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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am beset by doldrums of implacable size.
Colonel Thomas P. Fiddlegate stared at the sentence he had just scribbled, and found that it was so apt that he had no energy to press onwards. His eyelids felt like lead, his limbs iron, his mind a stone. Also, he was over seventy. That was probably the worst bit.
“Pinfat, my friend,” he somberly addressed his servant, as he tossed his journal to his desk, “I am altogether through. Finished. What is there left in life for me?”
“Lunch, sir,” said his servant. “And my name is not Pinfat, it is Paul. Pinfat is your cat, who is presently occupying your lap.”
“What greater purpose, Pinfat?” continued the Colonel, ignoring the noises of the underclass with Victorian ease as he stroked his cat. He eyed the majestic, weather-beaten globe atop his desk with grim displeasure. “What prime mover that shall shape my life and fortunes? I have done all that there is to be done, have I not? Have I not also seen all that I might see? I am rudderless!”
“It was just a little clam, sir. Hardly the end of the world.”
Colonel Fiddlegate’s moustache made the best effort at bristling that it could, though frightfully undernourished. “Just a clam?” he muttered in disbelief at the gall of servants. “JUST? Pinfat, that clam was the last of its family in all of Africa I had not hunted, and with that, the last of all clams in Africa I had not pursued, and with that, the last of all clams in all the world that I have not laid bare claim to! Pinfat, I am FINISHED! I am DONE! I am altogether THROUGH with clams now!” He stomped his foot firmly on the floor, causing Pinfat to bite him toothlessly in protest. “Only one clam left in all the world unseen by these faded old eyes, and that one a myth, I made sure of it!”
“Congratulations, sir.”
Fiddlegate slumped. “I am pointless without clams, Pinfat! Whatever will I do? What can I do?”
“Look to your peers for example, sir. Perhaps your brothers.”
“I’m intolerably poor at cards, Pinfat. And gambling is an acid of the soul.”
“The scotch, then.”
“No, I’d drain the bottle. I’ll take my misery in sober silence, thank you very much.”
Paul left the bottle. After about an hour, he came back and retrieved it for the garbage, leaving an extremely battered and cat-furred blanket to keep his master’s scrawny kneecaps warm against the cold. And so went the evening of Colonel Fiddlegate, who had killed all of one man during his glorious forty-year career (inadvertently: he could’ve sworn that the oyster he’d offered his sergeant was a good one, and nobody had ever argued differently).
Evening wore on, grew threadbare, and dissolved into night.
And in that night, came the dreams. Most were nonsensical. Some were anecdotal. And one, one was inspirational.

“AUSTRALIA!” bellowed Colonel Fiddlegate, starting upright in a fit and causing Pinfat to cling to his legs with the agility of a squirrel. “Ow,” he added, and hastily scooped up the paralyzed cat. “Australia!” he whispered to its surly face. “There! That’s where I’ll find it! I never looked for it there!” His eyes turned to the globe on his desk again, this time filled with hungry fire. “Australia!”
“You hollered, sir?” asked Paul. “It’s nigh-on five in the morning.”
“Fudge to the hour Peter, fetch me my bags!” ordered the Colonel, leaping to one foot and then with some difficulty to the other. “We’re off to terra incognita! The lost continent! The land of the kangaroo and the emu-bird! The Last Clam, the Myth-That-Burrows, the Hidden Pearl – it’s got to be there! I’m sure of it! The one place I never looked! Australia!”
“That is a most strenuous voyage to make at your age,” opined Paul. “And my name is not Peter, sir, it is Paul. Peter is your brother-in-law who passed away three springs ago, god rest his soul.”
“Bah, the devil himself would’ve been hard-pressed to squeeze a drop out of him. He’ll be fine! And Peter, don’t worry your head about me. I’ve made worse voyages and longer treks in my time, in my time with you, and with all the other years between! Remind me to tell you a few of those stories.”
“Were there clams involved?”
“Indisputably,” mused the Colonel, as he patted down his sides for his notebook. “Indisputably.”

