jamieproctor.ca

Three people sat under an old stone bridge, half-broken and tired in the dim light of an evening shower. A small fire was their light as they huddled round, watching raindrops fall in reddish light.
“I’ve got a story,” said one of them. He was an older man, with a greying beard.
“Go on then,” said a thin woman worn thinner by years and years. “It’s been a while since we had a proper story trade. What kind?”
“It’s a story of the King of the Turtles,” said the older man. “And I tell no lie; nobody’s ever heard it before. No man, no lady, no kid.”
“That’s a hard trade to make,” said the thin woman. “But I’ll wager I can match it. Tell your story.”
“Alright then,” said the older man. He crouched low by the fire, and began to speak into it.

So, back in the day, there was this little kid, alright? Just an ordinary little kid in most ways. Sure, his parents are dead, but that’s not so weird. It’s a nasty world, lots of kids with dead parents out there, no big deal. He coped. Sometimes they do that.
This kid, see, he wasn’t ordinary in one way: he thought he could do anything, and I mean, he really thought he could do anything. You know how they said that anybody could be the president? Like that.
Anyways, the kid hangs around down by the park sometimes. He likes the trees and stuff. And down there, he’s watching a lady feed some ducks. He’s laughing at ’em, because the ducks look so silly with their butts in the air when they dive for some bread that’s sinking. He and the lady don’t know you shouldn’t feed bread to ducks, but that’s sort of okay, and it’s not a big part of the story. No, what the big part of the story is, is when the kid gets bored of watching this lady feed the ducks, he starts to walk away and nearly trips over this big fat turtle that’s sitting by the pond’s edge. And this city boy who likes the park, who didn’t have parents to get him books on animals (D is for dog, C is for cat, T is for turtle), he’s so surprised and he goes “What’s that?” aloud, just like that.
And the lady, who’s jumped a bit and come over to see if this little kid with the nice smile is hurt, she sees what’s surprised him and she says “It’s a turtle.”
Little kid says “What’s a turtle? It looks like a rock with a head.”
The lady, she tells him about turtles. Just the basics, you know – lay eggs, are reptiles, blah blah blah. But the bit that sticks with this little kid, is that a turtle’s shell is like a little fort that it carries everywhere with it. Anywhere’s home for a turtle, and its home is a castle.
“I want to be a turtle,” says the little kid.
Now what do you say to that, huh? Lady laughs a bit, calls him a dear, and she walks off because she’s out of bread. Gives him a dollar, too. Cool lady.
Remember what I said about this kid thinking he could do anything?
So first things first, the kid thinks. Second thing, he picks up the turtle and he asks it “how can I be a turtle?” Straightforward, but the turtle just blinks at him. It ain’t talking.
The turtle, it just laughs at him. That gets the kid mad, so he tickles it, right on the belly, spry and nimble. And the turtle can’t help it – it laughs. And when it laughs, its head pops out, and when its head pops out, the kid grabs it. “Tell me,” he says, “or I’ll yank you right out of your shell!”
“Don’t do it!” says the turtle. It’s got a real gurgly, grimy voice. Like a scratchy old man voice, but with a mouthful of mud. “Don’t take my shell! Leave me my shell! I’m no proper turtle without my shell.”
“Then give me your shell so I can be a turtle,” says the kid, “and I’ll leave you alone.”
“I wouldn’t be a turtle without my shell – I’d rather die! And besides, it wouldn’t fit you! You’re much too big and fat.”
The kid shakes the turtle. “Tell me where I can find a shell that fits!” he says.
The turtle grumbles and groans and whinges, and the kid tickles him for five minutes straight before he gives. “Fine!” he says. “The King of the Turtles has a shell big enough to be a home for a human. But you’ll never get it from him.”
“Where does the King of the Turtles live?” asks the kid.
“Under the giant stone!” yells the turtle. Its head is really hurting now.
“Where is the giant stone?” asks the kid. He shakes it.
“In the lake! In the lake!” the turtle says. “Let me go!”
“If you lied to me,” the kid says, “I’ll come back.” And he winds up and chucks the turtle back into the pond, where it sinks down to nurse its neck.
Now, the lake is right next to the city. It’s a big lake, though, and even if a stone is a giant, that’s still one stone you’re looking for. Tough job. But this kid, he has a plan. He hikes all the way down to the lake – three days from the end of the city he’s at – and by the time he gets there, he’s got it all worked out. So he uses that one dollar that lady gave him to buy some cheap french fries, all grease and no potato, and he goes down to the water’s edge.
