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Albert was not a bad man; he was an accountant. Staid verging on stale, yes, but not a bad man, just a quiet one, a small one. A lot of people said he was dull, but none of them knew the first thing about accounting so he paid them no heed and got on with his life, which was mostly columns and rows. He loved them as some people loved trees: tenderly, but without overt sentiment, as he did his children, who subsisted on a series of good firm handshakes and level-headed compliments throughout their more difficult years in school.
And then one kindly Monday morning, everything changed – at least for Albert. He was walking to work one day, to a big sweeping skyscraper with a stuffy little room for him hiding somewhere in its esophagus, and a street was blocked off for construction. As it happens, there was a little park down the side path he hurried through, and there was a little pond in that little park, and Albert’s eyes did alight upon a rather smaller pair of eyes in that little pond.
They went “chugga-rumph” and vanished with a plink of water.
Albert stood there for five seconds, then went to work and made an inquiry of the security guard about eyes in pools and chugga-rumph.
“Frog,” said the guard. “The park’s been doing nice this year then. They like clean water. They can take in the sick real easy through their skin, y’know?”
Albert y’knew – at least, now he did. So he went upstairs to his office and locked the door and did all his work inside one hour, so that he had the rest of the day free for a sudden and somewhat bigger problem. And most of the evening, and a good bit of the night until the security guards came upstairs and kindly but firmly turfed him out onto the street with a bit of money for cab fare to skip the muggers. Albert slipped the money back under the front doors and went home by the long way again, stopping by the pond to peer with wary eyes for a glimpse of a hint of a theory.
The glimpse went “ribbit.”
Albert slapped his forehead, let fly with a volley of cursing that would’ve made a twelve-year-old blanch, and ran home in a mist of numbers and calculations and division thick enough to slice timber with. He dashed through his door, up the stairs, and sealed himself in the bathroom, where he covered both sides of each and every sheet of toilet paper with notes.
Albert took the next day off, then rethought that and made it the next week. This was easy as he had accidentally performed all of the week’s work the day previously, before he began work on his little problem.
His oldest child phoned him in the late afternoon.
“I thought you’d be at work. Are you sick?”
“Mmmm,” said Albert. “Busy.”
“More work?”
“No! No, not really. I’ve got to solve for it, that’s all. I’ve got to solve for it, and it won’t add up.”
“Well, if you’re not working, you should get some fresh air. You spend all week cooped up indoors, you should get a bit of a breather while you’ve got a chance.”
Albert smoothed down the frantically rumpled remnants of his hair and looked out the window. The sun was shining firmly, if a bit murkily.
“Yes!” he agreed, and he hung up.
Then he went to the zoo. For a bit of research and experimentation. It had been years and years since the family’s membership had expired, and it took him three tries to find the exhibit he was seeking, two of which ended up with him lost in the restroom near the orangutans.
He squinted carefully against the glass, read the placard thoroughly three times, cleared his throat, and cautiously enunciated “chugga-rumph?”
A pair of tiny glossy eyes peered back at him from a stretch of preserved bark and replied “cree-ree” with piercing disdain.
Albert said some strong words loudly enough to attract cruel looks from a nearby zookeeper, and began making furious notes on his arm. He moved from exhibit to exhibit. Cree-ree, ribbit, chugga-rumph, each dialect was tried and discarded in kind against case study until the gates closed and he was guided with firm not-quite-anger from the premises, shouting questions to the zookeepers all the way about nutrition and sleeping habits and the level of activity during the summer.
Cut off from that particular route of research ‘till past the next dawn, Albert grew restless and fierce with inactivity, prowling the extremely small and tidy halls of his home through the evening. His eyes alit at last upon his salvation: a tome of mathematics dense enough in volume to kill a horse, and filled with enough formulae to pop clean of skull the average brain.
He’d read it long ago in school, and discarded it soon afterwards. But if you’ve got to learn something new, best to start over at the bottom…

Dawn found Albert already wide awake, fortified at his breakfast table with a pot-full of coffee, hold the mug, and no fewer than six textbooks of mathematical and biological knowledge, with an eye to the amphibious. His eyes were jumpier than a fat summer fly, and skimmed from page to page with a peerless disregard for the boundaries of cover and spine. Entire paragraphs were ignored, chapters parsed with a glance. His fingers ached with neglect, but his mind was as limber as a preschoolers and a million times more trained.
“Yes!” he said at last, past nine o’clock, making dusty vocal chords shimmer and shake. “Of course! Exactly!” And then he jumped up from his desk with the force of joy only to be found in the freshly awakened, and nearly broke both his kneecaps due to stiff muscles.
Some hours later Albert made his way once more to the zoo, and a few scantling minutes more took him to the cages containing his test subjects.
“Ribbit,” he proclaimed with confidence empty of any trace of presumptuousness, firmness without arrogance.
A chin inflated at him lazily, then gave up halfway through for want of motivation. “Gluk.”
Albert walked home that day slumped with despair, his shoulders stooped under the burden of a much larger and crueller world than he had ever dreamed. Every other block his head would lift, buoyed up by a hopeful thought, then a shadow would cross his face and his chin would sink to his chest once more, tugged down by blackest reality in all its pendulous grotesqueness. His feet were his visible world now, one step two step look at the crosswalk, three step four step hear the stoplights talk, five step six step where’d that grass come from.
The grass had come from a little park, with a little pond, and Albert had almost walked into it. He raised his eyeballs to it, reddened with exhaustion and unshed tears, and met a very small pair of clear dark eyes that were resting quite comfortably on a rotten yet pleasant log.
Albert opened his mouth, to speak what he could not guess, but all that emerged from his raw and aching throat was a feeble croak.
The eyes blinked once. “Ribbit?” they replied.
Albert stood there, poleaxed.
“Ribbit?”

The rest of Albert’s trip home was unknown to all, including himself. What mattered was that he was back in minutes and scribbling calculations with a pen in each hand and one in his mouth, tongue protruding from the corner of his lips only to stab in anger at its inability to grasp a fourth pen. At one point in a burst of maniacal energy he attempted to write with his feet, and found to his astonishment that he could. This redoubled his efforts, and soon not a scrap of his office, then his bedroom, then bathroom, then his living room lay unmarked by scrawling ink. Tile, linoleum, boards, drywall, sofas – all was blank medium to be marked clear with math and mindpower. He had to invent over fifteen new symbols and double the size of the greek alphabet on his way, doing the math on the fingers and fingernails of his left hand. There was material in that for a book of essays large enough to crush a coffee table.
At last it was done, as much as done could be, all but for one thing.
Albert stood there, triumphant in the middle of the floor, stood at that final pair of parallel lines engraved at his feet before his favourite chair, and wrote one word.
Then he vanished.
Along with the house.

There was quite a ruckus when word got out that Albert Pendmuss had got missing. He had not been a volatile or extraordinary man, and the abruptness of his departure was a shock to his neighbours and workers. His children, at least, took it in stride. There was always something that had been cooking under Dad’s flat hair and quiet voice, and if it chose to express itself in his up and disappearing one day and leaving a pretty nice little pond where his house had been, well, so be it. And they made sure nobody thought of putting harm to that pond, though only the most soulless suit-wearer would’ve ever dreamt of it.
It was a nice little place, on a nice little lot, and the water was strangely kindly and clear, warm enough for little lily-pads to sprout up (look, if you turn them over, you can see little veiny squiggles that could almost be words: ‘zetta,’ ‘rana’) clean enough for frogs to pop up with little inky spots all over them, like pen blots.
And there was one big fellow right there in the center of it, fat and pleased as a king on his throne. And when we asked him if he’d solved for it, well, all he said was
“Chugga-rumph!”
and that’s a good enough answer for anyone.

“Problem: Solve for Frogs,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

They always tell you to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before you judge them. You know, ‘they.’ The same ones that tell you your shirt looks nice and you shouldn’t swim after eating or you’ll cramp up and drown.
Well, a fifty-fifty track record is enough for me to give them the benefit of the doubt. And when that angry old woman yelled at me I figured hey, why not? I’ve got the morning free anyways, and it’s not like the car hit or nothing. How long could it take? It’s just one mile.
So I tracked her home, broke in, stole a pair of sandals, and now I’m taking a hike. Seemed a bit ethically dubious, but we’re following advice here. Not our legal responsibility.
Well the first few meters of this walk are dull as ditchwater. Sleepy, hungry, poopy, and screamy. Mostly screamy. Screamy, screamy, scream, if you liked screaming so much kid why didn’t your parents NAME you screamy? I figure maybe that’s what this whole deal is all about: everyone was a yelling dingbat from birth, and the sooner you realize it the more sense everything they do will make.
A few more steps and hey, cognition kicks in! Now we’re cooking with gas – and woah, are those legs I see wobbling around underneath me? Hot damn, walking’s fine as can be. Look at how fast you can go! Whoosh – from one side of the room to the other! Whoosh – up the stairs to bug mom! Whoosh – halfway down the stairs backwards!
Wait, ow, ow, ow.
So there’s a broken arm there tagging along. That lasted for a good pace right there, that did, and it just weighed me down like a lead brassiere. The world seemed sadder and greyer, people were meaner, and candy didn’t taste as sweet. Wait, it was hospital candy. Damnit, even the vending machines in those places can’t escape the taint.
The cast popped off and I sort of had to relearn walking, but it was way faster this time. And then came the toys. All those wonderful toys. I’d had a spoiled older brother and my parents weren’t about to go spending good money on new toys just so I wouldn’t be getting any sorts of unwomanly ideas as a week tyke; I got a whole pile of old tin soldiers. They were just sturdy enough to stand up straight after a good stomping and had just the right bit of give to quiver like shell-shocked soldiers after an artillery foot came swooshing through their frontline. Here we were, with world war II just over and I’m already reminding people of the key strategic importance of airborne bombing. Damn I had no style, bringing all that up while everybody’s doing their best to shrug it off and get back to their feet. Not that I have to care about any of that. It all was across the ocean, and the ocean’s really big, like, hugely. I think my guess was about the size of a highway, but water.
Oh wow, what a coincidence. Up next comes the first trip to the ocean. That was a bit of a shocker. Though not as much as the crab in the dress. You jackass Thomas, I barely dented your shitty ol’ tin soldiers and you’d outgrown them, grow the hell up. Yeah that’s right you take that punch, you take it right in the kisser. Kiss through that lip if you can, twitface. Nice shark tooth, and hey, free crafts project! Necklace time with mom as a make-up for the spanking. Yeah, that was a good time there, and a good run.
School. Oh damn, damn, damn and it was all going so well, too. Here’s your As, here’s your Bs, here’s your Cs. Excuse me miss I already know those well shut up and learn them again and you can sit in the corner you little idiot. Education is bliss. Except for math. Math wasn’t hard, and it was even fun. Despite the teacher’s best efforts. What a mouth on that man, not that you could see it under the beard. Christ, looks like a mangy badger bit his fourth chin and never let go.
Now we’re picking up the pace here! School just makes those days fly by, which is funny because every single one feels like it lasts forever. Like filling your pockets full of lead and then falling over, I guess. Hey, right around now I started getting interested in guys. So that’s what that feels like. Aww, I told Clarence how I felt and he told me I smelled gross. Cuuuuute. Oh wait, I feel terrible and I’m crying after I shoved him over and ran away. Do I get cookies for that, mom? Nooo I get told to be nicer. Thanks. Thanks a lot for showing you care NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ME.
Score, next week I got cookies. Pure chocolate too, none of that chocolate chip crap. If I’m getting chocolate, I want all the chocolate. Don’t chip off what you can just chuck in.
I really got into my stride now, time just flapping by. No more toys, no more games, just run, run, run. Run through school, run through a part-time typist job, run as fast as you can until high school’s over and you’re still doing the same part-time job and your boyfriend just drove into a street lamp and got himself killed without a seat belt.
Ow. Now that hurts. Really tore me up inside, y’know? Hadn’t felt that bad in a few forevers. Lots of crying, lots of yelling. A few fights with mom. Time’s crawling now, but the days are still sailing by, year by year. More jobs, more fights. Booze started to show up just now too, and look who’s my new best friend! Wow, I went from Lucy Lily-Liver to Sally Chugsalot overnight – check out that vodka action! Stagger in awe as I down whole bottles of substances served in small glasses! Behold as I end up in the hospital after another few hundred yards of this and a near-fatal encounter with alcohol poisoning!
Hey, that doctor looked really nice. Aw well, you can’t mix business and flirty looks, hippopotomi oaths and all that. Besides, I can’t really ask him out for drinks.
Oh. Well, I guess I did. And hey, I just took water. And a ring. And a really nice dress mom had been saving in mothballs for a few decades. Aw jeez, did we really cry when we were hugging? No, no, that was just her. I just got my eyes all wrinkly from the mothballs and it squeezed out some moisture, that’s all.
Whatever.
Wow, that’s the smoothest stretch I’ve travelled yet. Nice and firm-packed, well worn as the stones in my sneakers, but still dreamy with misty memories. I can ever tell what colour the floorboards were: some incompetent idiot’s efforts at fixing up the varnish had left it a half-and-half piebald. The stained glass made up for it, except for that one window right over the altar where they made Jesus all cross-eyed and it was pretty funny because Mary looked so pleased about it in a quiet way. “Oh good, my son is healthy and the son of god and also god and also his eyeballs nearly meet. This is a good day.”
Yeowch those details flew away fast underfoot! The moment that altar goes into sight, it just tunnel visions away from all those flights of fancy and turns into a deadlocked sight aimed right at that man’s face. Hah, he flubbed the kiss – poor sucker forgot to shave and I nearly chewed the stubble off his lip. But it was so cute.
Now what’s that up ahead in the road, eh? I think it’s.
Well.
I’ll just.
Uh.
Avert my eyes a bit here.
Don’t want to be a rubbernecker or anything. Besides, I’m sure the next big thing’ll stick out (ha ha oh god don’t look) just fine AAAUGH MY GUT IS ENORMOUS. Jesus I can’t sleep on my freaking back OW OW OW my feet are sore ARRRRRRGH VOMITING.
The road here is a goddamned mess. It’s swerving up and down and all around and I think it just did a triple backflip and I can’t tell because I’m delirious with sleep deprivation from something kicking my stomach from the inside out GO TO SLEEP YOU LITTLE SHITHEAD IT’S FIVE IN THE MORNING.
Okay, okay. I can calm down now. Wow that last ways just dragggged. But we’re almost half a mile down now, and HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNGHHH.