The air was as fresh as the waves were salt. Gulls cried out in greeting to the ship, surprised once again to see such a large, wooden gull that sat so firmly upon the ocean. They were just gulls; it was hard to blame them for believing that sort of nonsense, especially when it was doing such a lively job of regurgitation, presumably to feed its young.
“It is indisputable,” Paul noted, “that you are ill.”
“Just a bit under the weather, that’s all,” mumbled the Colonel through a mouthful of unspeakable fluids never meant to touch human lips. He coughed damply. “This boat moves far too quickly up and down and not nearly fast enough forwards. How long have we been out here at sea? No, wait! Don’t tell me! Oh lord I wish to walk the land once again, to find the Hidden Pearl’s soulful-smooth shell beneath my fingers. There’s barely any details on it, you know – just whispers on the wind, between errant lips. They speak of what it is, but not WHERE, never where. Oh lord, I must walk!”
“Courage, the shore’s in sight. Australia awaits, much to the displeasure of your cat. I believe he has grown used to feeding upon the rats of the hold.”
“Thank the lord and every single one of his guppies,” whispered the Colonel. “Let Pinfat moan as he will; I feel better already. Haven’t felt wind of an illness like that since I went after the Coughing-Clam of Peru. Did I tell you about that one?”
“No, sir. You were busy vomiting.”
“Ah. So I was.”
“About this clam, sir?”
“Yes! The Coughing-Clam! That was a tricky one. Very easy to find, you see – when it coughs, it spits up a great big trail of bubbles. You can track them through any streambed with naught but your wits and a magnifying-glass, and in a pinch a keen eye substitutes for free!”
“Impressive.”
“Of course, I didn’t have a keen eye, but after I dropped my glass into the stream I learned to make do.” The Colonel broke into a shuddering dry heave, but more out of habit than anything else. “But anyways, Peabody, the hard bit wasn’t the finding. No, no, no. The hard bit was the CATCHING.”
“How so? And my name is not Peabody, sir, it is Paul. Peabody was your nurse as a child, who once tanned your hide near to the bone for playing in the chimney and getting soot all over the carpet.”
“The catching, you see, it’s the catching,” the Colonel continued. “Oh, it looks easy at first – just any old clam, eh? Grab ahold, yank ‘er up. Except it turns out the Coughing Clam can holler with such force underwater, Peabody, that it can numb the fingers and paralyze fine muscles. Trying to pick one up with tongs is no great shakes either; the force transmits up the tines, you see. I nearly shook my hands to pieces seizing one. Finally had to kick the damned thing free and onto the shore – no easy work, that, given how firmly they wedge themselves into the mountain streambeds – and even in the open air it made my hairs stand on end just having the thing wrapped in canvas in my backpack. My left pinky never did stop shaking, Peabody – not to this very day! Not now, even – see?”
Paul saw. “That’s just from the stress of vomiting, sir,” he opined.
“Possibly,” admitted the Colonel. “Excuse me a moment, one more for the road.” And he doubled over the railing again.

“Enjoying the road, sir?” asked Paul.
“Oh, damnably hot,” replied the Colonel, squinting at the nearer of the three horizons he could see, “but otherwise, yes, quite pleasant. I can almost see the shell of the Myth-That-Burrows before my eyes, even in this hellish heat-haze. It’s as if Helen of Troy herself stood before me – well, if she were a mollusk. Tell me, do you think you could ask one of those three fetching young ladies over there how much farther it is to Alice Springs? I feel quite light-headed, and a cool shade-nurtured drink would give me quite a rousing turnabout, I think.”
“There is only one lady, sir.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. And she is a camel.”
“Oh,” said the Colonel with a frown. He swayed a bit in his saddle, waking up Pinfat, who perched atop his shoulder. “Oh dear. I’m mad with the heat again, aren’t I, Paul?”
“Yes sir. Although you did just get my name right. Thank you.”
“Oh. Think nothing of it! Are you sure she’s a camel?”
