: Gruskomish were dangerous beyond imagining, but slow-moving in their juvenile stage, and lazy. She would be safe from them as long as she stayed above the absolute depths, out of easy reach. What frightened her more were the unknowns, the things she hunted that could so easily turn out to be much larger than they appeared.
The next prey Small-five found came as a surprise. In fact, she swam right into it. A spasming length of slimy muscle wrapped around her from out of the darkness, as unlit as she, indeterminate in length. Small-five thrashed, surged, began to feel her ribs quiver in their places, and realized that her proboscis was unsecured.
The third stab did the job. Whatever it was, something vital had lain too close to her head, packed in slim, slimy tissue – away from her teeth, but not from her more dangerous weapon. She wasn’t sure if it had been chance or misjudgement, but the effect was the same and her goals met. A meal in her possession and another in her belly, it was time to rise from the depths once more.
The speed was the thing. Always slow, too slow, insufferably, horribly slow. She wanted to give way to panic as she’d done the night Far-away-light abandoned her, to streak in a mad dash to the surface and light again. She also wanted to keep her bloodstream from turning into a bubbling net of agony that would strangle her brain, and that mandated patience, a slow, steady slog of patience that made her think of teeth over and over again, rising from below at a pace she dared not risk.
Where was the light? Where was it? She was too high up for no light. Where was-
Sister-sister-sister-food-sister-food-food-food-food-good?
Small-five twitched. Why was Pulsing-point so deep? They were too far below for…she rolled in the water and squinted upwards. The blackness remained, but as part of the sky, a sky hanging a mere bodylength above her, where the waves rolled onwards. Small-five had spent all day in the deep waters. She really did have to pay more attention to time – how long had her descent taken her? Her ascent? Her hunting? No idea beyond too long.
Bad-water-water-bad-deep-water-food-food-help?
Yes, yes Pulsing-point, the deep water was bad. But it gave food, or something close enough. She relaxed her death-grip on the prey-that-gripped, letting its folds fall away from her.
Bad, reiterated Pulsing-point, as she began to eat. Bad. Good-food. Bad.
Small-five looked closer and saw that she had a point: the creature was still dripping with its own bodily mucous, despite everything the ascent had done to mangle it. In appearance, it most closely resembled a giant Verrineeach, though with two eyes instead of three. Its sides did not shine as its cousins did, spreading a foul taste in the water as Pulsing-point chewed her way through its sides.
Disgusting though it was, it was meat, and meat for more than one meal. The rest was shoved into their empty carry-harnesses against the protests of Pulsing-point’s greedy mouth, to be saved for later. Some days Small-five rose from the depths with nothing at all. Most days.
Bad-water, insisted Pulsing-point as they continued their swim, their never-ending swim that left their ribs a little more pronounced against their skin every hour. Bad-water. Bad-water. Bad.
It took Small-five nearly until dawn to realize that yet another observation had been embedded in her sister’s mantras of annoyance: the water on the surface was nearly as cold as the depths. Something almost like hope stirred in her then, a strange feeling that threatened to dethrone the resigned will that had reigned since she first saw the empty bottoms of their carry-harnesses, since she first made the long, long swim to the deep waters for food. She’d never counted the trips she made, for fear of despair, and now suddenly progress – the damnable illusion – seemed nearly real.
The next day they saw floating ice, and Small-five spent all of it being pestered by excitement at this novelty. She wouldn’t have traded it for anything, and thankfully she didn’t have to. Three days passed and her sister fell silent all on her own as they approached the edge of a million-year ice shelf, the border that even the strongest summer could never thaw.
The pole again. Home to where her mind began.
Bad-water, Pulsing-point said, but automatically. Big-stange-bad-strange-strange-water.
Good-water, thought Small-five. You should’ve come here with me – with all of us – six years ago, sister. You should’ve all been here to eat and learn and grow, not cowering all alone in some dark corner of a reefcolony. You should have taken in this goodwater through food and gills until it swelled your braincase by three times, opened up your mind like a pearl and let us all see you for what you could be. You should’ve been that way.