“FOOD!” he hears above him. Lookithat, it’s all the seagulls, all come clamouring. “FOOD! FOOD! FOOD!”
“I’ll give you my food,” says the kid, “if you can find the giant stone for me.”
“NO! FOOD!” they scream, and down they come. But the boy’s clever and quick, and he jumps and dodges and bullies his way through the whole flock without a scratch, and he kicks three of them to the ground with bruised butts and ruffled feathers.
“Now I’ll give you half my food,” says the kid, “if you will tell me where the giant stone is.”
“FOOD!” they yell, and they all come at him again. This time he kicks half the flock, and the flock leader to boot, and laughs while he does it.
“Now I’ll give you one french fry if you tell me where the rock is,” says the kid. “And maybe I won’t finishing beating you up.”
“FINE!” say the gulls, out of breath, winded, and fed up. “FINE!” They’re sick of this kid and his rotten attitude and his quick feet, and they just want him to go away now. So they flap up into the sky and float around, and gull eyes aren’t too great but they can’t help but see that big rock over there from up there.
“IT”S OVER THERE!” they call.
“Here,” said the kid, and he drops the fries on the ground (all except for one) and leaves them to pick them over.
Now the kid had to swim. But he decided it couldn’t be that hard.
Remember what I told you about this kid?
So he makes it out a ways, lord knows how. And down there beneath him is the giant rock. He holds his breath and dives, but the rock’s edge snaps tight to the bottom of the lake the moment he gets close. He tries five times, and every time this happens. And he’s getting tired.
“Could I steal a big breath from you?” he asks the sky. “Just one. I’ll pay you back, honest.”
“I’ve been watching your deals today,” said the sky. “You were generous with the seagulls, but harsh to the turtle. I don’t know if I should trust you.”
“I promise. I’ll pay right now,” says the kid. And he sounds like he means it, so the sky’ll let that slide.
“Open your mouth,” it says, and he opens his mouth and a big cloud filled with the most perfect breath of air he’s ever felt jumps down into his lungs. It’ll last him for hours. And when he closes his mouth, he feels funny and then he sees the sky took all his teeth. It uses teeth for hailstones, you know. That’s what happens with all those teeth you lose when you’re little. Some guy in Finland’s getting them dumped on his head.
So the kid is hanging around down at the bottom of the giant rock, and just like he did last time he tugs really hard on its base after it snaps. He pounds and pulls and nearly puts out his back, and then he turns around, right? Like he’s going back up for a fresh lungful. And right as he turns his back on it, just as it’s opened up to see when he’s coming back, he flips around and dives, and ZOOM he squeaks right under the rock’s edge. Boy was it mad. Slammed down behind the kid WHAM just like that, but it was too late: he was in.
Inside was the palace of the King of the Turtles. Real nice place. Not a castle, a palace – the difference is in the decadence, you know? They made the word “lavish” for this stuff: carpets, tapestries, candelabras, everything all made of anything you’d find on the bottom of a pond – sticks, stones, all that sort of thing. And in the center of it all, a really big throne made out of a rock. On that rock there was the King of the Turtles, three times bigger than a man and something like three-and-a-half times bigger than a lady. And a lot bigger than a skinny little kid.
“Who are you and why shouldn’t I eat you?” he asks. Not the best way to start a conversation, you know what I mean? But the kid, he isn’t freaked out. He knows what to say, so he says it. “I am here to take your shell,” he says.
The King of the Turtles throws back his head and laughs ’till he was nearly sick. “You’d have a better chance of eating the clouds,” he laughs. “Go and do that first, then we’ll talk about my shell.”
“I already did that,” says the kid. And he opens his mouth and spits out the cloud. It fills up the whole palace with fog, and nobody can see anything.
“Clever!” says the King of the Turtles. “But irritating. And anyone can beat a cloud; they’re nothing but wisps of water! Why don’t you lift my throne, then we’ll talk.”
So the kid ran up to the big rock that the King of the Turtles sat on, and he yanked as hard as he could at it. Won’t budge, though. But the kid has an idea, and since it’s hard to see, he yanks out a stick from the table next to the throne, and he uses it as a lever, see? If it were any rotten old branch, that wouldn’t have worked, but the King of the Turtles uses the best in his home, and it was okay. Lifts the whole throne up nearly half a foot.