“Yes. And technically sir, a he.”
“Oh. Oh my. Well then, nothing to be done for it but wait. We ARE close, are we not?”
“Within the hour.”
The Colonel slapped his hands together. “Time enough for a story then! Paul, did I ever tell you how I wrestled the Dread Anklecrusher of the Phillipines?”
“Not once, no,” admitted Paul. A faint spark of intrigue glimmered in his eye.
“A deficiency in your education!” proclaimed the Colonel. “This was all, you know, quite some time ago. Now that I think on it, probably before you were born.”
“Most of your stories are that way.”
“True, true. Anyways! This one was earlier in my career, you understand. I was still full of enough piss and vinegar that I thought nothing of haring off into the wide unknown on a rumor and a whisper of a clam to test my mettle!”
“As opposed to now, sir?”
“Precisely! So there I was, on the tiniest, least hospitable reef ever to host a human body. Sharks at every turn! Barracuda at my heels! Jagged, razor-edged coral lurking at every stroke! I’ve still got the scars, you know. My left buttock will never again resemble its youthful shape, alas.”
Paul coughed in that way that has nothing at all to do with clearing the speaker’s throat.
“Right, so I was on the reef. And I knew I was looking for a clam there in the shallows, but I didn’t know what kind it was. I estimated it was going to be about shin-high at best. You know, for crushing ankles and so on and so forth.”
“A logical assumption.”
“I thought so too. Unfortunately, it transpired that the Dread Anklecrusher starts at your ankles and works its way up to your neck.”
“Its rough dimensions, sir?”
The Colonel frowned and thumped his right ear, causing Pinfat to gum his neck in protest. “Can’t quite remember. I was awfully short of breath when those nice fishermen dragged me out of the sea, and I can’t really recall anything I did that year without it looking as though someone’d draped gauze over my eyes. But I was still clutching a fistful of the beasty’s innards in my right hand, and they said it’d probably expire within the week. So, hunt successful!”
“I’d always speculated on what was in that musty jar you keep at your bedside.”
“Well, yes. I figured it was probably good luck, you know? Tell me, have we reached Alice Springs yet?”
“We have indeed, sir.”
“Good, good. Ask that nice man for a drink, would you?”
“That’s the bar, sir. You’d best have a lay-down on the double.”
“Quite right, quite right. We’ll head to the springs tomorrow.”

The Colonel inspected the flat sand in front of him with faint suspicion. “Perdue? Where are my glasses?”
“At home on your desk, which we both lamented greatly over the day we set sail from England. And my name is not Perdue, sir, it is Paul. Perdue was your closest colleague in elementary school.”
“So he was, so he was,” agreed the Colonel. He frowned at his feet, which Pinfat was sitting on, having disdained the dirt as a bed. “Blast it. You’ll have to verify my eyes then: isn’t this supposed to be, well, the springs?”
“Alice Springs has no springs, sir. This is the Todd River.”
“Ah. But it has no water.”
“Astutely noted. The Todd River is dry almost entirely year-round, save for when heavy rainfall sends it trickling along its bed. The flood is quite sludgy, and can usually be outpaced at a reasonably brisk walk.”
“A brisk walk?”
“A walk might be overstating it. Perhaps a nimble amble.”
The Colonel sighed with displeasure. He half-heartedly booted Pinfat off his toes and onto the dirt, where the cat resigned himself to examining twigs and meowling crankily.
“Don’t fear, sir. The weather’s been poorly lately; perhaps the rains will come before we leave.”
“Before we leave?” The Colonel smiled sadly. “Perdue, how old am I again?”
“Modesty precludes my mentioning it, sir.”
“Speak up, man! Give me credit for a little temperance!”
“Ninety-three and one-half, sir.”
“Nearer to a century than to seventy-five. That’s not the sort of age one makes trips of this kind at, Perdue. Do you suppose I’ll survive another voyage on that… death-bucket?”
Paul didn’t say anything. Instead he provided a small flask of whiskey, which the Colonel drank.