Aww. She is just precious. I hope someone wrote down the name, because I am gonna pass out now.

Right, all’s well. I think I can get moving a bit faster from here on out, seeing as I’ve gained some valuable perspective on why someone would yell at me for no goddamned reason because Jesus fucked if that isn’t a good excuse. Now I can just pick up this particular pace and take it past that incessant screaming, screaming, screaming and get all the way into OH COME ON NOT TWICE? TWICE? Really. Really. I just went through all that last year and now I get to do it again? Well, at least it can’t be as bad the second ti

Nope.

And this is where the pacing goes all funny and it turns into one sprint at the speed of snail’s molasses dropped into quicksand. That first third of this mile I had to walk? It sprints by in a few steps and a bound for those two girls of mine. I’ve barely budged before they’re crawling, then walking, then talking back (skip just plain talking, it’s of no mind and no notice to anyone). And just like that, without moving much farther I’m old. How can’t you help but feel old when you look at something that young? They’d turn a mayfly of sixteen hours into a grizzled grandfather by comparison.
I’m so proud of them that I can’t help but yell at them day and night until they move their beautiful, clever, lazy asses out because they’re sure as hell not giving me any rest until they do.
Now I’ve got all the time in the world to rest, and I’m lonely, lonely, lonely. Then they come for a visit and afterwards it isn’t so bad. And well, it’s not like I’ve got no company. I’ve got him, right?
Oh. Something else got him too.
My these feet are just flying now over these souls of mine. I’d better keep running in case I have to look back.
Check it out! Grandkids! Well damnit if I can’t taste that arthritis as it crackles through joints and up into bones. Cute as buttons – can’t have gotten that from my son-in-laws. Aw bless their hearts, I taught ’em a few bad words. Hah, that look on your momma’s face isn’t going to leave my memory that easy. Good as a photograph it is. Yessir this whole day’s been alright, time to go get a snack with the kids AW C’MON SON I ALMOST RAN US OVER FUCKIN’ HOOLIGAN DAMN RIGHT I’M GIVING ME THE FINGER I COULD’VE KILLED A LITTLE KID ASSHAT.

Well.

Well now. I’d better put these back; they’re a little sweaty but I bet she’d like to keep them. Lotta stories in your average set of feet, more than I’d have guessed. Strange mile to walk though. Clock says nothing and reads nothing, mind says about sixty years.
Wait a second, I forgot something. I walk, and then I, then I…
Yeah, then I judge, that’s it. But there’s no way I’m picking that lock twice, say nothing about walking that mile all over.
Aw well, law’s too much of a pain in the ass anyways.

“A Short Walk,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

Many years ago, there was a youth. The youth asked a question of his elder, and the elder thought about it.
“I do not know the answer to your question,” he said. “But my father’s father was told a fable by his father’s father that may help you deal with it. Would you like to hear it?”
“No,” said the youth.
“Good,” said the elder, “it is called “the Mantis and the Spider.” Now you sit down right there and listen up…”

One day, far away and long ago, a mantis came across a spider in his web. This is all metaphorical, so don’t get too worried about talking animals and all of that. It’s a metaphor.
“Good day,” said the mantis.
“Guess so,” said the spider.
“How is there a doubt in your mind?” said the mantis. “The sun shines bright, without rain to trouble us. The little insects which we both feed upon are abundant and delicious. Truly, it is indeed a good day!”
“Always room for more of a bad thing in any good thing,” said the spider.
“Pessimism, pessimism,” chided the mantis. “Now tell me, what good will that attitude do you? It saps your life of joy and throws away the chance for relaxation, leaves you a nervous juddering wreck! Your nerves will be shot, your eyes will grow dim and fearful, you’ll be dead before you even have the chance to be cannibalized while mating! Put aside your weary doubts and feel the refreshment of happiness.”
“If you always expect the worst, if you’re ever surprised it’s pleasant,” said the spider. “That’s all the happiness I need and more. Why’ve you got the time to go around bossing me on how cheerful I sound, eh? Don’t you have something better to do?”
“I am fed and I am looking for a mate at present, tracking for pheromones left, right, and center. What more is there for me to do?”
“Pshaw,” said the spider. “That’s barely anything. You have too much time on your hands.”
He meant claws, okay? Some idioms don’t translate too well across species.
“Excuse me?” said the mantis.
“That’s nothing, what you’re doing. Everything can do that much, and most of us do more. Look at me, I’m a hundred times busier than you are. That’s why I don’t have the time to go popping off on how danged pretty the sunshine is this morning: I’m doing things.”
“I’m hunting and searching for a mate right this second, and most of us do no less,” said the mantis, who was now getting annoyed.
“Oh sure, you’re hunting alright,” said the spider. “The problem is that you just aren’t willing to put any real effort into it.”
The mantis bristled. It was a natural thing for it to do, being so thin and sharp. At least half of its existence was composed of automatic bristling. “No real effort? Do you have any idea how long I can stand here, in one spot, waiting for a single little tiddly piece of prey? Not a single twitch, not a jot of a snippet of an ounce of a sound, all for hours on end until prey comes. And then I wait more, and more, and more still, and only at the very moment of success, THEN do I strike. Are you telling me that all of that takes no real effort?”
“Oh, it’s effort,” said the spider. It scratched its leg with one of its other legs. “But it’s not REAL effort.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Listen, I hold still,” said the spider. “I keep close and quiet. I can do that fine. But first, I have do real work. I have to build a web, and build it strong, and build it in the right spot at the right time. Got to make sure the breeze won’t rip it, got to make sure the rain won’t spill all down it and wash me out. That’s planning, that’s real effort. Then I’ve got to get down to nuts and bolts and brother-bug, you haven’t seen effort ’till you’ve seen the effort that goes into web building. I have to plan and measure by bodylengths and spin all around ’till I’m blue in the face and red in the spinnerets. Then it’s not over, oh no it isn’t. I’ve got to repair it after every catch, and every meal’s a struggle to wrap it all up before it gets away. THAT’S real effort.”
“Real effort?” said the mantis. “Now look here! I’ve tolerated your tone thus far, but this tripe is simply too much to bear. For your information, each day I must find a good spot to hunt and eat. YOU on the other hand need simply sit atop your spinnerets – which, for your information, are not red in the slightest but are rather of more-than-ample-dimensions – and wait for your dinner to fly into your mouth. Do you think these wings are for show? Do you think that my lanky posture is that of a frame that gives way under the slightest bit of travel? May I ask, oh One of Great Effort, when was the last time you had to subdue prey that wasn’t safely entangled in your silk? Every meal I take must be earned, and I eat my food as tough as can be: bite by bite! None of this faffabout liquification followed by suckling like an infant mammal at its mater’s teat, no sir, not for me! You are a lazy sod, an indolent cob, a selfish attercop without a bite of venom in his fangs but rather poison atop his tongue for those who work harder than he dreams to survive.”
The tongue thing is just another idiom. Pay it no mind.
The spider raised himself up on his web, swollen with indignation. “Indolent cob, is it now?” he hissed, all those hairy little needles on his body rubbing on each other to make a sound like cockroach hell. “Speaks the berk who’s too stupid to mate without getting his head chomped off and taken for his lady’s lunch, that’s who’s talking to me about indolence and laziness with as many pretty words as he pleases!”
“And you’re one to speak of mates that dine on one’s own flesh, aren’t you, my little arachnid friend?” said the mantis, waving his long thin arms around in a somewhat alarming manner.
“That’s for the widows, and I’m no widow, you pompous pinhead! Give me an excuse and I’ll silk your head and have it off before your pretty little friends get a crack at it!”
“With you I won’t have the head off, oh no no no,” whispered the mantis. “You’re too small to be a serious struggle. I’ll just eat you live. Bite by bite. As is only proper.”
They sat there for a minute, tense as lightning.
An antenna twitched. A mandible tweaked.
The breeze let another carefree gust blow through the web, making it whistle at a range just barely too high-pitched for any ear on earth to hear. Startled, the two little invertebrates looked up into the sky and saw nothing above them but that big blue wildness and its moving heat.
“Well, it’s not exactly a bad day, is it?” said the spider.
“Quite nice,” said the mantis.
They looked back down, at each other. Neither was sure what to say next.
Then a very large booted foot tumbled down from the sky, the breeze playing at its dangling shoelaces, and squashed the mantis flat. As it uprooted itself for the next stride it tore a hole clean through the spider’s web, dooming him to face a lingering death of starvation some two days later.

“Is there a moral to this fable that will help answer my question?” asked the youth.
The elder snored, like a gentle breeze.
The youth wandered away, disgruntled, and thought up his own answer. Much as it had been for the previous six generations, whether or not that had been the intended result remained entirely opaque.

“A Fable,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

CNS 0352, Full Shipcrafting, Outmoon Semester. Dr. Mannemeul Cirtosh, Phd.
Week 1
Class is small this term, but enthusiastic. Word must have gotten around about the failure rate last year; just as well, to have fewer slowpokes in the hammocks. Four students, three of them all heart and soul in this, one more who’s interested and bright but might just be dabbling in the end. Stencils flying at notes all through the introductory lectures, eyes pinned to the charts, immediate, clear questions from all quarters whenever prompted. This is going to be a good one.
They all should pass, that’s a given, sure as the tides. It’s who makes the biggest splash by the end – that’s the suspense.
Students
-Mafi
-Holliburt
-Gilmer
-Slikes

Attendance’ll be easy to track this year.

Week 2
Students made a bit more of a mark this week. As I thought, the planned pace is too slow; all of them have already made preliminary blueprints and have crafted prototypes on their own time as pre-coursework. Agreed to grade them as their first assignments, next class we’ll begin drafting work on their final projects. More time can only mean higher quality.
-Mafi, she’d designed a skirmishing warship with a specially crafted hull that shaped its wake with adjustable settings in the form of all kinds of flaps and ridges. You could erase almost all trace of your passing, and in combination with a muffled engine and a low profile, you can slip through places a rowboat would be tricky with. Great in theory, a nightmare in fact. Originality’s worth a lot of points, even if the breezy math’s going to take them right back. But the detail on the armaments keeps her mark high. The lady knows weapons. If she wants a recommendation for navy work when she graduates, I’ll sign her off before she can finish the sentence.
-Holliburt had put together a novelty. A damned interesting novelty, but a novelty; a fishing boat whose sails could be converted to soak up moonlight in a dead calm. You could see where he’d thought “this would be a good idea” and then where he stopped. Good draftsmanship on the papers, a nice concept, but no follow-through, no thought put past his one idea. If anyone stops at the end of this course, it’ll be him.
-Gilmer’s father owns one of the industrial shipworks out in Motash. Shows through the freighter sketches he gave me: artsy as anything that could be dreamed up from past midnight, but built to survive a blast from God’s own broadside. Seeing all those big prefabricated tankers get hammered out all alike all day, every day, from childhood to youth, that just sets a creative mind squirrelly with thoughts on what to do different.
-Slikes’s proposal was the farthest out of mind: a ship that ran almost entirely underwater, with just the solar sails sticking above the waves, designed to be quiet, unobstrusive, discreet, and blend in with the colours around it, so nothing took it for lunch. Crazy, but thought out thorough, and the math she’s got scribbled out there in the corners has stuff I’d use a calculator for. Top marks for her.
Good stuff overall. Too many big ideas with not enough fine print, sure, but we can work on that. Build the things piece by piece, I always tell them. Piece by piece.

Week 4
More theory this week, and had all their assignments graded out before it was done. Another perk of a small classroom.
The main objective for the first session was to get their brains humming. Think about the whole ship and all of its parts, don’t tie yourself too hard to one big idea – but don’t confuse one big idea with the One Big Goal: the thing you’re making this ship to do. Keep that goal there in your eye at all times, and make sure every single thing you do reaches it. Then you’ll be alright.
Day two, all four of them have a pretty good clue of what they’re working on. Gave the go-ahead to all of them.
-Mafi’s doing a heavyweight fearbreaker. I guess she figures that if she can design whatever she can dream up, she might as well dream big. Can’t wait to see her choice in cannons for that thing, there’s going to be more guns than rivets.
-Holliburt’s going to try and run off a midweight storm skiff. Ambitious choice with a good rate of failure; must be trying to impress me. Making ships that’ll keep afloat in a bad sea is tough. Making ships that thrive in a bad sea is downright nasty.
-Gilmer has a mind to stretch himself out of his comfort zone; no tankers from him, but a roly-poly coral rover, all belly and all living space to hold a full-sized clan from grandparents down onwards. A craft made from pure practicality, but I’ve a hunch he’s going to make it pretty.
-Slikes, she was almost too busy scribbling away to even talk to me, adding between sentences. Said she was working out her idea as she went, and the endpoint could change a bit as she goes, but one thing’s for sure: it’s going to be travelling below the waterline.