A touch at her proboscis, worried. Sister-hurt-sister-bad? Safe?
Small-five was sitting in the water, immobile. She shook herself three times quickly, stiffened her spine and resolve, and swam onwards, into the ice.

At first she thought her memories had faded, failed her, left her drifting. This was not how she’d remembered the pole – the cramped mazes were shrunken beyond accounting for her size, the waters were clear and empty, the few meals they could catch empty and scrawny as Kleeistrojatch elders. But no, it was far more than a mere faulty recollection of the end of her childhood: summer was here, bringing light and warmth and starvation, the same summer that had driven her and her sisters north to Far-away-light years ago. The ice they had found was the southernmost core, the prey they sought the refugees of winter’s bounty, clinging to the shelf and waiting for more bountiful times, for the winter night and the oncoming Fiskupid swarms and their attendants, for the juveniles on the cusp of maturity that would come with them.
Small-five examined the corpses of that which they ate – if Pulsing-point gave her enough time – and examined the progress of the stars and did her best to calculate the changing temperature of the water against old charts in old reports she’d read what felt like never ago. It all told her the same time, the same tale: midsummer. Late midsummer, if she were generous. Which was still much too early and much too long to spend eating what she could scavenge from the depths – the polar depths, where life might run riot but it also ran with sharp teeth, and quickly too.
Hungry-bad-water-hungry, complained Pulsing-point as they shivered under the sun through the nights and days, as their sides remained bare to the bones and open to the cold. Hungry-bad-water-bad.
Small-five soothed her with a brush of her proboscis and gently ran her touch along her sister’s skull, tracing the edge of her cranium. There was no notable change, and of course there shouldn’t have been, wouldn’t have been. Not this early, this fast. But the food they ate lacked that certain aftertaste that she found herself recalling from before, the hint of minerals and acid that always left your teeth itching. It tasted like watery flesh and empty bones now, cut off from the upwellings that brought up the nutrients from the deep down to the surface, concentrated and packed into meat.
Go-safe-good-water, insisted Pulsing-point. This had become part of her mantra for the past few days, a new hope, a new cause to plead for. Food-food-food. Good-water.
Small-five brushed her sister again in reassurance, and led them both farther into the ice, towards the end of the world. Day after day, stroke after stroke.

She’d hoped that it would start to make sense again, that the icy pathways would coagulate and choke to close her in from all sides and frighten her senseless, like the old days. That the Nolohks would return and stare at her from odd crevices, filled with one thousand mouths of hunger and the razory limbs that had trimmed Dim-glow’s fins so long ago, that the Rimebacks would scurry overhead on floes.
Instead, she found mountains in reverse, fangs of ice more solid than volcanic stone and a thousand times older hanging overhead and brooding as they passed, forcing them downward, always downward. The water thickened around them as they dropped again, a journey that felt like one of Small-five’s deep-foraging expeditions stretched out for days with no end in sight.
Pulsing-point made it bearable. Pulsing-point and her light, and her (slightly rattled) ability to find wonder in the sights around them rather than creeping dread. It was thanks to her that they saw the prey to catch (mostly filmy Eurenu, fat and toxic and unappealing but so wonderfully massive in their flesh, a gutful and a half at least). It was thanks to her that Small-five didn’t succumb to the mindless terror of being alone in constant darkness with no end in sight and ram herself to death against the miles-thick ice above them, screaming inside to be home. It was thanks to her that the journey even existed in the first place, that Small-five wasn’t still at home on the reefcolony regressing back to nothing more than a being of food and rest, simple needs, simple wants, a simple life with a simple death.
And it was thanks to her that they found it. A scurrying chase on the glimpse of maybe-food led her to a crevice in a six-mile spear of ice that plunged down past all sanity, to a crack in that crevice, and finally to a nook, which she wedged herself inside and immediately froze.