“Thank you,” he said. “So! We wait. How long can we afford to wait? How long can I afford to wait? I’m not young anymore, Perdue. I can’t spend eight months here in the desert, like I did when I hunted the Mad Lurker of Morocco!”
“How exactly was this clam ‘mad’, sir? Surely clams behave in much the same manner, living or dead?”
“Oh-ho, not this one!” chuckled the Colonel. “Had the tale not passed to you? Surely I mentioned it?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“I shall remedy this then, if only to distract me from our present troubles. ‘Twas all back in the old days, when I was young – I think forty? Yes – and the world was new to me. Clams were but a word for something I ate as part of a seafood feast. I was barbarous, but I claim youth and ignorance as my defense.”
“Now, at the time I was in Morocco for… some reason or another. I can’t recall, wasn’t important. And I had, at the time, acquired an enormous ball of hashish through some sort of accident.”
“Accident?”
“Yes, I can’t quite recall, but I think it involved a few dogs, a game of cards, and someone having to leave in a hurry before their wife caught them. So here I was stuck with this MASSIVE ball of hashish. The question was what on earth to do with the damned thing. I couldn’t throw it away or someone would notice, I couldn’t turn it in to the authorities without raising awkward questions, and I couldn’t just hide it. Someone would be bound to find it, probably Parkinson. Your predecessor thrice removed, I believe, though much shorter than you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“It’s just the truth, no need for formality. Nice man, Parkinson, but he could no more keep a secret than he could reach the top shelf of my whiskey cabinet. Anyways, the only thing to do was to ingest it. Which I rather foolishly did all at once, at night, on the shoreline.”
“I see.”
“So as not to be disturbed.”
“Indeed.”
“Now, my memory is difficult to sort out from my imagination hereafter –“
“Can’t imagine why.”
“-don’t interrupt, it’s terribly rude, you know. But yes, everything is a bit of a blur. I think I waded out into the waves at first to see if I could catch them, and then after about half an hour of THAT I decided I’d seen something shining on the seabed and decided to see if I could pick it up.”
“Oh?”
“Oh indeed. Indeed. And I had! Addled though I was, my eyes were keen back then. I reached down to that glimmering red-and-gold shape and plucked it up and it bit me, bit me hard and deep into my left index finger. Such a nasty shock! See here, you can see the mark – where the veins blacken.”
“Gruesome.”
“Oh yes. And that’s after fifty years; back then I believe it went bright purple and green very quickly. Now of course I grew very angry at this little nipping thing after that, so I did what any sensible person would’ve done.”
“Which was?”
“I stomped upon it. Wait, did I say sensible?”
“You did.”
“Scratch that from the record: I meant to say ‘damned stupid.’ It’s the reason I’ve had to wear extra-thick socks on my right foot at night the last fifteen years. I think something got into the bone down there, and it’s been eating away at it for decades now. Pretty fierce stuff in that clam. For that’s what it was! The Mad Lurker of Morocco – a shining little star in the sand that will nip you and fill you up to the brim with loony-juice if you dare touch it. Quite fatal, of course. Eventually. You run around like absolute bonkers for at least an hour before expiring.”
“And yet you sit before me living and breathing, sir.”
“With difficulty, yes,” admitted the Colonel. “This air is too thick with heat. But your point is made; I went quite mad, of course. Howling at the moon like a dog, barking like a seal, ran the streets like a bull… I even tried to eat the front door of my quarters. Lost a tooth doing that, which is why my smile is so golden these days. But I made it through the night, and the five-day hangover after that, and when I finally stumbled out of my bed and changed my clothing, what did I find in my pockets but the Mad Lurker of Morocco! Gave me a start, and made me glad I’d been out so long – a few days earlier and it might’ve still had enough fight in it to give me a second nip. And THAT would’ve put an end to me, for as everyone told me afterwards, all that saved my life was that hashish. It did something quite queer to that poison, and saved my life, albeit in one of the most miserably sickening ways I’ve ever experienced. If I close my eyes on a bad night, Perdue, I can still taste the fire and dirt on the back of my tongue.”