Week 5
Piece by piece started up this week with the hull. Started off with information: gave them the full story of all the golden oldies, a rundown of the latest tricks that haven’t made it into catalogues yet, and encouragement to look up as much as they could.
-Mafi’s gone with a mix of old and new that both the crustiest admiral and the scrawniest techman’d approve. The hull’s good-old-fashioned triple-plated fearbreaker steel, forged through the lens of the innermost moon for that unbending tenacity that soaks up an impact and spits it back out at you; but shaped to a setup of her own design: strange wavy patterns and ripple-soft swirls that according to her should give the thing an unbeatable amount of forward momentum. Asked her about stopping, she just said “don’t.” Pithy, but I’m not so sure it’ll sell to an accountant.
-Holliburt took Mafi’s plan, but in reverse: a design not too far off the classic storm skiff, with all those outriggers and the twin hulls. But the material, now, that was new. Sharkwood, they called it; special stuff that was successfully created in a laboratory in the last decade and only fabricated non-commercially even now. Took forever to get the saws working right, took longer to get just the right size on the trees, but the natural grain on those planks lets them just slide through water without even a twitch, like the boat was greased by angels
-Gilmer’s hull is out of its norm. Round, sure. Made of living coral, it goes without saying. Bloated, a bit, if a tad sleek for something of its sort. But it’s smaller than any coral rover I’ve ever seen by about a third. He’s up to something, I can guess it, and what’s more, I trust him to make it all play out fine. Can’t wait for the interior plans.
-Slikes’s plans…well, for a minute there I’d thought she’d handed in her biology work by mistake. Long and lean, thin as an eel’s blood and sleeker than sin. But then you look closer, and it all makes a bit more sense. She’s making something that’ll travel under the surface, yes. All the way under. For that, there’ll be no wind power, no moonlens, no nothing. This girl has to solve energy problems that’ve beaten half the engineers on the planet hollow for centuries.
I talked to Odarrion, the unlucky man stuck with physics this term, about her chances. He says to just wait and see what happens. I don’t know if I trust a man with that laugh of his, but we’ll just wait and see.

Week 6
Propulsion’s turn to shine. Same routine as always: I give them the lowdown on the old, the new, and then they go out there and come back to me with the strange and beautiful. That’s the theory. Hasn’t failed us yet.
-Mafi’s moonblend-fuelled turbines are on the oversize even for a heavyweight, and there’s five instead of the standard three. She’s tripled the fuel compartment size too. A hunk of steel this big is going to take a minute or eighty to get going, but once it does, it should move faster than a cork in a cannon. And maybe as smoothly; the crew on this had better have seasoned stomachs.
-Holliburt’s going with wind power to keep the storm skiff lightweight. The sails are like the hull: just a little bit different. They’re made of the toughest lyreweeds, like the old days, but with triple the density. Only high-powered industrial equipment could set the weave that tight, and they’ll need special calibration for it. This boat sees water at all, it’ll only be in small numbers crewed by canny men: high-grade or go home. The mast is an old plynth pine, hard to come by these days, but they’d rather bend double than snap in any gale. More’s to the point, they’ll spring right back upright once that gale’s moved on.
-Gilmer’s opted for a inmoon diesel. A solid, sturdy, slow-moving thing that’ll keep going long after the rest of the ship has bloomed its last, sloughed off, and ground itself down to seafloor slime. Though with that hull he put on it, it’s going to take a while. I took a second or third look at it over the last few nights, and he’s got the coral layered with precision a master gardener would envy. Got space to grow for decades before anybody on board needs to raise a trimmer to it.
-Slikes has a, well. A thing. She gave me all the data for it, but it’s seventeen pages of pure mathematics and the citations include twenty-nine blackwater biology periodicals. Got halfway in and stopped for the night; it was accurate as best as I could see and there was something going on in there. The only recognizable part of the whole mess – and it’s a downright real mess, it’s going to fill at least half the hull of the damned thing – is a little outmoon chugger. Not the most common lensblend, but it’s got a damned powerful kick to it if you can get the finicky tweaked out of it. But Slikes’s plans are going deeper. This little engine’s just the primer for whatever’s lurking in those notes of hers.
I’d show Odarrion them, but what if he calls it off? Man doesn’t know the first thing about shipcrafting. Never could appreciate the sort of risks creativity demands. No, she deserves all the trust she can hold.

Week 7
Time we gave steering a bit of a shot. Some of these kids have put a lot of power behind these hulls of theirs, but that isn’t to say they’ll go where they point them just yet.
-The controls and mechanisms on Mafi’s fearbreaker are all normal as far as they go, up until you get to the rudder. That rudder on Mafi’s baby girl is as outsized as her engines, reinforced from the inside out to put the armoured plating to shame, and has the mechanical muscles behind it to heave against the bad edge of a tidal wave with grit to spare. At the speeds she wants that thing going at, it just might be enough to steer it. Barely.
-Holliburt’s rudder is dreadnought-quality moonblend steel. Not something you see very often in a storm skiff, heavy metals like that, but he’s got a real fine cross-hatched build on it that should keep as much of the strength as it can while shedding most of the weight. And this is one rudder that’ll never snap in any gale, let the winds blow how they want. The strength of its attachment to the hull and the tiller atop it worry me, though. Sure, the rudder won’t break until the ends of the winds, but what good does that do if it’s been shaken off the boat forty leagues back?
-Gilmer could be a lensman if he wanted, his circuitry is so fine in the details. The controls on his rover’s steering are so simple they could be operated by an untrained child, and that takes a complexity that makes your head whirl. He even put in a rough sketch of a new-age autopilot, runs off a sensor system that checks currents to estimate the depth. First-draft, that thing is already patent-worthy. This boy is going places, and if his daddy isn’t proud of him for it I’ll pay him a visit and make sure he is by the end of it.
-Slikes has no rudder. She’s got fins though.
Yep, checked again. She’s still not handing in her biology work by accident. Flonis says she’s the most enthusiastic pupil she’s ever had though, so the girl’s obviously bringing some inspiration along with her. That’s fine. We only have the moonlens and all that comes with it because Berramont Tury thought to ask herself why and how a kraken’s eye glowed so brightly under the blackest waves. The pricklemine, bane of many a warship, that only bobbed in the tides thanks to the day Varn Nurris spotted a jellyfish and wondered what would happen if you substituted concentrated electric shock for the venom, and set your sights on what rode atop the sea’s surface instead of beneath it. And of course, who could forget the coral rovers, where some bright soul in centuries past thought that the only thing that stopped a reef from being the perfect home was that you couldn’t make it float. Well, they were all made fun of in their time, and they all came out just fine. No reason Slikes isn’t sipping from the same cup as all those geniuses of time ago.
But still…fins?

Week 8.
Time to work on the guts of these beasts, get them all tuned up and worked out. We’re getting closer to the time of construction now, where we make our votes, make our choices, call up the university shipyard and tell them we’ve got our orders ready. Only so many ships can see the open sea based on a single student’s dreaming. Even when the dreamers are these four.
Damn, but I’d build them all if I could, with my own hands.
-Mafi’s edited her hull a bit more with this week’s work: it’s double thick now, especially at the front, and the bow is more like a fist than a knife-edge. “Should set the spray flying,” she said, and told me not to worry about the speed, that’s what the engines were for, she’d done all the math. And she had, and she had. It’s just the question of “why” that’s got me all interested here. Anyways, for this week’s work she’s got triple redundancies and a hell of a lot of leak controls. Crew’s going to be smaller than your standard heavyweight with that much space taken up on safeties, but she says she wouldn’t trust anybody but seasoned professionals on this thing anyways. Too strange for the fresh ones. Pretty funny to hear that coming from someone her age, but I’m not going to laugh until I hear the punchline.
-Holliburt has four or five run-of-the-mill storm skiffs inside his storm skiff. The bunkroom’s in the old sprawling Halteen style, the catch hold is more streamlined and Arbesque, and the storage compartments for line and patching are the tight-packed Nashy method. Interesting. Maybe even effective. But nothing really new, not even in the old-made-new way. Good, but not great. Sure, novelty alone won’t set your name on fire and douse you in moonlight, but neither will rehashing last century’s tricks.
-Gilmer, well, he’s been shaping this girl for months, and only now does he tip his hand and show us that she was a queen all along. Look inside that coral rover’s tubby little frame, and you wonder why it’s so small?
Detail. Everyday, ordinary, perfect detail down to the last knothole in the final plank of old ommery ashwood. He’s got every single necessity that a rover should have, but packed into half the size it should be. Even the food’s shrunk down small, with a miniature cannery to keep the storage hold packed tight and neat. Half the mechanisms in here are brand new, and the other half have had so many parts stripped out to make room that they might as well be. I changed my mind: the boy wouldn’t make a fine lensman. He’d be a jeweler the likes the world never dreamt of.
-Slikes’s baby is tight inside. A cabin over the bow, with a little class viewing port, but most of the steering information is going to be coming in through sensors, second-hand. It’s packed tight with machinery, all unrecognizable, all low-energy stuff. She said she’d make it all clear soon.
Still no idea where the power’s coming from.

Week 9
Time for the superstructure and any other gewgaws that roll up at the last second. Next week we all tip our hands, and we decide who’s getting built and who’s staying put.
-The guns on Mafi’s fearbreaker are the heaviest the lady can carry. A bit heavier than anything we’ve got currently, actually – but then again, we’ve never made a fearbreaker with muscles in it like this one. The bridge is so armour-plated it’d put a bunker to shame, and it’s slung real low in the hull. There’s a communications mast, but it can be lowered straight down into the deck to streamline the whole ship. The final touch: a pair of outriggers that can be dropped down on either side of the hull. Between those and the bow, this thing’ll lift more of a mist than a hurricane once it gets up to speed.
-Holliburt’s followed old storm skiff doctrine and kept the deck as clear and clean as possible, with a minimum of durable, tough rigging. Good solid stuff though, and the cables he’s using may be old state-of-the-art, but the synthetic coating on them to ward off any manner of moisture is brand new, and should last for decades before replacement. Beats the bi-daily application of schutz juice of the latter days, or even that weekly oiling they’ve used for the last few decades.
-Gilmer’s got four moonlenses up on deck in a tight array for open-sea recharging, all of them convertible jobs that can soak any of the three moons’ rays without too much of a hitch. Sure, they aren’t going to be the most efficient tools for any one job, but with all four doing it they’ll make sure the fuel never stops coming. The deckhouse is sprawling and takes up most of the aft, but there’s room on the bow for dozens of lines to hang laundry or air-dry catches or whatever you mind. Not an inch wasted, and many more saved.
-Just a single hatch for exit and entrance on the back of Slikes’s little experiment, along with a completely retractable antenna that can poke just up above the surface if it sidles real close to it. No exterior drag, she says. Where she’s going, nothing can afford to get damaged. Not with miles up to go to get where it can be fixed.

Week 10
It’s all over with now, the project we make a reality is laid out flat. And I’d be lying if I said it were close. There wasn’t a single really weak chart out there, but the winner was plain the moment it was laid out for us.
Mafi spelled it all out for us. The contours in the hull, the outriggers, the bow, the engines… her heavyweight will kick up a mountain of spray when it moves, making its own fog. Between that and her engines, this lady’ll come to close blows faster than anyone could count on, and once she gets there, those guns and that hide of hers will keep her safe and her enemies blasted clean. If she gets close enough, Mafi said, she even built the prow sturdy enough to take a full-on ramming at top speed. Her numbers don’t lie: the lady could punch straight through another fearbreaker. Make a hell of a racket and need one big dry-docking afterwards, but if you land the punch that ends the fight, you don’t mind too much. A frightening machine, but a damned interesting one.
Holliburt, well, he didn’t have much to say. An updating of the storm skiff to match modern times, he said. Well sure. That can be done. It has been done. You’ve got the latest model, but it’s got no personal touch to it. It’ll sell, sure. You’ve got a job on your hands here Holliburt, you’re good, you’re right on the money. But you’re no artist, and it pains me to say it so blunt. If there’s one certain no-winner here, it has to be you, pretty as you’ve made your case.
Gilmer’s design is what it is: the perfect coral rover. All of the long list of needs and wants and structural demands condensed down into the smallest package I’ve ever seen, doing the job of a ship twice its size without a moment’s stress. Here’s what you could’ve done, Holliburt: refining an old job in a new way until it shines like a kraken’s eyeball. There’s love in every line.
Slikes finally laid it all out for us: this baby of hers goes deep, yes. And it stays deep, yes, all the way down in the blackwater, where every scientist wants to go and nobody ever wants to stay. And it all works out just fine, all of the weirdness. The fins, the streamlining, the powerful lights, but it still doesn’t explain her fuel problem. Krakens surface three times a year to fill their eyes, and they have to stay up for a week – Slikes says she wants this thing to stay down for as long as it needs. Forever, if need be. And that’s where her biology and physics come into this, because Slikes has given her submarine an honest-to-god gut, from mouth to stomach to waste vents. Suction pulls prey into that razor-edged maw at the prow and pipes it into a chamber, where a sort of chemical soup kicks in. All sorts of acids in there, nasty stuff. Once the digestion’s over, all sorts of heat’s been kicked up, and that’s what keeps it cruising. Streamlined down to the last inch, a single burst of thrust and proper current use can keep it rolling onwards for weeks – and with the autopilot she’s rigged up, built on the back of the brains of softline eels, it’ll find a path through the heart of a whirlpool.
Well now, it just wasn’t even a contest after that. Build order went out this evening. Let’s see what the shipyard makes of it.

Week 11
Grades went out.
-Mafi 93%. I showed her charts to an admiral I know. He said she’s crazy. Also, he has a job for her. Well, more of a career.
-Holliburt 85%. Not half-bad. He’ll have no trouble finding a place for himself out there at all. But it might not be as a shipcrafter.
-Gilmer 94%. His father will know men who know men that want this kid. He could walk into any shipyard on the planet and use this one project as his entire resume and get put in charge of half the new product lines on the spot.
-Slikes 99%. The 1% is excessive secrecy. The 99% is all hers. They laid down the foundations for her baby this evening, and they’re going to work fast. Should be up by the end of midmoon break, and first voyage right after the fact.