Small-five wasn’t worried; she’d seen her sister get herself into considerably tighter spots before on the reefcolony. She grasped her tail and began to tug gently, guiding her backwards.
Pulsing-point stiffened and squirmed, refusing to budge.
Annoyed, Small-five yanked her tail again, more firmly. No matter how tasty-looking whatever she’d cornered was, it wasn’t worth becoming frozen into an icicle.
Pulsing-point thrashed briefly, smacking Small-five in the snout with her tail.
Small-five succumbed to her irritation and yanked Pulsing-point bodily with all the force she could muster, only to meet a total lack of resistance as her sister played the oldest trick imaginable and reversed direction, shooting backwards out of the icy nook with the force of a Godfish’s fin and sending both of them spinning. LOOK-FOOD! she shone, bright as the sun with an eyeful of air, LOOK-FOOD-FOOD!
Small-five debated smacking her, but chose to succumb to curiosity rather than brutality. She cautiously swam up to the hole and peered inside.
Ooliku. A small one, but alive and alert, glaring back at her as he cowered in the nestling grip of the ice. Except ice wasn’t that colour, wasn’t that rounded, wasn’t…. Small-five began to count, lost track, and gave up.
Ooliku. The inside of the great undersea icicle was almost completely hollow. And everywhere she looked, every inch of the surface was covered in Ooliku. Resting.
Every single eye was fixed upon hers.
Small-five waited there for the longest moment of her life. Then she backed up, just a whisker’s worth.
She might well have caused the same effect if she’d dived in headfirst flashing distress-shines as hard as she could’ve ever managed. Within three seconds every single Ooliku in the entire cave had jumped into action, either trying to flee, trying to fight, or trying to see what all the other Ooliku were fleeing from or fighting. All three goals required them to pass through the same passage, which Small-five and Pulsing-point were currently occupying.
It was a reminder for Small-five of a bygone time in a place full of strangeness, to be so surrounded by life. It seemed like all the water had vanished and been replaced with Ooliku, as suddenly-numerous as Fiskupids. They swarmed over her and her sister, so eager for battle or escape that they managed to lose them entirely, spiralling away and jetting into the depths with the sudden purpose that comes with almost total distraction. They had a purpose here, in this far-away place where no one had ever been before, where no intruder had ever disturbed their slumber. A single event, however shocking, was not great enough to disturb them from their timeless ruts of instinct and habit. They were awake, and thus they would feed, so they might continue to spar and mate. To that food they raced, and in their wake, as fast as they were able, came Small-five and Pulsing-point.
First down, then up, then down and finally up again, up again on the sudden and fiercely-gripping claws of a current the likes of which Small-five had never felt take hold of her. Up again and again and again until finally sunlight, terrifying, glorious sunlight came into their eyes from far above, trickling down from above as they surged to meet it on a column of water from the coldest currents on earth.
And where the two met, life filled Small-five’s gaze.
She couldn’t describe what she saw growing on the ice around them, in this suddenly-open water, this polar oasis. She couldn’t recognize a thing that wasn’t an Ooliku (so many Ooliku, even among the bounty that they were now feeding upon), couldn’t name the corals and shells that studded every surface, the creatures that speckled the water in impossibly tiny trillions, the swarming things that dashed through the water.
But she knew one thing truly, when she first saw Pulsing-point bite down on an unaware Ooliku and shimmer in surprised distaste. When she first closed her own teeth on prey.
That strange feeling in your mouth, like minerals and chemicals and things that couldn’t be synthesized in any laboratory, that were impossible to pipe all the way home without contamination or disruption.
Strange-things, said Pulsing-point. Strange. Food-though.
And so they ate, and so they began to change.

Of course I remember the first time it happened. You don’t just forget an event like that, you know – why, the very fact that I’m telling you all this is sheer proof of how its effects reverberated throughout my entire life! If I grow senile – well, much MORE senile – that will be the very last thing to go, I assure you.
I was nine years old and my big brother asked me to look through a crack in the wall, so that I could ‘look at her titties.’