The air was quiet for an instant or three. Pinfat bristled his fur at some imaginary cat-nemesis and scuttled to his master’s shoulderblade with supple ease, ears twitching.
“And that was what made you decide to hunt clams?” asked Paul, breaking the silence.
“Hmmm?” replied the Colonel, dragged back half a century at once. “Oh, yes. All that pain and distress all caused by one tiny creature, and yet saved by such a slight sampling of the Lord’s favour. It was a sign, I thought, and all my life I’ve strived to live up to it. And that’s how it was. There, wasn’t that a pleasant distraction from the vast and groaning weight of my failures, Perdue?”
Paul stared at a fixed point on the horizon, and said nothing, though his hands twitched.
“Oh, blast it, I suppose it wasn’t. It feels heavier than ever! I am finished, Perdue! Absolutely done! Demolished! All the work and all the adventures and all the hunting and scraping and harm a body can stand, and all for naught – all for naught! A man can end happy knowing he’s collected every clam, but what can a man who claims all-but-one say for himself? It’s worse than having never started at all!”
“Sir,” managed Paul. “Sir. Would you care to look upwards, sir? To the north?
The Colonel slumped dejectedly. “Oh fudge to it, Perdue. You know I can’t see worth a half-pence without my glasses. Why, the clam itself could pop up right under my toes and I wouldn’t see worth spit.”
“Sir! The river!”
“Eh?”
“It’s coming!”

It took the Colonel some ten minutes to make out what was going on. This was good, because that was how long it took for the slow, sludge-driven, mud-choked Todd River’s currents to ooze their way to their feet, driven onwards by the relentless pressure of rainfall and gravity against a mouthful of grit and muck that would’ve throttled a less determined river dead in its cradle.
“My word,” said the Colonel. “I’ve never seen such a stream.”
“Very silty indeed, sir,” observed Paul.
“Ah, needs must! We’ll manage just fine – here, help me search the streambed, and mind your toes. I doubt crocodiles have had time to move in, but all the same, let’s be wary fellows and sing out if something grabs ahold of your legs, eh?”
“At once, sir,” said Paul. He gently removed Pinfat from the Colonel’s shoulders and placed the unresisting cat on the riverside. “One question: what exactly am I searching for?”
“I haven’t the faintest. Anything clam-like will do. Now scoot!”
The water was warm, despite its recent fall from the sky; the Australian soil was nearly half its bulk now, and had lent a sun-baked heat to it in addition to a chocolaty thickness. If Paul squinted his eyes just right, held his head at the right angle against the sun, and blinked rapidly, he could just barely see nothing at all.
“Go by feel, man!” called out the Colonel. He was bent double in the stream, groping about with fingers and toes. “Go by feel! We can’t be wasting time now!”
Paul did so, though he paused to roll up his sleeves first. “Sir, what do clams feel like?”
“Ridged!” shouted the Colonel, raising his voice over the rumble of the waters. “Patterned! Anything that’s too regular to be a stone! Look for-”
At the exact moment the Colonel’s voice subsided, Paul realized that the waters shouldn’t be rumbling when they were moving at a nimble amble. He looked up in alarm, and it was because of this that he managed to be standing upright when the entire Todd River tackled him in the midsection in a very slow, ambling, muddy way that drove him several hundred yards downstream and deposited him on a high bank, plastered with enough sediment to start an orchard.
Paul stared at the sky for a moment, reflecting dreamily that he now knew the meaning of Brown. His vision was Brown. His mouth was filled with Brown. His body was Brown. The entire world and everything in it made a little more sense now that he’d been through that. At least the bits of it that were brown.
He blinked, flicking mud from his eyelashes as he did so. There was something important. He needed to do something. For someone. Who. Whatever it was, he had the feeling it wasn’t Brown, and therefore was going to be difficult to cope with.
Pinfat came into his view, then sat on his head.