Midmoon field results for CNS 0352, Full Shipcrafting, Outmoon Semester. Dr. Mannemeul Cirtosh, Phd.
All right. Now the important thing is to consider what we’ve learned here.
First: softline eels are tenacious creatures that are almost impossible to discourage, and so are their instincts.
Second: softline eels will eat anything smaller than they are, and they’re pretty generous about estimating body length.
Third: experimental systems should always be tested, then re-tested, then tested a bit more. Especially if they’re auto-piloting subsystems that are intended to edit overlying manual control. No matter how good the math turns out.
Fourth: math lies. I don’t care what your teacher told you, math is a damned liar.
Fifth: legal immunity to prosecution doesn’t do a damned thing for your professional reputation.
Sixth: perspective in kind, this was still a hell of a good field test for the effectiveness of public safety standards in the average harbour.

See? As long as you learned something, it wasn’t a waste. And I think we all learned something.
I think I’m ready for a bigger class again come inmoon semester. Failing kids is hard, but it’s a hell of a lot less work than dealing with success.

“CNS 0352” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

Now, there were some people later on who would say that it was all Simon’s fault. Which was unfair, because it clearly wasn’t. Stuff just sort of happened to him, that’s all. And the first thing that happened was his mother told him he’d better help out and shovel snow Thursday morning, before school.
“Why?” asked Simon.
“Or I’ll disown you,” said his mother.
“Okay, okay, fine,” said Simon. And he made a little note on his schedule there.
The second thing that happened was he went into school and found out that he had three extra-length exams at once on Thursday due to a last-minute rescheduling. Chemistry. Computer science. Some really complicated stuff with math in it.
“Any questions?” asked the teacher.
Simon stuck his hand up.
“Good. See you tomorrow.”
Simon made another note on his schedule, along with some other words.
The third thing that happened was that Simon’s girlfriend texted him about how they would be spending their Valentine’s Day. Which was Thursday. She had a restaurant.
“k” said Simon. And he made another note. His calendar was now full, and he went home making lists in his head over and over again.
Then the fourth thing happened. Simon walked into the house and was informed by his mother, as she juggled the laundry in one hand and the cat in the other, that he had to feed the dog dinner.
“Can’t Susan do it?” asked Simon.
“No,” said Simon’s mother. flipping the contents of each hand into separate baskets. “Don’t be dense.”
“Okay, all right,” said Simon. He made a note on his schedule as he walked to his room, then looked twice.
“Hey,” said Simon’s dad.
“Huh?”
“We’re moving the fridge tomorrow night, remember?”
“Whuh?”
“Great!” said Simon’s dad, and he gave him a friendly whack on the shoulder and went downstairs.
Simon made another note, then looked at his schedule. He thought about meals and sleep and studying and school and then he did some math. And did it again. And then he triple-checked it on his calculator.
“Well FUCK,” said Simon, and he meant it.
“Fuck in a bucket with fries,” clarified Simon. And he meant that too. Because he’d checked three times and it all added up: he was an hour short on Thursday.

Now, this was a problem. And not even the kind where the solution was “get up earlier.” No, Simon had things that had to be done at the same time as other things, things that were unskippable colliding with things that were unskippabler, immovable assignments colliding with unstoppable dates. He was as trapped and timeless as a mosquito in amber, and he could see only one way out: through the dinosaurs.
So he phoned grandpa.
“Hey grandpa,” said Simon.
“Well hello there how are you doing my how you’ve grown you look just like your mother nice weather isn’t it why back in my dad it was much nicer,” said Simon’s grandpa.
“Yeah,” said Simon.
“Good! Now that THAT’S all out of the way, what’s up?”
“I’m short an hour on Thursday,” said Simon.
“Shucks and much stronger language,” said Simon’s grandpa. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“You checked? Double-checked?”
“Yeah yeah.”
“Checked with a calculator?”
“Checked with a calculator.”
“Well hell.” Simon’s grandpa clucked his false teeth, juggling them idly against the tips of his lips in a way that had always made his wife poke him in the ribs. “I guess I can spare an hour or so. Not like I was planning to do much come Friday evening anyways.”
“Thanks a ton, grandpa.”
“Ah, don’t mention it. You have a good Thursday now, eh? And get some rest on Friday.”
“Got it.”
Click went Simon’s phone, and Simon felt like he had a good handle on Thursday now. Click went Simon’s grandpa’s phone, and just when he felt like he had a good handle on things ring ring it went.
“Hello?”
“Hey there, it’s Edna.”
“Well hey there Edna. What’s going on?”
“Poker night is what’s going on. Friday night is poker night, and that means time for some beer and time for some bad grease and time for you and me to play darts after the game until we’re both sick.”
Simon’s grandpa swore very loudly.
“Sorry now?”
“Aw hell Ed, I just gave away that hour to my grandkid.”
“Now why would you do that? You know those kids don’t appreciate a good hour like they should.”
“It doesn’t matter. Listen, can you cut me an hour off’ve your Sunday? I know you’re never awake in church around then anyhow.”
“Well sure I can do that now for you Gunther, don’t you worry.”
“Ah, you’re a peach.”
“Sure am. But I’m gonna have to cut into my breakfast for that. Unless…wait, it’ll be fine. Sure, take the time.”
“Thanks a bunch Ed.”
“No problems.”
Edna hung up and gave herself a few thoughts. She was going to have pancakes Sunday morning. That was worth lingering over, worth fighting for. Even if she had to call in a favour…
So she called her son-in-law.
“Hello?”
“Horace, it’s your mother.”
“Ah. Hello.”
“You listening to me Horace? You sound a bit distracted.”
Horace Sweet had his left hand slipped inside a tiger’s guts with a velvet touch as his other stroked the big cat’s velvety nose with all the tenderness of a nursing mama. The phone was wedged between his cheek and shoulder, the sheets of surface bone supporting it with such tenseness that the keys were in grave danger of snapping in.
The tiger’s eye was still dilated, despite the half-empty syringe. When this was over, he and the pharmacist were going to have words. “No, no. What is it?”
“Can you give me an hour or two?”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
“Only I need them for Sunday morning. Pretty soon rather than later, is what I’m getting at. Hey, you sure you’re not busy?”
The tiger twitched, exposing a canine for a glimmer of a second’s reflection. Horace’s stroking became a tiny bit infinitely more soothing. “No, no.”
“Mind if I just take ’em off your hands right now then?”
Horace Sweet thought about what the next hour could contain and weighed the odds.
“Sure. Sure. No rush.”
“Awfully fine of you, Horace. You give Mary a kiss for me now, you understand?”
“Absolutely.”
Edna hung up and Horace’s next hour was mercifully over in an instant, down to the very last stitch.
“Bit rough on the knots, though,” commented his doctor.
“Couldn’t be avoided,” said Horace.
“Looks worse than it is, anyways. Get some sleep is what I recommended. Twelve hours minimum.” He caught Horace’s wince. “What is it?”
“I’m down two hours. Mother-in-law.”
“Say no more, say no more. Got a few to spare from my vacation coming up Sunday. I’ll just take them out of the snorkelling. Kids insisted on it, but it’s not really my thing anyways.”
“You’re a lifesaver.”
“My job.”
And as Horace slept that evening, as peaceful as a baby, his doctor went home and made dinner and performed a quick, expert diagnosis of a common cold on his youngest.
“Mostly in the head,” he opined.
“Icky,” said Tina.
“Yup. Just keep a bunch of kleenex at hand, take these decongestants, and all’s well.”
“What if I get water up my nose?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Will it feel gross?”
“Nah.”
“It’ll feel gross.”
The doctor could feel what was coming next in his marrow, superstitious bastard of a tissue that it was. “No baby, it’s not-”
“It’s gonna feel GROSSSSSSSSSS!”
And after a while it turned out that they wouldn’t be snorkelling, they’d go to the zoo. It was on the doctor’s mind anyways, after the veterinarian incident.
He liked the zoo. So he phoned up his stockbroker.
“Clarence?”
Clarence put down his ping-pong paddle and held up a finger to the heavily-armed man across the table from him. “Doctor Ramesh, man, what’s up your face tonight? Ain’t the kids gotta go to bed in a coupla minutes?”
“Five minutes ago. Probably get there in an hour.”
“I’m tellin’ you Doctor, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a nanny who could just solve this whole issue for you right-”
“Can you get me two hours for Sunday?”
Clarence risked sucking in some air over his teeth, and managed to avoid choking on the fumes. “Tough call Doctor, tough call. You’ve got solid credit, but that’s a bit hard to shake on a nice weekend like this. I’ll have to pull some shenanigans.”
“Not up for shenanigans, Clarence?”
Clarence laughed and spun his chair around in a little circle. “Ah you got me up and down there Doctor, you got me. I’ll do it. Just expect my fee to take a little kick-over next time around, okay? You’re buying grey hairs off me by the fistful, man, and they ain’t all on my head if you know what I mean when I say what I mean.”
“Too clearly.”
“Aw you take care of yourself.”
“You too.”
Click.
Clarence let out a whistle from one lung and sigh from the other and forced the resulting crossbreed alone and friendless into the world. “Right, right,” he said. “Right!”
He looked at the man opposite him, absently tried for the fourth time to count the number of probably-legal firearms he was holding, and lost track. “So! How’d you like to diversify that portfolio a little?”
“I’m listening.”

And that was how twelve hours of April ended up being sealed inside a condom and stored in a man’s gut as he headed through customs, safe and smooth and without a hitch. It was retrieved in California, sold for a pittance on a market that had grown unexpectedly inflated, and prepared for use in prolonging pre-production on a major blockbuster, all in less than two hours.
“Looks good,” said the accountant.
“Damn straight,” said the producer.
“Where’d you get that time from?” asked the acountant.
“Um,” said the producer. He drummed his fingers on the table. He coughed nervously. He adjusted his collar. He whistled lightly and laughed nervous. Then he leaned back in his chair, gave the accountant a wink, and hurled himself through the window and into a dumpster. They caught him five months later, living in a tent under a different name on Santa Carolina, Mozambique.
In the meantime, of course, the film had gone bust. All that time sitting around had to go somewhere, and it went on auction, where, as happens with most things, a man bought it cheap and sold it dear. Some forty-five minutes later, an investment set of forty-eight hours had changed hands eleven times and was safely stowed away in the guts of a package being tended in the careful nest of Walton-Meyers insurance, Ltd.
Leasing took place. Investment. Diversification. Perhaps…loans.
And then it all ended up in the lap of Wendy Chalmers, at eleven minutes to midnight. Wendy was tired. Wendy was feeling like the suit she was wearing was worth more than she was. Wendy was sick and tired of other people’s money and other people’s time and she had just about had enough.
She looked at her keyboard. Seventy-two billion hours of other people’s time was dancing out there. A hundred thousand and twelve hours of mixed April time was on her desk, the last of a workload that had been ten times too large six Fibonacci sequences ago.
Wendy picked a random number, then picked the first stock that came up on Google.
“Hell with it,” she said as she hammered enter and turned her back on her office. “Not like it’ll make a difference.”

Ten minutes later, the clocks of half the planet ticked that last second of Wednesday off their to-do list, some really complicated stuff with math in it happened, and then they moved straight on to Friday.
Saying it twice now: it made no sense that those people said it was all Simon’s fault, because he explained everything. Stuff just happens, and it tends to happen more and more the farther it goes.
So failing him on those exams for being ‘late’ was just plain out of grounds.

“Spare Time,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

This is the Duke of Urr’s gauntlet.
It weighs twenty pounds and has four big spikes, one for the knuckle of each finger. The Duke of Urr has used each of these spikes five-hundred-and-twelve times each, except for the littlest one, which has been used an extra five times to pick the noses out of people’s heads.
It has the last of the Duke of Urr’s baby teeth sewn into its palm, for luck and protection.

This is the Duke of Urr’s helm.
It has a narrow slit for vision that wraps around most of its front, and you can just barely see his eyes in there when he wears it. They glisten red because of all the reflected light from the fires. His eyes are brown.
The top of it looks a bit like a crown, but beaten black without a gleam of shine. It is showy, but will not gleam in the night-time, until the fires start.

This is the Duke of Urr’s banner.
It is his three hundredth. The others caught fire and burned on the pole as he fought underneath them. They do that because he lights them as the first arrows fly, to show his enemies that he does not care if they know where he is and to fill his men with reckless courage. At the end of each battle, he plants the charred pole in the body of the enemy commander and has a new one made, with the skull of his adversary topping the shaft.
It is a red field, with a dark horse rampant. The pitch makes its borders black.

This is the Duke of Urr’s best dagger.
It is very long and very thin and it has been well oiled and carefully stored for many years. The Duke loves it very much. He has owned it since he was a young boy, when it was given to him by the big stupid man who threatened him with it. His grip was lazy, his thoughts arrogant, and his surprise paralyzing.
There is a bluntness at the blade’s tip that the Duke has never had repaired. The big stupid man’s breastplate had been nearly as well-made as the blade. But not quite.

This is the Duke of Urr’s mind.
It is a long, dark, broody thing that simmers and lays low when nothing of interest is occurring. The moment something interests it is the moment it rises up in a lather, already angry without knowing why. If it were a creature it would be fire and malice and frightfully sharp-edged.
It is quiet at the moment.

This is the Duke of Urr’s horse.
It is a large horse, a trained warhorse. It has trampled several men to death recently, but it did not particularly enjoy it or dislike it.
There is nothing much special about it.

This is the Duke of Urr’s latest conquest.
It was a small kingdom, but not a quiet one. Just another one of the little fiefs-grown-boisterous that riot and wrestle with one another that sprung up in the wild bits of the world. The castle has been plundered liberally. The king has been thrown into his moat, headless.
The peasants haven’t really gotten involved.