Well, of course I had no real interest in such things yet, but who was I to deny such a moment of fraternal unity? I stepped to the wall, jumped up on a rock to give me the extra three-inch height I needed, and found myself staring at the small of the back of an extremely hideous woman, bloated, warted, and strongly resembling some manner of dinosaur rather than a human. I stared long and hard, until I saw a twitch at her scalp and realized that instead of hair, she was crowned with a wriggling mass of small but lively snakes. So I did what later years of mythological reading would teach me was the best thing possible, and lurched backwards in a blind panic.
My brother asked me if I’d seen her titties. I told him no, and he gave me a noogie without pity. I strongly suspect that this was what led to our lifetime estrangement. Oh well.

Now, you might expect that the little incident would’ve put me off peering through cracks in walls, and you would be right! As a matter of fact I stayed away from walls entirely for the next four years. My parents took me to three different specialists, but thankfully they were squeamish and opted not to follow through with a lobotomy. Those were quite fashionable at the time, you know. But it would’ve cost money they didn’t have, so instead they settled for shutting me up with distractions when company was over, and covering most of my walls with bookcases so I didn’t have to look at them. Never took to reading much, though.
So it was a while and I got most of the way through puberty and things and then I started to discard all that silly nonsense I’d believed when I was a child. Stepping on cracks snapping my mother’s back? Nonsense! Buttercups telling you if you liked butter? Bunkum! Monsters under the bed? Balderdash! All of it was discredited poppycock, and that’s why when I was wondering down a street late at night throwing rocks at people’s doors and saw that a garage door had been left carelessly unlatched (but was anyone home?), I stepped right up and put my peeper to a crack in its siding without hesitation.
Inside, I saw the most marvelous thing – a cavern filled with an endless sea of golden treasure, glittering through the smoky haze emitted from the forty torches carried in the forty left hands of forty bearded, hairy, smelly men, each more bearded, hairier, and smellier than the last. In their forty right hands they carried forty sacks of plundered loot, which they spilt about willy-nilly in the boisterousness of their passage.
Naturally, I did the sensible thing and jimmed the door open an inch, hoping to seize a single scoop of pilfered valuables for myself. My hand reached in and closed into a fist – were those jewels in my grasp, gleaming and precious? Alas no, it was the infant young of a raccoon, which bit me. My screaming hysterics soon brought down the wrath of the slumbering homeowners upon me, and following a most cruel batterment by rake and a swift trial I was put to juvie hall, where I spent my time avoiding all of the walls. Especially the cracked ones.

My little stint in our great nation’s legal halls, corridors, and cells had a great impact on me. Mostly the cells, especially when my cellmate was a testy fellow. But I persevered, and by the tender young age of twenty-two I’d put all that trouble behind me to work as a simple, honest door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, the last of my kind in the nation. I got the idea when my father passed away and left me his encyclopedia set as a quick and clean-cut way to make a modest afternoon’s living before my landlord struck me from his good books and my possessions from his property. I’d not had much luck after the first nine streets, but here I stood upon the sixtieth house of the tenth, massive, weight briefcase in one hand and a carefree grin in the other, listening to the wheezing, gasping shuffle of geriatric feet approaching from the other side of a well-painted upscale home. Alas, as their owner reached the apex of his ascent, the shuffling was replaced with a single drawn-out wail that ended in a tremendous, bone-rattling thud, followed by the silence of the cardiacly stricken. I am an upstanding citizen, and that is why I did what I did next: I peered through a crack in the otherwise impenetrable glazed glass of the door-window to make sure everything was all right and that I hadn’t fallen for some hilarious elderly prank.
I peered through utmost gloom (this house’s lighting was a travesty!) and saw before me a yawning expanse fit to make eyes pop – if this was a cavern, it was one whose scope dwarfed the Sistine Chapel! Dark stalagmites the size of skyscrapers lurked in the far-above ceiling; miles below me, magma sluggishly oozed at depths that would sicken bedrock. And in the center of the chamber lay a slab that could’ve birthed mountains, across which was trussed and chained a man whose size astounds mere description save to say that each of his fingernails would’ve made high-quality low-cost waterproof roofing for an entire football field.