“COLONEL!” yelled Paul – with difficulty, emitting a good deal of Brownness from his lungs as he did so. He coughed viciously and bolted upright, fell over, then picked up the alarmed Pinfat and lurched desperately along the riverbank, legs dripping with Brown. “COLONEL!”

The Colonel was nearly a mile downstream. He was a much smaller man than Paul, and the flash flood had buoyed his bird-light bones along on the foaming crest of its waves, almost tenderly.
It was still too much, of course. Too much.
“Oh,” sighed the Colonel. “It’s you. Good.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Paul. He leaned down to pick the old man up, then stopped himself when he saw him wince. “Can you move?”
“Move. Uhm. Hmm. No, no I don’t think so. Maybe in a few minutes, but not right now. There’s something… rather… I think important. It needs doing, but I fear I can’t seem to move my hands. Coughing Clam seems to have caught up to them at last – or was it the Mad Lurker?” He coughed. “Bit stupid name for a clam, really. Not sure it was the right one at all.”
“Sir?” asked Paul. “What do you need?”
“Could you – would you mind – if you could just – grab my hand there, and pull it over. No, not over there. A bit up. Right. My right. Thank you. Now close my fingers.”
The Colonel’s eyes were hard to see under the mud, but the wrinkling of his face showed they’d just closed in satisfaction. Then they creaked opened again, with renewed purpose.
“Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Now please, can you please, would you please hold up my hand? A bit close, good fellow – my eyes, they aren’t what they were, I think. I can’t seem to see much now.” He peered closely. “That’s strange. It’s… browner than I expected.”
Paul leaned over and wiped the Colonel’s eyes clear with his pinky, as carefully as he could.
“Ah. Oh. My,” he said, and the drying mud cracked around his mouth as it spread into a smile, breaking free his shabby little moustache. “There it is.”

The shell was a mottled sort of brown-and-grey, where the greater Brown had not overcome it. It was just a bit smaller than the Colonel’s palm, and little bubbles were leaking from one end as the clam breathed.
“Now tell me, Paul,” said the Colonel, as his eyelids began to droop again, slowly but implacably, “have you ever seen a more beautiful thing?”

So, how old were you?
“You really want to know?”
It’s important.
“…Shit, nine?”
Does it always happen that early?
“Well, you’ve got to remember, today’s youth isn’t what it was. We grew all knowing about it – it was something the cool guys did. Hell, half our parents did it, and only half of THOSE even tried to hide it. Kids aren’t that dumb, we all knew what was going on.”
So you were nine. How did it happen?
“I can remember it pretty good. A lot of stuff from back then is all gone except for the colours, but I held on tight to this. It’s late November. The sky’s that total off-white grey thing you get during the first real snowfalls – you know what I mean? – and me and my friends are all out late on our street messing around. Throwing crabapples on the road, you know. Pointless kid stuff. I won’t name anybody; they’re all doing fine, that’s all I’ll say. But they’re damned lucky to be that way. They could’ve been me. All of them, could’ve been me.”
“So we were goofing around, and then out of nowhere, this guy – let’s call him Jake, he was my best friend’s friend, not my friend, you know how it is – just up stuck his tongue out and ate a snowflake. Just like that, not even showing off. Like it was normal.”
What was your reaction?
“Well, I flipped the hell out, of course. I was a little tightass back then, and I knew that you were supposed to be hiding this stuff, and we were right near my house of course so I had to act up for any parents that were, don’t know, hiding in the bushes or something. But, uh, Jake just laughed at me. And then he dared me to do it.”
Your response?
“I said that was gross and he was a freaky weirdo, and he was going to get sick from all the crap in it. But Jake said I was a dumbass. Said around here all the snow was white as milk, all clean and fresh. No impurities. Then he double-dared me.”
“And then I did it.”
What was it like?
“Cold, mostly. I got so nervous I swallowed down the wrong pipe, spent five minutes coughing my lungs out and trying not to throw up. By then everybody else’d got over their laughing and given it a try. So I made a big show about how they were all gross and stomped off home with them laughing at me for being such a dip. And then… just as I’m reaching for the doorbell, swear to god….this big, fat, soft flake lands right on my mitt. It’s practically winking at me.”