This is the Duke of Urr’s sword.
There is no count of how many people it has killed; its notches and nicks and chips are beyond counting, beyond polishing, beyond repair. The little groove near the mid-point marks the head of the man who granted him the title of duke. The dent on the pommel is the crushed skull of his uncle, whose blade it was before him. The wear and tear on the crossguard shows where it was used to crush a man against a wall in a hilt-to-hilt struggle and drove right through his body.
It is still very, very sharp.

This is the Duke of Urr’s arm.
It is mostly scars, and the scars have somehow become muscles. It is as thick and muscled as a blacksmith’s, though it swings the sword rather than the hammer by habit. In practice, it has swung hammers, swords, axes, knives, daggers, chairs, tables, limbs, and once a throne with the lord still sitting on it.
The first scar is from when the Duke fought with his older brother at age maybe-five. It runs from elbow to armpit.

This is the Duke of Urr’s tattoo.
It runs from the backs of his ears down to the base of his spine, curving and weaving and forcing its way through folds of muscle and rippling forests of hair and the criss-crossing-hatching of scars. Red and green and black and anger, all woven together by an old, old, old woman who said she was a witch and never spoke of any payment.
It is impossible to tell what it looks like.

This is the Duke of Urr’s latest victim.
He is a servant who yesterday was a prince, and who raised a hand – with a knife in it – to the Duke as he feigned to fill his wine cup, which was made from a skull. The skull had been inside a king’s skull the day before.
The servant’s head should not be pointing that way.

This is the Duke of Urr’s stomach.
It is full, and is currently working away at its supper. Supper contained some roast pork, and pork that maybe hadn’t been roasted as long as it should’ve been. The Duke would’ve noticed it by the smell, maybe, but assassinations, even ad-hoc ones, make him hungry enough to not be put off his meal.
There’s a lot of dead meat in that pork, but there were a few little tough living things, too.

And that is the Duke of Urr in his whole and his parts, here and now and for the last time all in one place. Because his stomach will be the somewhat uncomfortable death of him in five weeks and four days.

“Some Things,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

An early cold sky cuddled up to the new-risen sun for warmth as Richard rose from his tiny, tattered bedroll in his tiny, tattered tent, all alone with just him and his beard.
“Here we go, here we go again,” he grumbled and fussed as he got dressed. “The same, the same as the day before, the same as it’ll be again,” he said as he ate his bannock still-hot and with the tiniest sliver of butter (such luxury!). “Ah well, ah well, oh well, here we are,” he said, and with ice axe and shovel and plenty of spirit he took himself up and walked towards his work.
Richard’s work was more square miles than he’d care to imagine and more thousands of tonnes than you could shake a tree at, and it was made almost entire of old, raw ice that was older than the concept of sin itself. Walking towards it, you could feel the air grow ancient and chill on your tongue, taste the tang of water that had almost forgotten what it was like to be a liquid. Richard was used to it by now, and thought it was the finest drink to be had in the world, once your teeth quit chattering.
But pleasure was merely a part of his experience. There was work to be done, and judging from the dark shadows in the ice, work none the sooner. Richard unslung his ice pick and took to a trot, hurrying the slippery, stony way all the way up and over to the creeping edge of the glacier, the tip of a slow-grinding ice river. It was all colours inside, if all colours were blue and white and frozen.
Also, there was something very green. Richard was particularly interested in that something that was very green. It was his job. But what he’d seen, that wasn’t the green he saw now. No, no, that wasn’t it at all. Still too deep inside to have been what caught his eye. No, no, oh there, there it was!
There it was, hanging half outside the ice and half in, made of frozen flesh and weariness and too many limbs, greener than a fern, than a gangrenous cut. One of those things that tickled that little nerve at the back of your mind, that saw something that wasn’t right, wasn’t the sort of thing you saw outside of bad dreams.
It meowed at him.
Richard gave it a cheery smile, a quick whistle, and brought down his ice pick as close to the center of what he could call its body mass as he possibly could, as hard as he could. It creaked and cried and sprayed itself all teal and vermillion across the ice, staining it sticky-warm for an instant before it freeze-dried black. A thing with claws on it (a limb? a head?) reached for nothing, twitched, and went boneless.
“Nasty, nasty,” said Richard, clicking his tongue. “Too close these days, they come too close. A bit farther and your left leg would’ve been out, and a bit farther than that and your other left leg would’ve been out, and then you could’ve tugged a bit and come out and oh my oh my would we have some troubles then, so many, so much. Yes indeed.” He shook his head, and used the blade of his space to chop the thing to pieces, a laborious, lengthy process. Burial was out of the question, of course, not with all that permafrost, so he poured a little gasoline on it from a can he kept for that very purpose, set it alight with a match, and moved on before the smell arrived.
“Too many,” he told the man he met as he came around the curve. “Too many of them nowadays. Why, I barely have time to sleep as it is, and there are at least half a hundred more due within the month. Good day to you, and a good morning! What’s your name?”
The man Richard had met blinked an unnecessary amount before replying. “Uh, Trevor.”
“Nice to meet you, it is very nice to meet you! Not so much company up here, you know? A bit lonely, very much so. Tell me, why are you here?” Richard saw no reason to stop walking as he spoke, and Trevor broke into a brief jog to catch up with the question.
“You’re here to hike, of course!” Richard answered for him.
“Yes,” said Trevor, “and,” and Richard was talking again.
“A good walk, absolutely. Without a shred of doubt the finest exercise known to man. As am I! But my walk, it is for business and pleasure both. Come, walk with me! See what I see, what I do!”
“I’m here to take some measurements,” Trevor finished, but Richard was walking faster now and soon both their lungs were too busy with that to go about talking. Besides, there was plenty to look at. Fresh, deep green pines. Rolling, rocky hills. Shining, clashing streams that leaked from the glacier’s innards all over the place. A bird made a bizarre noise somewhere.
It really was very lovely.
“Wonderful, isn’t it, it is,” said Richard after a time, slowing down to a pace that let both feet touch the ground again. “Just wonderful. A breath of air here is as good as a feast. What did you say you were here for again?”
“Measurements,” said Trevor, with some difficulty. Richard’s legs looked like driftwood coated in sheepskin, but they moved like windmill blades. “Measuring. The glacier.”
“Hmm? There was a man just up here a while ago, doing that. A man just a year or so ago I think. Yes, he was the last person here. Why are you here then? They can’t have moved all that much, can they, can they now?”
“He never came back,” said Trevor.
Richard tsk-tsked. “Terrible thing. Dangerous things up here. Treacherous, nasty place, as pretty as it is. A rock looks sound, and then whoops it slips and down you bump down down down three hundred feet of cliff face, just like that. Terrible. Oh, and speaking of which, here we are, here we go! There we are!”
‘There’ was a deep crevasse in the glacier’s side, but thin, thinner than a man no more than twenty feet in, with a brief bulge before that formed by unknowable pressures. The ice was too cold to register as such; Trevor’s palms brushed it on the way in and his fingers vanished from his nervous system’s radar for some thirty seconds before brisk rubbing could restore them.
“You see that green? You see that sheen, down there, twinkling?”
Trevor looked. “Yes.”
“Well, that’s a problem, that is, that will be. In…oh…a week. Yes, I think a week.” He produced a ragged piece of paper and added to the scribbled ink that already coated over half of it. “Yes, I’ll have to come back here in three weeks. But here” – and he jabbed at a subtly different, nearby portion of the map -“here’s where we need to be now. Just checking here, just checking. Tell me, what do you see on the north wall?”
Trevor looked at the north wall. There was something hanging loose from the ice, and he said so.
“Yes, yes, that’s how it always is. Go take a look! Go on! Come on now.”
There was no drama to it, no sudden gasp of realization, no shock. Trevor was no closer than halfway to the dangling arm before he knew what it was, and before that he had suspected. An arm was an arm was an arm, after all, even if this one was a cartoon-froggy green and had too many joints in it.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Richard in his ear. “They always are, before they wake up.”
Trevor looked at it. “They wake up?”
“Yes, yes, yes. Unusual, isn’t it? I understand most life isn’t very happy after it gets frozen for a hundred thousand thousand years, not at all, but they don’t seem to mind.” Richard thought it over. “Well, they don’t seem to be in that bad shape, considering. They might mind. It’s hard to put any sort of meaning to the sounds they make, you know?” He shrugged and pulled out his shovel. “Should bleed out by the time it’s through, with any luck.”
“What’s that for?” asked Trevor.
Richard gave him a quizzical look. “What now?”
“The shovel.”
“Oh.” Richard looked at it. “I’m going to cut its arm off, knock it right to pieces. Blood flow’s sluggish when they’re mostly still frozen, but it should drop before it thaws. Most efficient way about it, you know, much better, much better than coming back in a few days to deal with it that way.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I just told you!”
“No, I mean why did you kill it? You’ve got something here that, that can live through whole-body freezing and come out again still moving! And you just chop it to pieces?”
“Oh yes, yes. Got to burn it too, mind you. Just a waste if you go to all that chopping and let the pieces sit there. Do you want to know what happens, what could happen, if something fancies a nibble or a snack from one of these misplaced limb-bits? I don’t.” Richard adjusted his glasses and shouldered his shovel, jiggling it absently as he felt his way through his sentences. “See, you’re thinking of this all wrong, Trevor my friend my buddy. This isn’t a study here, this is just disease management. Preventative medicine. Amputation, if you can grasp the abstract metaphor that I’m using, which I’m using.”
“They’re animals, not microbes. What, are you afraid they’re going to just pop out of the ice and sprint for it?”
Richard gave him an annoyed look. “Okay, Trevor, my buddy, my companion of the hike, we will see. We will try it your way this time, understood, all clear?” He shrugged the ice pick off his shoulder and tossed it to Trevor. “There you go, now just chippy-chip-chip your way in, no worries. Be careful though! It’s sharper than it looks, and we don’t want to bruise the poor dear thing with its poor dear self.”
Trevor took the pick, gave him a look right back, and started at it. The pick was old and the handle was worn near through, but the ice was strangely soft and pitted around the limb and came away like rotted cheese. Bit by bit, a form was coming clear. Another leg. A torso. A head. An eye.
The eye rotated, then the head moved, and the torso heaved, and the whole thing wheeled drunkenly out of its hollow, half-coated in slime and making noises like a loose fan belt. It reeled onto its side and lay there, legs kicking at the universe in general, arms askew.
“There,” said Trevor. He dropped the pick and stretched, wincing as he clutched at his back. “Damn, that puts a real -”
The frozen thing lurched itself to all five limbs with a drunkard’s grace, all coltish limbs and whinnies. Then it hurled itself teeth-first at Richard, its mouth opening maybe twice as wide as its head. Richard yelped, swore, and went down with it in a stumbling tumble of shovel, slime, and legs as Trevor snatched up the pick again and tried to aim for someplace that wasn’t Richard. For an instant, just an instant, the rolling stopped, and he sank the pick home, sending it straight through strangely soft tissues and straight into ice.
“Don’t worry, hold back now,” came Richard’s muffled voice. “I’m here, I’m me, I’m fine. Your friend isn’t, though.”

The thing was soft and brittle simultaneously, a freeze-dried sack of organs. During the tussle, as Richard called it, its own weight had crushed its chest through the handle of the shovel , tearing something important and spilling strange bloody fluids all over Richard’s shirt.
“Don’t lick it,” he’d advised. “It tastes like tin, it does, it really does. Or maybe copper, or nickel.” He’d stared at his fingers. “Maybe I should try it again, just to see, just to test.”
He had. The results hadn’t been revealed to Trevor.
The rest of the day had been educational. Trevor had walked around the glacier taking measurements, and Richard had walked around with him pointing out areas of “future developments” and “emergency zones.” The latter he tended to immediately, with Trevor standing witness.
The ice pick, he’d learned, was usually reserved for excavation. The shovel was the execution tool, as long as too much of the target wasn’t protruding. In that case out came the pick for a one-swing kill, as clean as any of that sort of thing could be said to be.
Which wasn’t very. Richard performed the taste test twice more, just to confirm his hypothesis, but the rest just had to be scrubbed. Poorly.

“How long have you been doing this?” asked Trevor. Camp had been increased in size by one tent, one man, and a shared package of marshmallows
Richard frowned. “Not sure, not totally, not at all. A while?” He shrugged, the motion like a dog shedding water, and popped another marshmallow into his mouth. “A while. The days don’t matter, you know, it’s true. Just the process. How long ’till the glacier’s melted, eh? How long ’till it’s all gone?”
Trevor looked at his notes. “I don’t have the rest of the data all in one place, and this is going to take a lot of work, but -”
“A while?”
“A while.”
Richard nodded, his stuffed cheeks jiggling like water balloons. “I’ve been here that long, I can be here longer. They’re getting denser, you know, it’s true, it is. The deeper in you go, the thicker they lurk. Barely any at all on the outer crust, none at all, but now there’s dozens and soon there’s scores, SCORES! Maybe there’s no center to it all at all, you think?” He laughed, spraying marshmallow splinters. “Just a big ball of slime and legs and eyes and gasping mouths and grasping hands. Such a sight that’d be, it could be!” The laughter broke off in a coughing rattle as the marshmallows ventured down the wrong pipe, and the rest of the evening’s conversation trailed away as both parties lost the taste for talk and headed to bed.
Trevor woke up first, five minutes later, because he’d carefully planned that to happen. He waited there for a second, ears wide open, and only began to move when he confirmed the faint sighing gasps of Richard’s lungs working overtime to turn air into snore.
In five minute’s time he was out and walking, heading to the glacier with his flashlight on its very lowest and least obnoxious setting. In less than a minute’s time he turned that off too; the stars and moon were out in full force, each trying to outshine the other. It was a different place at night, the world up near the rim of the glacier. Quieter for sure, but oh how that quiet turned the little sounds loud.
And that was out there, out in the world, where the trees and the sky lived. Up here, over there, where Trevor stood at the mouth of that icy little gap in the glacier?
Well a tombstone’s breath would ring like the end of the world.