I was staggered and astonished, naturally. My brain took a holiday and let my eyeballs please themselves, twitching at every impossible sight. Drawn to motion as they were, it wasn’t long before the venom dripping from above caught my eye: a snake that could’ve swallowed a hundred subway cars hung from the ceiling, twisted in the roots of an impossible tree, its open mouth filling and spilling with poisonous liquids that were landing right inside the poor old bastard’s eyelids. I winced, and at that moment of wincing the snake and I locked eyes – oh my, the evil in those little eyes the size of houses! I don’t want to know what could’ve happened to me if it weren’t for the chained man and his howling at the pain; he shivered and shook and spasmed and moaned and gave such a shaking that I was bowled clean off my feet just as the snake made to slide closer to me. I hopped to my feet, turned tail, and was off home at a sprint, leaving my encyclopedia behind me in exchange for a faster flight.
Anyways, after I got back to my apartment I locked myself up, threw all the furniture in front of the door, and curled in a ball until four in the morning, when the police busted down my door and arrested me for unlawful squatting and suspicion of murder. Apparently the poor old thing had popped his clogs clean off and a neighbour had spotted my getaway. The whole lot got cleared up after I’d spent a few years in high-security, though, so no use fussing about it.

Now, I spent my time wisely in the big box that go-around. I studied architecture, and learned all about how to make safe, secure, structurally sound walls with no cracks whatsoever in them. I did quite well, if I do say so myself, and if you go to any modern penitentiary built within the last twenty years I’ll wager dollars to dufflebags full of heroin that I had a hand in building it. They copied my notes, you see, not that I ever saw so much as a single red cent oh dearie me no, couldn’t be seen taking inspiration from a COVICT now, could we. The gall!
I lost my train of thought, where was I? Oh yes.
Right, so after I left jail again about a decade after that first time I left jail a decade before, around ten years back, my first priority was to live somewhere nice, with firm, well-founded buildings that were brand new and spic and span with no cracks whatsoever. I chose to move to Tokyo on the wings of a plane ticket that was obtained through blackmail, but the entirely acceptable and cosy familial kind where you threaten to tell your brother’s wife and kids about what he did when he was seven. Japan was lovely – I stayed in a nice neighborhood with beautiful skyscrapers, even the alleyway I lived in was so new and fresh you could eat your dinner off it, and good thing, too. Yes sir, those were the finest six days of my life, right up until the earthquake hit and I tripped and landed facefirst on the sidewalk right as it cracked open and almost sucked my entire head in.
This time what I saw I…can’t really recall. There were five suns, each lasting an age, and fire, and storms, and blood, and for some reason an enormous quantity of jaguars.
There may also have been monkeys.
All I know is that by the time I came to my senses I’d been deported and barred from entering Japan ever again, along with anyone of closer relation to me than a second cousin. Quite puzzling and altogether disturbing, especially when I found a little heart belonging to a small snake in my left pants pocket. I have no idea how the police missed it. I’ll show you; I’ve got it in a box somewhere.

After that I went and lived in the woods, which isn’t as bad as it sounds if you plaster all of your tiny hermit shack’s walls with lots of mud and replaster them again every season. Then there’s not a crack to be found! Twenty-nine years out here eating twigs and roots and VERY odd mushrooms without so much as a crevice to peer into and I’ve been happy and fine and fit as a fiddle. All until, oh, five minutes ago when I carelessly hit my head on the wall and glanced the wrong way and locked your eyes with mine.
I must say, you’re a very good listener. Especially without any ears. Do you listen through your eyes? Because there are an awful lot of them. Each charming in their very own way, of course.
Would you like to come in? The place is a dreadful mess these days, but I’m sure we could make a shot at tidying it up.

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.”