What did you do?
“What do you think? And it was so much easier than the last time. Crisp. Clear. Clean. Perfect. Love at first shot. Nine years old.”

What happened next?
“Well, I sort of hid it from my parents. Obviously. Hid it from my friends too, because kids are dumb and don’t want to admit they’re wrong. Started a bad habit of covering shit up there, that did. And it probably didn’t help my addiction process – the other kids, they were social snow-eaters, sneak a flake or two to help them all relax together after school. Me, I was eating handfuls in the corner of the playground and making ‘ew’ noises at them for it.”
Did they ever find out?
“No. Not seriously. We did grow apart a bit as the years went on, and part of that was that their habit was less and less of one and mine more and more a compulsion. Especially after the third summer. Christ the hard times were hard.”
Tell us what made that summer so difficult.
“The first summer was sort of sad. I missed the flakes, you know? The second summer I was annoyed, but got over it. But the third one…I kept taking more, get it? Your third high isn’t as good as the second isn’t as good as the first. Nothing beats the first. So you take more and more and all of a sudden the summer’s here and you’re not going to see the ass-side of a droplet for six months. Rough stuff, when you’re twelve. Rough stuff. Puberty AND a snow problem. I wouldn’t stop fighting with my brother. All that stuff about how it makes you relaxed – that shit’s only when you’re high. When you come down, you just don’t give a damn about anything but when your next shot’s gonna be.”
How did the third summer change things?
“Well, I knew I couldn’t handle that twice. Got grounded so many times I almost forgot what the world past our driveway looked like. So I started a stash. Kept a plastic bag in the meat fridge out in the shed – not too big though. Wasn’t a total idiot, knew I had to keep it small enough that nobody’d look inside. Sometimes I think mom found it and thought it was dad’s; I knew he’d been up to some cold stuff back in his youth. Maybe I helped the divorce along a little more roughly. Didn’t think of it at the time.”
Did the stash help?
“Fuck no. Made things a lot worse. See, now that I was calmed down enough to go out and about during the summer, I saw kids acting just I’d been. I could spot what they were wanting a mile off. I was looking through the eyeballs of Adam Smith’s asshole there, and what I saw was demand. And then I looked back at my bag at home, and I saw supply. And we all know what happens when demand chunks the hell out of supply, hey?”
So you sold it.
“Yeah. I just gave away little bits at first as favours, then when I ran low I started charging. Was cutting my own throat at the start, really, ‘till I saw the sort of desperation I was working with. Ran a pretty tight monopoly ‘till grade nine.”
What happened then?
“Bigger school, more freedom, more competition. Some kids out there had access to fridges even. Nobody was going to pay fifty bucks for a half-assed palmful of melted sludge anymore. So I had two options: I could quit, or I could go whole hog. Guess which one I did.”
You were a dealer.
“Yeah. And a good one. I got by without even having a fridge; I ended up being almost more of a broker than the product-man. Found clients, talked them along, hooked them up with the cold stuff, got the commissions. Made me a really popular guy. And of course that was a feedback loop, because the more people liked me the easier it was for me to get them to bring in new customers. Repeat ad nauseum. Shit, that’s the only Latin I remember from grade twelve.”
When did you realize how serious what you were getting into was?
“Honestly? I don’t think I ever did, and there’s one clear memory I got that really shows that. I was seventeen and fucking around with some bad friends of mine – all the guys I worked with; really we had a better work ethic than anybody else our age, we were the entrepreneurs – and, let’s say, Trish, she breaks out an icicle.”
Just like Jake and the snowflake.
“No, no, no. Jake, it was casual, and that drew your eye. Trish, it was a showpiece. ‘Check THIS shit out, kiddos.’ I remember her saying that. I don’t know if she said it, but I remember her saying that.”
Did you have some?