Deeper in was better, easier on Trevor’s nerves, more reassuring. Being surrounded by creepy, scary things is much better than having those creepy, scary things happen within spitting distance of something nice and friendly and normal.
Not that it was creepy or scary in here, it was just
dark
and quite a bit
cold
that was all that it was. Even with that one eye staring at him at the back of the cave.
A week. That was how long it’d been, hadn’t it? A week, that’s what Richard had said. And Trevor trusted Richard, which was why he was out here with Richard’s ice pick getting ready to dig free another one of the things that had just jumped on Richard’s head and tried to eat him.
Because he didn’t trust Richard, or his aimless smile, or the way his sentences repeated themselves inside themselves, as if he were trying to persuade himself. And because if he were trapped inside a wall of solid ice and saw someone who was getting ready to hit him with a ice pick, he’d damned well jump him first too, brittle bones, brittle body and all.
It took a long time, but the sun was still down when that one eye was open to the cool air and it blinked. Just like that, after how many million years, that eye blinked like it wasn’t a thing.
It took another time, but less of a long one, for the face to come free, along with most of one side. It was not a nice face. A face with too many jaws, for one thing, and not enough flesh. Its skin looked to have been mummified three times over, and a faint slime coated the ice where its body had lain.
Trevor looked at it. It looked back. Then its jaws worked, its mouth cracked open and shut with a sound like crumbling cockroaches, and it wrenched its face open wide and let out a shriek that could wake the dead in Chicago. One arm ripped its way free of the wall and jutted a single claw outwards, stretching towards something.
By the time Trevor realized it was pointing behind him, Richard had grabbed him and clubbed him to the ground and was hunched over him with his hands buried in his coat, reaching for neck.
“Now that’s not good, not nice at all,” he mumbled, breath whistling past yellowed teeth. Trevor writhed, but those arms, bone-and-nothing but they were, were surprisingly, frighteningly solid, locked into place with tendons made from steel rods.
“It’s no fun at all,” said Richard. He made a sound in his throat that had come from somewhere deeper down, somewhere that gurgled and hissed. “Not a bit. So lonely, you know, all so lonely, all shut out in the cold, because no one cared, because no one waited.” He wheezed out a sickened giggle and shook Trevor by the scruff like a puppy. “No, oh no, they all left me behind, left me out on the edges to spend all the days until the end of it all BY MYSELF and NO ONE CARED until good Marcus, sweet Marcus, my friend, my friend, my friend indeed I was a friend indeed.”
Trevor’s hands found something at the edge of their grip, and he swung it. It turned out to be the ice pick, which bounced away, split in two from the hardness of the human skull after it hit…
After it hit…
Several things made sense at once, in a way that made no sense.
“…Marcus?” asked Trevor, hauling himself up on his elbows.
Richard glared back at him as he scrambled upwards, winched up as much by knees as anything else, then he was blank where he stood, eyes open wide, shovel gripped in one mitten. And with those wide eyes and that far-off look, there he was, there was Marcus, gone for a year and missing since he walked off to do the job Trevor had done.
“Marcus?” he said. “Me? I was Marcus….” He shook his head and the shovel clenched into his fist. “No. That wasn’t me now. I’m ME now, and. And ME is RI-”
There was a crumble and a rattle and a shivering crack-crak of ice, and then the ice pick’s head and handle returned, each clutched in a claw of the thing in the wall and travelling at what felt like a thousand miles per second. Richard’s shovel came around, a rusty, broken blade, but slow, too slow, and the broken pieces of pick arrived like a hammer and chisel; first the handle, and then the blow that sent it shivering into his heart.
It went THud. Just like that. All hard at first, then meaty-soft. And then a tiny, chittering wail that rose and died away again almost before it began.

Marcus was Marcus again. All that leaked out of the hole in his chest was a green, fine powder, a busted and cracked shell of thin legs and brittle bones, a mess of ruin that matched the ruin the thing-in-the-ice had transformed its arm into when it killed Richard.
It was still sitting there, hissing softly, moaning a bit, rubbing its brokenness. And then, bit by bit, bone by bone, it lurched itself up until it was face to face with Trevor.
It blinked, which was strange to watch with five eyes. It dropped the bits of the pick.
And then it hugged him, careful and slow, making sure to avoid his bruised neck and its own injured arm.

It took two hours or so for it to seal itself back in the little ice burrow it had made. Trevor helped. And when he went back home with his measurements, he made special recommendation that the area be left alone. It could be unstable. Or something.

“Out in the Cold,” copyright 2012.

It was a letter. Unusual in these days of instant messages and talking electrons, but it had a few newspaper clippings slipped in there that wouldn’t have gotten my way otherwise. Physical proof adds weight to the claims of the crazy, and it takes just enough longer to take a trip to the garbage can than to the ‘delete’ button that you might notice something worthwhile on your way. Three little articles from two little papers, with seven spelling mistakes between them. A missing car, a missing man, a missing hiker. All in the same place, all on the same road, all without a trace. The letter attached to that was an afterthought of information at best. ‘Come here,’ it said. ‘Help,’ it said.
‘Hunt.’
I thought about the options as I looked over my traveling kit.
Bear. No. They usually don’t do serial jobs, and they certainly don’t do cars.
Cougar. The same.
Humans. Could be, could be. Never rule out humans. It’d add to the challenge, sure.
Accidents. A universal. But maybe not this closely-packed. There’s bad luck, and then there’s bad luck.
And then there could be… something else. Which was why I was carrying the special case with the special tools in my left hand when I stepped out the door and left my latest small, meaningless apartment behind.
I’d say that the job finding me was unusual, but that would be a lie. What I do isn’t work. Great-great-granddad called it by a different name.
It’s the purest play there is, he said, a game humans invented a long, long time ago. And I still haven’t found anything that can beat me at it.
I can say the same thing.

It was a quiet sort of place, tucked away in some leafy little corner of the country that no one really cared about or looked at too closely. A hundred houses spread thin on the ground, two franchise buildings that sold grease and clogged arteries, and a late-night hunting supplies store on the highway that some joker had decided to paint in camouflage which might have been the stupidest thing I’d seen in my life. Country folk, god bless ‘em and screw them to pieces. Nothing important lived for a hundred miles around, which was a good sign of whatever problem that was hanging around it being ‘something else.’ That sort of thing usually sticks off the beaten path. Too noisy, too busy, too many people, and they just run. With this few nearby, they don’t run, they stay and fight.
I ate lunch in a terrible fast food chain coated wall-to-wall in plastic, feeling nostalgia for the good old days when I would’ve eaten lunch in a terrible independently owned restaurant covered in dented chrome. It didn’t really matter, as long as the food was bad. It forced you to think, to look at your map and make marks on it, to do anything, anything at all to take your mind off what was crawling over your gums.
Three vanishings over five years on the same stretch of highway next to the ass of a useless little town that hung off the road like a tick. And no traces ever found. The hiker sets off from his home and doesn’t come back. The driver heads into town and never gets there, nor his car. The idiot drunk gets in a shouting match with his friend, gets turfed out of the car to walk the last mile home by himself, and drops off the face of the known universe.
All locals, of course. It’s the only reason the papers – and by extension, me – know where the hell they went missing. I thought idly about how many people vanish without a trace on America’s highways and byways, and wondered how many of them could’ve happened just down by here.

I set up my blind in the edge of the thicket by the hunting store. A good view over the stretch of the highway I’d penciled out as the likely danger zone, and it’d be easier to explain away what I was doing to anyone to that wandered by. A few rednecks stopping by to stock up on bullets and beef jerky saw me setting up and made tsking noises. No way I’d get deer down there, what the hell was I thinking, blah blah blah. Nothing new, nothing useful.
It was mostly bent branches when I was finished, a screen that didn’t look like a screen, a seamless little blot on the landscape just big enough for me to tuck myself and the contents of the special case inside and vanish as far as eyeballs were concerned. Hidden in plain sight, the best and only real way to do it. Sound would be no problem, not unless I came down with the worst cold of my life in the next two hours, or explosive hiccups, or spontaneous Tourette’s syndrome, because all three of those were just about as likely as each other. That just left scent, and where I was sitting the wind wouldn’t reach.
Everything was ready well before sundown, so I went inside (nearly cut myself on the doorframe – rusty, and jagged as a shark’s mouth) and shot the shit a bit with the owner of the store. A fat, pale weasel with too few teeth and barely any eyes. Like a bloated worm. Those tiny little eyeballs nearly bugged out of his flattened skull when he saw the Gun, though. It was a mistake to bring that in there, I thought he’d take no for an answer when he asked to see it but the whining just wouldn’t stop until it came out of its case.
I told him the truth because that was the easiest way: yes, that was my great-great-grandfather’s elephant gun, old as sin and twice as ugly, yes, I knew how to take care of it, no, he couldn’t touch it, yes, it used black powder, yes, I agreed that it was a bit much to use on deer, blah blah. Yes, I knew how much it was worth, now stop talking I’m leaving. At least he didn’t have a problem with me leaving my car in the lot while I hunted ‘deer’; hell, just for letting me see the Gun he’d probably have let me sleep with his sister.
I went back to my blind and sat there in the dusk, watching the stars come out, counting the cars leaving the hunting store’s parking lot (one, two, three, four… only two left) and measuring the darkness. It was straightforward, normal, the sort of lack-of-light you find anywhere in the world. Not the deep black of an old, brooding forest, not the underworld pitch of a cave, not even the forever sleep of the bottom of the ocean. Just your everyday, everynight nighttime, nothing to write home about or quake under the bed in fear of.
Perfect cover for something else. And while I sat there on the cold dirt and branches, I thought about all the something elses out there that might be roaming my way.
Would it be a bigfoot? It’d been a while since a bigfoot. They were the reason I carried around great-great-granddad’s outmoded monster Gun with me, despite the reload time and the monstrous weight of the thing. All that hair and hide was on top of near-solid bone in all the important spots, and it was hard to find anything that could punch through that on demand.
I remembered that first time I saw one. All that arm and leg, lanky as a colt, but on a torso bigger than an entire gorilla. It looked at me as I pulled the trigger, and I think I saw surprise in there somewhere. I sold the feet to an old, old man in Texas, with a lot of old, old money; the things stank worse than a rotten skunk.
Bigfoot ate anything, just like people, but they steered clear of us when they could. We’re better at killing than they are, and they know it. And even a really big old one would have trouble getting rid of a whole car. Probably wasn’t a bigfoot. Unless it was really pissed off and really smart. Those two traits, they don’t go well together.
Now, while I was waiting and thinking all this, my ears and eyes were on the move, prowling the night around me while my body and brain sat lullaby-soft. And here and now, they came back home and told me that there was something out there, and it was standing just where the brush thickened into trees, forty feet from me, surrounded by branches and needles. Its breath was very soft, but deep and full, and it seemed to take forever for each exhalation to end and another to begin. Big lungs on it.
I moved the Gun into position and got my other hand ready on the big spotlight that was another part of the special case. One second was all it took once I had the range and aim. Turn on the light, and then, in that instant between freeze and flight, bang.
Or, since this was the Gun, BANG.
If I missed, there’d be problems. So there weren’t.
The sound of gravel under a tire rasped on the night like glass against a cheese grater, and the quiet breather in the wood chuffed under its breath and left, whump-thud-whump, off at a trot, paws churning through old pine needles and drained soil, overwritten by the wheezing roar of a pickup truck that had last seen maintenance when its owner was sperm as it hauled out of the parking lot of the hunting store.
I swore inside my head. Two seconds. Three seconds. Maybe two seconds and a bit closer. So near to being a one-night hunt too. Just once, just once (wait, there’d been the time in Puerto Rica) just twice, it’d be nice to have a one-night hunt. No chance it’d come back now, not after a run like that.
The car was my bed, the second of the terrible fast-food franchises in town was my evening breakfast, and the slimy little man in the hunting store was my timekiller, if only because the mildewed air in there put me to sleep real easy. He’d known the man that went missing in the car, he said. A good customer, a regular, a friend. Terrible shame. I’d better be careful, because if I went missing so would the Gun, and that would be the real tragedy haw haw haw haw.
Haw haw back at you. Jackass.

I moved for the second night, set up my blind in the trees. I knew where the thing was coming from now, I knew its sound, I knew its tracks – poorly. The shuffle of its run had been too frantic, all the details had been rubbed raw into a blur of claws. It could be a bigfoot, a big clumsy guy with overgrown toenails, a chupacabra, or even a bear. Too damned messy to say for sure.
And so I waited, and this time my thoughts wandered towards chupacabras. Which this couldn’t be. Goatsuckers like it warm, too warm for it to ever come this far north. Not on the hottest summer of this place’s existence. And besides, they were spindly little bastards that went for goats and cattle, and only took beef when it was asleep. An alert human? Probably not. A car? Not on the best day of the biggest, baddest goatsucker’s life. Especially not since I’d shot her four years ago.
One hunt. One night. One shot. The thing’s teeth had been worn down to little stubs from use, her bites were more like rat-gnawing than needle-pricks. Took the teeth for the trophy rack in the special case, sold the head to a man in Japan. He died two days later. I wonder what happened to the head. Wonder if it made it into the will.
There it was again. There was that breathing, soft and slow. Still quiet, but a bit more controlled, tighter. Not as relaxed, are you? Because last night you got scared off, and now you’re back and
Right
There
baBANGng
I jumped as the shot took, aiming and firing on automatic while my body did its thing. A bear’s face in the spotlight, surprised and wide-eyed in the light, a bear’s body falling over with the head a ruined mess. The Gun had spoken, but something else had too. That was a car door slamming, another one of those goddamned hicks nearly spoiling my shot with his late-night exit after one of those useless long conversations with the storekeep about guns and light beer and how his wife’s a goddamned bitch. Nearly ruined two nights now, and all for a goddamned bear.
All that flew between my ears as I turned to the parking lot, Gun still smoking big gouts of black powder, and then it flew away because the lot was empty. No engine had started. No tires had turned. Just the doors, and then a lot empty except for my own car.
Bang.