“Trickster!” seethes the King of the Turtles. “Nobody can lift my throne but me! Let’s see how clever you are when my jaws are around your shoulders!” And he reaches down to grab the kid. But the kid was expecting something like this, so he jumps out of the way and the King of the Turtles grabs the table instead of him. And at first he just thinks that kid was even skinnier than he looked – but after that first bite, he’s changing his mind. Got a table leg stuck in his mouth and a howl that makes the ceiling shake. And right as he’s standing up and reaching into his mouth, the kid kicks out the stick he’s wedged the throne up with, and the King of the Turtles falls over and stabs himself right in the head through his mouth. That’s that for him, so the kid rolls him out of the shell and rolls into it just like that, snug as a house for him, layer on layer.
“This is a good place,” says the kid. He lived down there on the bottom of the lake for a month, drinking that fine turtle wine and eating good turtle food. He grew a decade’s worth in thirty days, and filled up with good strong muscles. And when he came up from down there, that big old shell tight as a snug suit around his shoulders, he saw that a whole decade HAD passed. Ten full years, just like that.
Well, the kid decided he’d make the best of it. And he decided the best thing he could do right then was to be what he wanted, and what he wanted was to be the King of the Turtles.
I told you about how that kid thought he could do anything, didn’t I?

“Now how’d you know that?” asked the thin woman.
“I talk to the seagulls time and then,” said the older man. “One of them, on the end of his wings, he told me a bit about this sort of stuff.”
“Seagulls are liars,” said the thin woman.
“That’s right,” said the older man. “But not when they’re about to die.”
The thin woman threw up her hands. “If you say so. But now I’ll tell you my story. And my story comes from a solid source. Can’t trust birds, old man.”
“Older man,” he corrected.
“Whatever. Now, listen up. This one’s as new as yours.”

Right, we all know the sorts of things the King of the Turtles did. He fought a year-long duel with the King of the Frogs – and he won it, too, when the frog tried to swallow him whole and his shell tore its throat right out. He swam to the bottom of the bottom of the ocean, to prove that he could, and brought back pearls bigger than whale-eyes. He demanded tribute and respect from cities across the world, whenever they laughed at him, he swallowed all the water of those cities and wouldn’t give it back until they bowed and scraped.
But those were the later things. The first thing he did – the first BIG thing – was when he came out of the water and spoke to the people on the shore. There were only a few people around the lakefront that early morning; two women and a man.
“Who are you?” asked the first woman.
He scratched at his shell. “I’m the King of the Turtles now, I guess,” he said.
“What are you doing here?” asked the man.
He thought. “I’m coming to see the city again,” he said. “It wasn’t a good place to me when I was little. I think I’ll see if it’s gotten better.”
“What are you going to do?” asked the second woman.
He shrugged. “I’ll find out,” he said, and he walked through the streets of the city that he’d grown up in. The first woman and the man followed him. The second woman turned and ran away.
Every footprint left a puddle, and every time he stopped and looked at something – to see a street sign, or a new building, or anything – he left a mudhole that sank right through the concrete. Where he breathed deeply, bullrushes sprouted. When he laughed, the smell of rotting reeds and pond scum filled the air. It made some people sick, and he just laughed harder at them.
“This city isn’t so big after all,” he said. “I was small, that was all. It doesn’t look so good now.” And he spat in front of city hall, and it turned into a marsh; a cabinet of cicadas singing on the background of a mayor blackbird.
“This city isn’t so scary after all,” he said. “I was scared, that was all. It doesn’t look so frightening now.” And he spat on a factory, and it withered up into a huge old rotting log, filled with all sorts of surprised animals.
All the people were running now, of course, and many of them were screaming. This irritated the King of the Turtles, especially when some of them began to shoot at him. The men in the little black and white cars tickled, but some of the big guns that were starting to appear, in big trucks driven by big men – they hurt. Itchy-hurt, not burning-hurt, but hurt nonetheless.
“This whole city is just one big mess,” he said. “And this is taking too long. I think I’ll fix it all at once.”
So he climbed to the top of the highest building in the city – it was a big smokestack. He looked down on all of it from up there, all the brick and mortar and struggle and bustle and hustle, and he stomped his right foot three times. And each time his foot hit the chimneytop, a third of the city sank into the water, until there was nothing left but a big bog.