“Well, with these guys I didn’t have any squeaky-clean image to preserve, AND I knew what I was doing – I didn’t, but that’s what I thought – AND I was pretty sure I was immune to the side effects of the stuff. Wilful blindness. So I did it. I saw the hard stuff, and I took it.”
And?
“I’ve never beaten that high. I swore off snowflakes and never looked back.”
Because they’d led you to icicles.
“That’s right. Pure gateway chill, they were. Wasn’t a pure icicle, though. Years later, when I had more experience with this sort of thing, I think I decided somebody’d cut it with dog piss. Still the best stuff I’d ever had. Have ever had.”
What happened then?
“Well, I kept my hand in the snow trade, but I sort of slacked off. Spent a lot of time looking up ice and stuff – never on school computers, I wasn’t an idiot; deleted my home browsing history too – and decided that it was way too complicated to deal with in high school. So I went into university as a climatology student.”
This is a common perception of the profession, isn’t it?
“Yeah. Everybody ‘knows’ the clime students are just in it to get super high, right? Right. So of course nobody’d ever believe one of them really WAS chilling up homecooled ice in his fridge in the dorm. Cover story was that it was too obvious a cover story – sort of smart, but really stupid. And risky. My roomy found my stash at one point; I could tell he’d moved the boxes of old waffles I hid the cooling racks behind. But he never said anything, and I wasn’t sure if he was planning to rat me out or if he just wasn’t going to talk. Spent three months worrying I’d have to kill a guy if I didn’t want to earn my Bachelor’s in the fed.”
Obviously, he didn’t talk.
“Nope. Christ, I spent ninety-seven days sweating like a pig and dropping grades because of this guy, and in the end, he probably’d never even recognized what he’d been looking at. How stupid is THAT?”
After graduation, what did you do?
“Failed, mostly. If I’d been more self-aware, I could’ve seen it coming.”
Oh?
“Yeah. I kept abusing my own product. Couldn’t make enough to sell in uni, so I got in the habit of just shooting it up as I made it. Fancied I’d make myself a connoisseur or dispose of the evidence or some shit, I don’t know what the hell. But it was stupid as fuck. I made myself five times the druggie I was in high school, and once I lost access to easy lab materials, well, that was it for my savings. I went through the motions of trying to have a life, but I didn’t anymore. Not really. My life was ice, and ice didn’t come cheap. Fuck, I couldn’t even go on a date without ducking into the washroom to crunch the ice cubes in my drink. Couldn’t go for two hours in a nice restaurant with an attractive single without cooling down. I was pretty much on the fast-track to human waste.”
And what saved you?
“Well, I had to start living at home again once my savings were gone, and my dad was concerned enough about my finances that he started to notice I was losing more than I was claiming. So he had a friend look into me. On the force.”
And you were caught?
“Busted hardcore. I think dad was hoping I was being exorted or something, he was really shocked when it came out that his kid was an addict to the hard, cold, long stuff. And I really was by then. Third day of custody I was begging to do anything for some ice – any ice. Ice from an industrial gutter, black ice off the highway with salt in it, ice made from frozen cat piss – way worse than the dog stuff, real sharp vinegar that cuts your eyes and mouth both. I had to have ice. The only thing separating me and those dead-inside-schmucks that hang around airport runways to lick the residue off’ve returned planes was that I hadn’t sold my nice clothes yet.”
And where did that get you?
“Well, here. Thirty-five to life for possession, with no parole. Minus five years or so for taking part in this. And that’s only because I was never convicted for the snow-selling back in school; that’d net me life without parole.”
Do you have any advice for our audience?
“Sure: kids, just don’t fucking do it. It’s cheesy as hell, but Just Say No. No to Snow. It’ll take you down a bad, hard road that don’t stop ‘till it hits the bottom, and that’s just a pause to catch its breath.”

Sam Hardin was a snow user. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all snow users become snow addicts. One hundred and ten percent of all snow addicts end up taking icicles and becoming homeless degenerates that crowd the streets of our nation.
End the campaign to legalize snow: Just Say No to Snow.