The bear had been a nuisance, feeding on the garbage over and over, said the store owner. His own damned fault for not getting better bins, probably. But now it was dead, hoorah, hooray, thank you so much, let me get you some more ammo for free, I’m sure I can have it shipped in, what’s your address, don’t worry, I know a guy who knows someone, wink wink. What’s that, man go missing? No sir, didn’t know that. Ain’t that a trouble there, makes me scared to leave the building. Good thing I live-in, huh? Haw haw.
I hated him, but quietly. I was thinking, and I let myself nod and grunt when he wanted me to while I puzzled over that parking lot.
No tracks. Not a one. And it had made off with a whole car in the time it took me to shoot, swear, and turn around.
Without leaving a track, there or in the bush.
A flyer, maybe? The Jersey Devil had traveled abroad now and then, they said. Not that I’d ever seen the bastard, despite my best efforts. Four trips, weeks each time, and not a single cloven hoof or leathery wingbeat in the night. Maybe it had died years ago; it was hard to sort out the genuine sightings by crackpots from the phony sightings by other, more imaginative crackpots.
It could be a bigfoot. A really old one, big enough to hoist a car, smart enough to do it quietly and cover its tracks, filled with enough simmering, built-up hatred to slow-burn through a massacre of decades, man by man. But no, no, no. At that range the stench would’ve given it away, and the bigger they are the worse they smell. No ignoring it. Besides, no matter how strong the damned thing is, it has to lift a pickup truck and carry it through a forest at about sixty miles an hour without leaving a trace.
Maybe it wasn’t physical. Now that thought got the hairs on my neck tingling; the Gun can’t work on what isn’t really there, and I hunt animals, not ghosts. I checked my watch while the owner paused in his gossipy ramble to take a bite out of his burrito, and was relieved to see the minute hand still frozen at noon. Not a quiver, and with anything with enough mojo to move a truck, it’d be spinning for days. I idly wondered if the store owner was a serial killer and had been using the dumpster-diving bear to dispose of his victims, and discarded it. The man weighed four hundred pounds and seemed glued to his chair. And there was still the matter of the vanishing car.
I excused myself and left the hunting store for someplace less damp, brushing myself clean with both hands, and considered my plan for the evening. Whatever the hell was doing this didn’t matter. It was real, it wasn’t dead, therefore the Gun would kill it. I just had to catch it, and judging from how fast it moved, catch it fast. So I’d have to know where it would be. So I’d need bait.

My sleeping bag was a rumpled, sweaty mess, but for good measure I wrapped it around myself for the rest of the day to make sure it stayed fresh. A couple armfuls of sticks and the use of my coat, and I had a hideous scarecrow that wouldn’t have fooled a nearsighted four-year-old.
But propped up and in a laid-back seat, in the poor light given out by the watery lights of the hunting store… well, things would be different. Were different. I didn’t even need the spotlight this time, just both hands on the Gun and a long, slow breath that never quite ended and was soundless as a falling snowflake.
Not much that could do a thing like this. I was ready for anything to cross my sights. A ripple in the air, a glimmer of an eye, a breeze that wasn’t quite a breeze. I almost shot a raccoon three separate times and each time I refused to let myself relax.
This would be so much easier if I knew what it was, even though it didn’t matter. Doesn’t have to be a ghost to be something a bit more out of my comfort zone than a twelve-foot hairy bastard. Might be a Grey. I heard they’ve been creeping back on-world in the last decade, and those shitheads are spooky as ghosts except they shoot back, and shoot hard. But no, there’d been no lights in the sky, last night, the night before, any night at all. Can’t be them.
Could be a wendigo, this far north. I’d heard some of them could fly, and they got big, bigger with each person they eat. And I don’t think they die of old age. Half-spirit, half-monster, but no ghost. Maybe one had come walking down from the north for a holiday.
Fingers bigger than pine trees flexed in my mind, reaching down, down, down to a car smaller than its nail, picking it up with no more sound than the bang of a car door…
The lights went out.
The Gun went off. BANG.
Flicker, flicker, fizz, and up came the store lights from the dark again, showing me an empty parking lot where my car had been.

I spent the rest of the night in a daze, reloading somewhere but otherwise offline as I searched my head for a next step. The car was gone, which meant my coat was gone, and I liked the damned coat, and most alarming of all I’d shot at something and missed. Or I’d shot something and it hadn’t died. I wasn’t sure which was more alarming.
The store owner was full of slimy condolences on my car being stolen. Oh, it was terrible, must be those damned punks from down the road, kids these days, yes there was a power failure last night how did you know, terrible service around here, pity you were doing so well, third time was the charm, better to go home now and so on.
No, I didn’t need a ride. I’d call in a cab. The idea of trusting my life to that fat slug’s ability to press a pedal hidden entirely by his gut made my eyes twitch. And I had a coat to pry out of something’s innards.

The roof of the hunting store was easier to reach than it looked. Up I crawled, hand over hand, Gun dangling. One good thing about that stupid-ass camouflage paint on the roof; it made my blending in a lot easier. Just laying down nice and flat there, I stretched myself out low and looked over the lot, a god on a fifteen-foot throne, eyes a bit bugged and brain a bit strained.
Perfect.
I climbed back down, ran to my blind, broke it to pieces and scattered them every which way, made it look like a cleanup that wasn’t quite careful enough, like an angry man had broken it down in a temper and gone home.
Perfect.
I took a land mine from the special case, instantly lightening it by ninety percent, and breached many international laws by planting it in the parking lot where my car had been, very carefully.
Perfect.
And finally, I took a very small item from the special case. It was an old souvenir from a hunt a long time ago, the littlest tooth from something I’d killed in a lake up in Canada once, years and years ago. It had left it inside my leg, and I needed all the luck I could hold right now.
Perfect.
I went back to my roof and laid down flat as the sun set. No thoughts this night. Nothing for the mind to distract itself with, no letting it wander while the body manages its own business. No, tonight was just for me and my trigger finger, nothing else between us. The thing would be back, it would be back.
The last red slipped out of the sky, and I settled myself carefully into place for the evening. If all went properly, the only part of me that would move anywhere this evening would be my finger. One finger, one gesture, one shot, blam. I had the positioning, I had the light ready, I had the luck, the hidden edge, and as I shifted my elbow I had a very large camo-patterned eyelid roll open next to my hand.
It was the size of my head, and it blinked at me. Winked at me.
Oh, that store owner, I thought, extremely slowly. Oh, how he reminded me of a worm, a big fat slimy worm stuck to his desk like a hook.
I turned the Gun, and was thrown to the ground fast as lightning as the hunting store bucked under me, landing right in front of it on the gravel with a crunch-crack of ribs and legs and arms. Away went the gun, skipping over the gravel as the hunting store heaved itself up in front of me, its lights flickering on and off like an anglerfish’s, doors clattering open and shut with all their jagged old rusty edges, moist, mildewed air seeping out into my face.

Great-great-granddad, times change.

“Hunting,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

Weather is annoying. It can’t help it.
Some places, it’s sunny, some places, it’s cloudy. Some places, it’s rainy, some places, it’s snowy. And yet across the entire planet, without exception, there is not one single place that has never been blessed with bad weather of some kind or another. If the problem can be boiled down to a single issue, it’s most likely that there’s always such a fine line between too hot and too cold.
For Judy, at the moment, it was too damned cold, and in a way that she was pretty used but not at all prepared for at the same time. The temperature was the usual too-damned-cold of the midwinter months, when the sun had run away over the horizon. That was normal, that was okay, she’d planned for that, same as every year.
What she hadn’t planned on was it going on ’till near April.
Well, that was fixable. Probably. With a bit of luck. Judy had a lot more than she’d need put away for her and the girls, just in case. But just in case was about half through, and getting a little more of it never hurt.
Fishing was a good start. Get a line, cut a hole, sit on the ice, wait. And wait.
And wait.

And wait.

And wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and THEN
wait a little bit more and there was a tug on the line.
Judy yanked up the fish and whacked it on the ice. One. Two might take a bit longer.
“So slow, so slow!” said a voice.
Judy frowned as she looked up. A voice had no call being so loud and warm this time of year. It was against the natural order of things. “Pardon?” she said.
The first thing that hit her was the smile. It was a big smile, a broad smile, a wide smile, a tall smile, a smile-little-smiles-looked-up-to-with-shining-eyes. It didn’t gleam, it glowed. The man it was attached to was nearly background after that.
“Waiting so long for one fish so small?” He laughed, a big, jolly laugh that made Judy’s knuckles itch. “Slow! Hah, I could outfish you two-to-one in my sleep!”
“Big talk from a big mouth with a little brain,” said Judy. “Go away. You’ll scare them.”
“Scare them? Hah! I invite them! The little scaly ones, they hear my voice and it calls them in like a mother’s lullaby, just you see. I bet you I can outfish you two-to-one with my big loud voice and your little quiet grouchy one, angry person!”
“Fine. Go fish over there.” A long way over there. Please.
“Hah!” The smile walked away.
Judy continued to fish as she did, maybe with her knuckles a little bit tightened. One fish (got it) two fish (a nice fat one) three fish (better chop the hole open again) four fish and five fish (skinny, discouraging things), and that was enough because she was about to freeze to the ice. There was no sign of the man on the lake, and she felt a vague sort of happiness in her heart that completely deserted her as she approached the shoreline and saw the waving, blurry little smile.
“Ten, and lively to boot,” it boasted. “What was your catch, fair lady?”
Judy gave him a look, and kept walking.
“Speak up now,” said the man, hurrying alongside her, “don’t be shy! We have a bet, didn’t we?”
“Ten,” said Judy, walking faster, “and no.”
“Surely you jest!”
“You said we had a bet, I didn’t. Stuff it.”
“Cruelty, such cruelty! At least give me one of your catch to make up for your cold, bitter heart, fair lady!”
Judy’s head hurt. “No. And stop yelling.”
“Ah, but we’ll settle this score yet! Come again, fair lady, and I’ll be waiting!”
Judy started humming very loudly and walked still faster. The man laughed, but didn’t follow.

“So that’s that,” said Judy to her mother, Anna.
“A twit,” said Anna, chewing her lip as she selected a large knife. Her other hand was busy moving the insides of the five fish to their outsides.
“You don’t say,” said Judy.
“None of that lip from you. See this lip that I am chewing? That is all the lip we permit in this household.”
“This is my house, mom.”
“Details and politicking. Give me that salt.”
Judy gave her that salt.
“That’s the stuff. Now, what you’ve got to do, you’ve got to find out how he’s cheating. Because you just told me that some smartass boy said he was a better fisherman than my girl, and I know that is a lie because the only one that could out-fish you was your daddy, until you out-fished him.”
“This isn’t a big deal, mom.”
“Sure it is. Someone flirting you up when you aren’t asking for it and making jokes on you, and you aren’t thinking of getting them back? The moment my girl takes that attitude is the moment I throw her out of the house and tell my grandchildren that their mommy got replaced by some stranger with her face on.”
“Water under the bridge, mom. He won’t even be there again.”
“What water, it’s all frozen, you are just talking crazy talk. And that man will be there, mark every word I just told you twice. Now take this advice out there with you tomorrow: you watch which way that man goes to fish, and you creep up on him and watch how he cheats. Then once you know, you wait ’till he boasts and you tell him how he cheats right to his stupid face. Got any more salt?”
Judy checked. “No.”
“Dang.”

Judy walked down to the lake. And she was pretty sure she wouldn’t ever see that man again, and she knew that she wouldn’t need to remember a single thing Anna told her. And she still wasn’t at all surprised when the man strolled up whistling as she was cutting her fishing hole and said “So, up for another bet?”
“Go away.”
“Come now, fair lady, giving up so easily? You did so well yesterday, I very nearly had to hurry to catch up!” He laughed, then caught himself. “Well, nearly.”
“Go and fish somewhere else.”
“I shall, I shall, I shall. And when we meet again, I guarantee that I will have caught three fish for each that nibbles your bait, and you can trust that word ’till the end of the earth.”
Judy sighed and concentrated on her fishing lure, and then, hating her mother just a little bit and herself a little bit more, she watched that man walk away out of the corner of her eye and made a note of that direction.
One fish, two fish. Set the pole up, fasten it tight (don’t want to lose that hook), and then off tiptoed Judy, feeling as stealthy as a toddler, creeping over the ice and trying not to breathe too loudly.
Finding the man was pretty easy. That laugh of his carried, and it never let up for long. A chuckle, a giggle, all leading into a big guffaw and then dying back down. In fact, he was so loud that she thought he MUST be right there at least three times, even though her eyes told her otherwise.
He had his back to her fishing hole where he sat, that must be the only reason he didn’t see her coming. The line danced through his fingers, half-fidget, half-play, half-haul, and up came the eighth or maybe ninth, so lively that it was fairly snapping at his fingers.
“Naughty!” he said, and then another one of those long, jolly, side-splitting laughs that made your fingers curl up into angry shapes all by themselves.
Judy was so busy trying to get them to unbend again that she nearly missed what was wrong with the man’s fishing hole. It was about twenty feet across and fish were swarming in it, dashing around under the surface like it was a summer stream.
First she stared, then she swore (very quietly), then she looked around for how the man could be doing a thing like that. Unless the answer could fit into his clothing or he was cutting fishing holes with his line, it was apparently not in front of her.
“Hoo hum ho,” chortled the man, and he pulled up the probably tenth fish as Judy slunk back to her line, thinking. She pulled in her third while she was at it, and her fourth, but she couldn’t make time from nothing and was only at five again by luck when she had to turn back.
The smile was waiting on the shore again, with the man. “Fifteen!”
“Mmm.”
“What? No praise? No adulation? Ah, such cruelty from the unappreciative – it makes me wonder I left my home to travel far and wide, if all men and women everywhere are brothers and sisters in their stingy praise!”
Judy started humming again.
“Ah, my prize is a song? How elegant! If you know the tune, I would not object to-”
Judy started jogging and humming, and didn’t stop ’till she was halfway home.