“You people are messing up my new home,” he said to the people all floundering in it. “If you won’t leave, you’d better listen to me then.” He stomped his left foot three times, and each time his foot touched the chimneytop a third of the people of that city were turned into turtles, until there wasn’t a single human left for miles.
“That’s almost it,” he said, and he climbed down from the chimney and slapped it once. The chimney bowed and bent and wriggled and it turned into a huge tree like nobody’d heard of before. Its branches dripped rivers and its leaves were shrubs; frogs jumped in its canopy and birds nested in its pools. It was a swamp-tree, and it was the biggest thing in all the new bog that the King of the Turtles had made.
“Now listen to me now,” he told the turtles, who were still very confused. “I am your king – I am the King of the Turtles. The old king was lazy, and he stayed at home. He let strangers push around his people, even if they were just little children. But I’ll take care of you now, because it looks like you’re my problem. Go out there and eat!”
And so the people of the city went out into their new home and ate. There wasn’t much else they could do, and at least there was plenty of food.

“That’s messed up,” said the older man. “Turning all those people into turtles. Who’d he think he was, huh?”
“The same thing he was when he was little,” said the thin woman. “Just bigger. Just like most people. And I didn’t say he did a good thing. Just a big thing. A whole city made into turtles sounds pretty big to me. He thought he could do it, and he did.”
“And how’d you know that story, eh? You couldn’t have been there.”
“I was the second woman on the beach,” she said. “And I didn’t feel like hanging around after that conversation. I was just outside the city limits when I watched it sink into the swamp.”
The last man stood up. “Those are good stories,” he said. His voice was thick and slow, like sticky oatmeal; his skin was raddled with bruises. “But I have one more. And it’s a true one too, and a new one. And it is about the King of the Turtles. But that isn’t his name anymore.”

Now, this wasn’t as long ago as the last two stories. The King of the Turtles had grown older, fatter, stronger, more lazily confident in his own strength. He ruled over the waters that were little, and the waters that were middle-sized, and even some (a bit, mind you, no one could claim all of them) of the deep blue endless waves. Wherever his subjects wore shells, he was there, and he was always on the lookout for a new morsel; for dinner, for knowledge, for hoarding. He threatened and blackmailed and coaxed and strongarmed and gained wealth greater than any human had ever dreamed, and he piled it in the walls of his palace – which he had moved from under the giant stone to the bottom of the big bog, under the roots of the swamp-tree. The very most prized of his possessions he filled his shell with, and they sank into his sides and his shell with the years like candies into a cake. They filled his head with dreams as he slept, and he slept long and often, dwelling on his deeds and wealth.
People like that can last for a long time. But sooner or later, they stop paying attention for just long enough, and it all falls apart with one little thing.
One little thing was a girl with a missing engagement ring.
You see, her fiancé came staggering in the door in the dead of night, barely able to stand. After a toweling-down and a cup of horrible-tasting stuff, he told her the story.
“I was in a pub,” he said.
She nodded. And narrowed her eyes.
“No, it was just a night after my work. But this guy, he challenged us to drink.”
“And you said yes,” she said. Flatly.
“It wasn’t like that. He was a big guy – eight foot and nearly as much across the chest. Friendly, sure, with a nice smile, but, you know, that kind of friendly where it can stop real fast. So we said sure, and he said he’d down a glass for each that any of us took.”
She nodded. Her eyes sunk farther into slits.
“And you know I’m not a lightweight – none of us but Pete are – but man, he out-drank all of us at once. We woke up outside, and the ring was gone.”
“Which pub?” she asked.
She went to the pub. She smelled the swampwater in the air, and she saw the damp footprints, and she wondered and mulled it over. And she phoned her grandmother, who’d always known about this sort of thing.
“Was there a smell?” asked her grandmother.
“Like swampwater,” she said.
“Ahh. Ahh. Ahh. Were there footprints?” asked her grandmother.
“Damp ones. Big ones,” she said.
“Ahh. Ahh! And tell me, what was he like?”
She thought about that. “Friendly, with a nice smile.”
“The King of the Turtles has your wedding ring,” said the old, old woman. “There is no doubt in my mind at all. If you want to get it back, you’ll need to find him in his home. It lies under the roots of the swamp-tree, in the heart of the bog that was a city. You’d better start walking fast, before he tucks that ring into his shell for good.”
The girl was fast. She drove, then biked, then walked, abandoning each in a safe place as first the road, then the trail, grew too bumpy and uneven. She pressed on and on, through thickets and mires, past the big still eyes of alligators and the reedy chorus of treefrogs. And finally, she came to the swamp-tree, a swamp-above-a-swamp, and she knew she was near.
“Now how do I get in there?” she asked aloud, and she felt the wind whisk away her question and carry it up to ears that were as big as the horizon.
“With my help,” said the sky.
“At what price?” said the girl. She wasn’t stupid. Her grandmother had told her stories, remember.
“None,” said the sky. “The King of the Turtles has stolen back the price he paid to me fairly for my aid. I wish revenge. I will give you a breath large enough to take you to his lair.”
The girl took a big breath, and the sky filled her lungs up to the brim. She made it down to the palace of the King of the Turtles at the bottom of the bog with plenty to spare, and snuck into his hall.
But the King of the Turtles was not an unaware ruler, even in his slothfulness. He woke the second her foot crossed his door, and laughed to himself as he saw her enter. “This will be very funny!” he said. “The last thief I had was years ago, and he was most amusing. I will wait for her to entertain me before I dispose of her. Maybe she’ll get lost and start to cry, like he did!” And so he went back to sleep, chuckling. He thought he could do anything, you see.
The girl wasn’t foolhardy. She kept to the sidepassages and sidecorridors, she stayed out of the light. She got lost, of course, but kept her head and got her bearings as best as she could, right up until she stumbled into the kitchen, where a fat old frog and a tough old blackbird were slacking at their duties to share a pipe and a gossip.
“Now who’s this?” asked the frog.
“A busybody,” said the blackbird. “Trust me, I’ve seen plenty. I know the type.”
“I am here to reclaim stolen property,” said the girl. “Keep your accusations.”
“Wasn’t deploring you, sunshine,” said the blackbird, flicking away ill-kept feathers. “The more ill-will you bear, the more power to you. I was the mayor of this dump until the big lug did his thing. If you want to make trouble, be my guest.”
“And he defeated my lord in a duel,” said the frog, “and conscripted us, his loyal subjects, to servitude! Do what you like.”
“I’d like to steal back my ring,” said the girl.
“Good luck to that,” sneered the blackbird. “He’s been bragging about a ring for days. It’ll be stuck inside his shell for good now. Best give up on it.”
“We could help,” said the frog.
“Help and be caught for our pains once she mucks it up. Never rely on the public for anything,” retorted the blackbird.
“Getting caught can’t make our lives much worse, and she might even do something properly about all this. I say we help,” said the frog.
“Fine. Be that way.” The blackbird threw up its wings in disgust and paced away, muttering.
“What kind of help?” asked the girl.
“We can give you some medicine to slip into the King of Turtles’ dinner,” said the frog. “It will put him fast to sleep, and you can pick out your ring if you’re quick about it. But there’s a problem: his highness orders a banquet every evening, and we never know what he eats. You’ll need to find out what he’ll eat up entirely, or he won’t be put to sleep soundly enough for you to do your work.”
“When’s the meal?” asked the girl.
The frog waved his arm at a serving cart, loaded down with trays and dishes. “In five minutes. Hurry up.”
The King of the Turtles heard the blackbird bang the kitchen door shut in its anger, and he saw this happening. But he wasn’t worried. “I’ll punish the cooks later,” he said. “She will never discover what my meal is, anyways.” And so he went back to sleep.
Truffles, sandwiches, roasts, gravies, salads, soups, and fish, loaded up to the brim and beyond in each bowl. The girl felt dreadfully hungry after such a long trip, but she bottled it up and considered her options. There were too many, and she nearly despaired, but then she spied a little covered bowl shoved in at the bottom of the cart, almost as an afterthought. Opening it up, mind turning over, she found a little bowl of porridge. And just like that, she had her answer all ready.