“Well now that’s strange,” said Anna.
“You’re telling me,” replied Judy. She was rubbing her sore feet by the fire.
“Just a big hole?”
Judy nodded.
“Strange. You’d better go ask mother then.”
Judy flinched.
“Don’t you give me that flinching. Your grandmother can’t help having her Condition. Just don’t talk too loud or get right up in her face and it makes no difference to anyone anyways anyhow.”
And that was why Judy had to go over to the spot where Carol was sleeping and poke her in the back.
“Huh?”
“Grandma Carol?”
“Whuh?”
“We’ve got a question for you now, grandma Carol.”
Carol scrubbed her eyes with a fury normally reserved for the filthiest of her descendant’s clothing. “Uh. Hmm. Er. Now, what was that, Anna?”
“It’s Judy, grandma.”
“I know that, I know, I know. But you do sound like her, you know. You both talk too loud and too much. Makes my head twirl.”
“I’m sorry, grandma.”
“Don’t be so sorry, it’s all right, it’s all right. You’re just perfect you know, just perfect. Now, what’s wrong?”
So Judy told Carol about the irritating smile and the man it was attached to, taking great care to keep her voice down at all times, even when she was describing the annoying laughs. And Carol nodded and listened and growled a bit, and when the tale was through she fussed it over and muttered to herself some.
“That man is irritating,” she told Judy. “You owe him a good fuss-making and an irritation right back at him. Up to some sort of tricks, he is. You sure you didn’t see anything?”
“No. No strange tools, nothing.”
“Hmm. Must be a trick he keeps close. What you need to do now, Anna, is you need to sneak up on him while he’s getting ready to fish, right away. You need to see how he puts up this special spot for himself.”
“Out on the open ice?”
“Don’t speak so loud! I have a Condition, and you know that. Carol knows that. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Sorry, grandma, sorry,”
“Should be. So you do that. And as for that ice, take my old white furry hide blanket with you and wrap your daughter up in that, and then, well, you can guess.”
“Yes?”
“Guess. Go on. Now let me get back to sleep, I need that sleep. This winter is too long and too dark, and all that dark is good for is sleep.”

Judy left Carol to her sleep and brought Emily with her. The girl was big for her age, still growing, and more than happy to have something to get her outside and running, even if the ice was a bit boring. And she got to wear her grandma Carol’s old white furry hide blanket. It was some sort of treat, apparently.
“Four to one?” asked the man, who showed up just as Judy was finishing up her cutting.
“Leave us alone,” said Judy.
“Ah, the child! Adorable, completely and utterly in every way! What’s your name, dear girl? No, no, how rude of me, I shouldn’t pry – hush, and I shall hush and be on my way. Good luck, fair lady! Good luck, little daughter!”
Carol counted to ten as the man walked away, then took ahold of the old white furry hide blanket from Emily. Her daughter opened her mouth to complain, then shut it as her mother firmly wrapped the line around her fingers.
“Stay here,” Judy told her. “Remember what you’ve practiced. And try to look obvious.”
Emily gave her a calculating look, then deferred pouting in favour of fishing. It took less effort.
The man walked, and as he walked he talked to himself – bits of nonsense, really – and laughed. And three times he looked over his shoulder, and three times Judy had to stop moving before she started creeping again, staying real close and real low to the ice while his eyes sailed over her white furry lump on a white frozen sea and bobbed back to that little brown coat by her fishing hole, right where she should be, waiting for him to say “Hah!” (it was always ‘Hah!’) and move on. It was chilly and she got a few mouthfuls of snow, but before her face started getting numb the man stopped and said “That’s that!”
Then he spat.
Judy wondered what he was doing five times in a row before she heard the sizzling. The man’s spit had melted a hole clean through the ice down to the water, and it was gnawing away more and more every second. By the time the drip-drip-splosh of fast-melt had stopped, the man had a practical ice-pond at the tips of his toes, warm as a summer sea. Curious, cold fish were already popping up in it like wildflowers, and there came that laugh again, full of joy and sharp and irritating as grit in your eyelids.

“I caught a fish!” said Emily.
“Good, good,” said Judy. “Let’s go home now. It’s a big fish, and that’s enough for now.” But the man was still waiting for them with his fish, twenty of them, early though they left.
“Too cold?” he asked, sympathy filling him to the brim. “Well, we can’t have the little daughters freeze, or who will be tomorrow’s fair ladies, fair lady? Still, my catch is twenty times yours! You really must pay me back tomorrow, or I’ll have to insist – giving way on this many bets without repayment is simply miserliness, no excuses permitted.”
“Emily, would you please sing us a song?”
“Oh how-” managed the man, and then Emily launched into her favourite one of Anna’s old tunes, plus or minus bits of one Judy had taught her, in a key that Carol had hummed for her. The combined effect was impressive, but the rest of the walk home was a lot quieter compared to the alternative.

“Well, that beats the hell out of me,” said Carol. “You got any ideas, Anna?”
“No mother, that puzzles me thorough to the core. It’s cheating, true, but no kind that’s ever crossed my eyes or ears ever in my life.”
“Slow down and talk quietly,” said Carol. “This is a puzzle.”
“A puzzler,” said Anna.
“No, a puzzle. The puzzler’s the one who made the puzzle, and that’s this smiley man. Didn’t I tell you never to trust a man that smiley?”
“Yes you did,” said Anna.
“Did you tell your daughter?”
“No,” said Judy.
“Well! Now why would you do that sort of thing?”
“She was smart enough to know it on her own now, wasn’t she?” said Carol.
“Don’t get sharp! Too sharp, now, now, now. Now. What are we going to do about this?”
They sat there.
“Tell him he’s a jerk,” suggested Emily.
“No,” said Judy.
“No,” said Anna.
“No, what we need to do is ask my mother,” said Carol. “Why didn’t one of you think of that?”
“Because grandma’s up and died years ago by now,” said Anna.
“Well! That’s no call to not go asking her questions, is it? You’ll make her feel unwanted.”
“I’m not asking any dead person questions,” said Anna. “That sort of thing is just not what I should be doing, and besides, I never was her favourite grandchild at all.”
“And it’s a good thing I wasn’t asking you to go do that, Anna, because mother only had one great-grandchild before she died and that was little Judy. Judy, won’t you be a dear and talk to mother for us?”
“Yes Judy,” said Anna. “That’s a good idea. She liked you a whole lot when she was alive and she probably won’t do anything too nasty.”
Judy looked at Emily, and found no support. She sighed, deeply and thoroughly. “How do we do this?”
“Well,” said Carol, “first we take this handful of…stuff.”
It was mostly plants, or at least maybe plants. “Right.”
“And we is you, because of my Condition.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t you roll those eyes at me! Take that to the fire.”
“Alright.”
“And toss it in.”
Judy tossed the stuff in.
“Now just yawn.”
Judy yawned, and accidentally yawned herself out of herself. But that was okay because there wasn’t a roof anymore, and she bounced off the belly of something big and pink instead.
“Great-grandmother Mary?” she asked.
“No,” said the thing, which had forty five eyes and no nose. “Try again.” It flicked her gently, and she landed on the other side of the building which was also the other side of the universe.
“Great-grandmother Mary?” she asked the ground underneath her, which was made out of faces.
“No,” said the faces. All of them had no ears, and all of them had two sets of eyebrows, one above and one below. “Try again.” They all sneezed, and she fell back inside the building which wasn’t there anymore but now its roof was.
“Great-grandmother Mary?” she asked the roof.
“Yes?”
“I could use a hand with a man who smiles too much.”
“Didn’t your grandmother tell you never to trust a man that smiley?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess.” The roof scratched its hip. “Listen, that smiley man’s causing his fair share of troublesome right now, and it’s to more than just you. That’s why I’m helping you right now, that and you’re a nice good girl who makes me very proud, all right?”
Judy nodded, and had to reattach her head.
“Careful! See, this is why you don’t need encouragement to do this sort of thing. Just get him to stop smiling, that’s all you need to do. And tell Emily she’s a pretty little thing, and she ought to sing more often. You and your mother were too quiet, that’s your problem.”
Judy nodded, and this time her head came off and didn’t reattach. It hurt an awful lot, and she had to work her way through half of the kettle of tea Anna had made in the meantime to get rid of the ache.
“Got a plan?” asked her mother.
Judy rubbed her face. “Sort of.”
“Good enough then.”

The next day Judy saw hide nor hair of the man, not on the shore, not on the ice. Not as she cut her fishing hole, not as she set the line, not as she drew up no fewer than ten fine fat fish. She looked left and right and all around as she wrapped up her line and strung her catch, and he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t on the shore when she came back, and she walked halfway home without a single other soul to break the quiet of her breath.
“Thanks, Mary,” she said to herself and anyone else that could be listening, “but I guess it’s alright now.”
“Hello!” said an extremely cheerful voice in her ear.
“Go away,” she told the man, reflexively.
No, that wouldn’t do. And it didn’t, because that smile never flickered for an instant. “A fine catch! A full belly for all! Such a pity, such a pity, alas and alack. I’d bet you that I’d have to bring home no fewer than five times your catch, and today you exceed the furthest reaches of my imagination!”
“Not difficult in the slightest sense,” said Judy.
“Cruelty,” said the man, “is of no avail, when all I need do to refresh my happiness is to look upon you, fair lady! Although, of course, I must insist on the terms of our bet, regardless of my fondness of you. Behold!”
Judy beheld almost against her will. At least a hundred fat little fish were strung up on the man’s line, maybe far more. His arm nearly wavered as he held them high, but his smile stood firmer than a stone.
“How small,” she managed. “Though that’s normal for you.”
“Your awe overreaches your words, fair lady,” he replied without so much as a moment’s loss of focus. “Truly, I do not deserve your company.”
“You don’t deserve the company of the densest of the smallest of the fish on that line,” said Judy. “I feel pity for it, having to endure so much wind and noise.”
The smile held, but Judy fancied she saw a bit of a brittle shine on its edges. “Ah, but I kill them quick and merciful, so that they suffer little,” said the man. He seemed to perk up. “And besides, there’s no harm at all in a little conversation. One cannot live on one’s own, after all.”
“You talk to yourself enough for three; are you calling yourself lonely now?”
The man laughed and laughed, a big roiling belly-bellow that sank Judy’s hopes with each second it dragged on. The smile wouldn’t end, any more than this conversation would, even with home in sight. Emily and Anna and Carol were all outside with tea, waiting for her triumphant return, and she winced inside at the thought of bringing the man up to them with no way to get rid of him, not with that smile hanging about his face. Especially Emily. The poor girl had already suffered the man once, but…
Oh, there was something she’d forgotten.
“…of course, I need not take payment in fish,” the man was saying, as Emily ran up to hug her. “Maybe…”
“Emily dear,” said Judy, “great-grandmother Mary gave me a message for you!”
Emily blinked.
“She says you should sing more often.”
Emily beamed, and just like that, just as she opened her mouth, just for a moment that Judy would’ve missed if she and Anna and Carol weren’t all watching the man like a hawk, his smile blinked right out. And even when that smile was gone, even when that man looked as scared and miserable as a lost baby, that warmth kept coming out of his face, right through his eyes and ears and nose and everywhere else, and with it came light.
“So that’s where you’ve been hiding,” said Judy, and something about her voice made Emily close her mouth again right away.
The man blinked very fast, shook his head, and tried smiling. “Sorry?”
“You’re a very bad liar,” said Carol. “And if that’s the best smile he can do, I’m very ashamed of you, Judy.”
Now it wasn’t a smile at all, just teeth. “No call for rudeness now, fair ladies-”
“Easy for you to spit up a little melt with all that in you,” said Anna. “No harm in that, none at all, but why you’ve got to go and go lying to my girl like about bets when you plan on cheating, well, I don’t see why.”
“I never said I wouldn’t do it!” said the man, and now his smile was all gone and the fire he’d hidden was all there to be seen for anyone, hanging in the breeze with no smile to cover it up. There wasn’t a face there, either. “I never said!”
“I never agreed on any bet either,” said Judy, “but somehow there was one.” Anna was thumping Carol on the back, her mother was coughing and hiccuping. “And I don’t bet, and I sure as sure don’t make bets with anyone I don’t trust. And I don’t trust you, mister Sun, because you ran away out of the sky and left us in the dark and cold just so you could have a tease and laugh at me. And I don’t care how much people don’t appreciate you, that makes you a twit, and my family doesn’t like twits.”
The Sun was glowering now, a good smoulder. The snow was melting into puddles up to his ankles. “You never said please or thank you or even ‘you-did-a-good-job!'” he shouted. “All I wanted was a bit of fun!”
“I’d stop yelling,” said Judy.
“No! I’m not listening to you! All you do is sneer and ignore me and complain and that’s when I’m TRYING TO BE NICE! Can’t you all JUST ”
Carol’s Condition occurred.

It had been a long winter, and it had been a cold winter. But these sorts of things balance themselves out, across the world, across the years. For instance, that summer was the longest and warmest in decades, and the winter never quite dipped below dusk. The sun didn’t seem to want to come down from the sky.

“On the Ice,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.