The King of the Turtles ate well that night – a bit from every dish, a bite nibbled everywhere. Not so much as a mouthful from anything… except from that porridge. Just as the girl had guessed, it was the only thing that his toothless mouth could swallow without hurting fiercely, and he drained it to the last drop, along with every bit of sleeping medicine the girl had sprinkled into it. Before midnight had come, he was snoring away, and the girl crept out from her hiding place underneath the cart to pick through his shell. It was a tight fit, but her hands were small, and she saw the thousands of gleaming treasures sprinkled throughout it. The pearls the size of whales’ eyes, the precious shells, the golden ingots from Spanish galleons, and there, right under the King of the Turtles’ chin, was her engagement ring. And right then, just as her hand was about to close on it, was when she sneezed.
It was more than just bad luck, of course. The King of the Turtles smelled so strong of swampwater it was a miracle she could breathe next to him, even with the good breath the sky had lent her. But, small sneeze though it was, excusable though it was, it was still enough to wake him up, and he laughed and laughed and laughed as he watched her run to the door.
“This is even funnier than I thought!” he said. “I’ll catch up to her nice and slow, and grab her just outside my front door. That way she’ll think she got away, and it’ll be all the more entertaining for me.” So he lumbered forwards slowly and roared and waved his claws, and amused himself greatly.
The girl was not amused. She wasn’t frightened. But she was very intent on her purpose, and she knew she didn’t have her ring yet. Escape though she might, she wasn’t leaving the kingdom of the King of the Turtles until it was back in her hand, and she was already trying to think of a new idea as she ran out the front door back to the bottom of the bog.
“I need something to stop him,” she said aloud. “I need to take his shell off.”
“The chimney, the chimney,” cried a tiny voice. The girl looked, and saw a very small turtle tucked into the roots of the swamp-tree. It was old, old, old, even for a turtle, and covered in moss.
“I am the first woman that the King of the Turtles spoke to,” it called, “and you must stop here if you want to escape alive. The chimney! You must let out the chimney again! Strike it with your hand!”
No sooner was the turtle’s warning complete than the doors of the palace burst open, and out came the King of the Turtles, laughing and roaring, shell spiked for war and beak snapping. He paused there for effect, taking his time. He knew he could catch the girl. He could do anything.
And right then, the girl slapped her hand against the swamp-tree. It groaned, creaked, wailed, and fell apart into a thousand crumbling bricks, held together by no mortar and gnawed bare by an age’s-worth of still water and slime. And every single one of those bricks landed on the King of the Turtles, and his beautiful shell cracked, splintered, and chipped with each until the very last brick fell, and then it burst apart into a million pieces. The ring was the last to fly free, and it landed right in the girl’s hand.
“My shell! My home!” he cried. “This wasn’t going to happen! Why did it happen when I knew it wasn’t going to?”
“We all say that, sometimes,” said the girl. “It doesn’t fix it.” And she left him there, stuck under a pile of old, burnt clay, at the bottom of the bog.

“That’s a new story, alright,” said the older man.
“Yes,” said the thin woman. “I haven’t heard it. There can’t be many who’d know it.”
“Stuck at the bottom of the bog, that’s straight harsh,” said the older man. “Down there forever.”
“Maybe not forever,” said the last man, sadly. “Maybe just a long time.”
They were all quiet for a while, and watched their fire.
“We live with what we’re given,” said the thin woman at last, laying down on her side, wrapped tight against the night. “And we do our best with it.”
“I know that,” said the older man. He leaned back and took his hands as a pillow. “And you know that too, that it’s true.”
“And he knows that now,” said the last man in his thick, slow voice, wrapping himself and his thousand bruises up carefully in his old, worn blanket, layer on layer. “He knows it now.”

“A Tale of Three Turtles,” copyright Jamie Proctor 2011.

The first sensation of awareness is always touch. Nerveless, but there. A root’s-eye-view of my being, of every headstone, corpse, coffin, and iron bar. Spreading outwards from the yew tree. That is always the way.
And always, always, always when this happens, there is the moment where something-is-not. A cavity in my being, mind and body both. The self-that-sleeps, wakes.
This is something that must be sorted.
A body is made. Bones from roots, flesh from soil. The eyes are damp pebbles from deep underground, the veins sluggish worms, pulsing soft and slow. The heart is a knotted piece of wood from the yew, gnarled over and over into something harder than matter and narrower than mind. To inhabit it is… strange. Barely conscious of it though I am, I know what I am. To be in this shape, this not-I, is limiting. For some time I stand there, on myself, in my new-self, watching the sun set, feeling the world breath. Its breath is fouler than the last time I was needed.
Dark comes, and I leave. There are priorities. The station across the road is still there, strange as it is, odd as these streets are, filled with noisy metal things and strange lights. People stare at me, dressed in odd clothes. They are currently irrelevant.
I enter the lawman-station, passing men in uniforms I do not recognize. But the badge is the same, the emblem is right, and I know what I may ask here as I walk to the desk with the sergeant at it. His eyebrows are jumping around as he watches me, his lip quirking as he puzzles something out – from head to toe, he resembles a plucked string that has never stopped vibrating, even his clothes tucked to breaking point with tension. But he does not reach for his weapon, as his constables did; he knows what I am, even if they have forgotten.
He is familiar, and I do not know or care why.
“Lawman Sergeant,” I say. My new voice is weak, breathy, a death rattle made from old gravel and knucklebones.
He nods. “Sergeant Mulroney. Your, uh, nameplace?”
“Saint Martin’s at Crescent-and-Ash.”
“Good. That’s right. It’s been some time since you showed yourself, is it, uh, a hundred?..”
“One hundred forty six years. Lawman Sergeant Mulroney, I require transport to find a thief. A good carriage, and a competent Lawman Constable to drive it.”
“Right. Right. Beckworth’ll do. Something to get her off her ass and busy. Jackson, get the car and the constable ready five minutes ago – you do NOT keep this sort of business waiting.” He looked at me again. “Just put a, uh, tarp on the back seat or something first.”

The constable is female. That is new. She also manages to keep her hand from swooping to her gun on sighting me. That is also new among her rank, and pleasing.
“Where to?” she asks me as I climb into the strange metal box. Bits of my superstructure grind and mash against its walls, and I see her wince at the scraping of paint.
“Drive north, Lawman Constable. I will correct our course to match the thief’s as needed.”
“Right. Right. Look, what do you want me to call you?”
“I am Saint Martin’s at Crescent-and-Ash.”
“No other name?”
“That is my name. I am Saint Martin’s at Crescent-and-Ash. This body is a temporary tool.”
“Okay. So you’re the cemetery.”
“Yes.”
“This is a little strange. Look, the last time anything like this happened was, uh…”
“One hundred forty six years ago, Lawman Constable. Your Sergeant Mulroney’s great-great-great grandfather aided me in that investigation.”
“Yeah? Figures.” She stopped at a red light, then moved at a green light. Why was not evident. “What I’m getting at is that this is all pretty new to us – to me. What exactly are you again?”
“I am that little-known?”
“Buddy, if you’d made one move that seemed sketchy in the station half of us would’ve shot you no questions asked. You’re lucky you got Mulroney on desk that night; he’s a real history freak, even if he is an asshole. Probably knew your name on sight – he’s into anything occult like a cat-on-cream. Goes up and chats with some of the gargoyles on city hall on his offdays now and then. Wanted to get into the Occult division proper, got turned down – must’ve wanted to be like his great-upteen-grandaddy, if you’re saying he was neck deep in your business.”
“Turn west.”
Beckworth swore and wrenched at the controls of her machine, spinning us around halfway through an intersection. Strange bleating wails echoed from the vehicles around us.
“CAN IT!” she yelled out the window, then rolled it shut with a few unrecognizable curses. “What I’m getting at here is what the hell are you? You a ghost? I’m not on Occult duty, but I’ve dealt with – talked with – a few ghosts. Nothing that could shift this much matter, though.”
“I am not a ghost. I am a cemetery. Conscious ground.”
“I thought that didn’t happen to man-made spots, you needed an unspoiled spring or a really old tree or something, right? Like Everest. Genus loci.”
“Death is the great naturalizer. Your headstones are sufficiently primitive in terms of desire to avoid contamination. So much concentrated decay acts as a natural stimulant to my presence.”
“Right. So, is this common?”
“Yes.”
“How common are we talking?”
“The chances of consciousness arising in any cemetery more than a century old are almost one hundred percent, Lawman Constable. Directly correlated to local death rates.”
“So almost every cemetery in the country.”
“The world.”
“Jesus.”
“Turn north, Lawman Constable.”
“Next intersection. If you guys are so common, how come nobody pays attention? Most genus loci are pretty talky.”
“We awaken for defense of selves. Unspoilt ground necessitates defense, or we weaken and die. Our soulpoints require defense, or we die. Sometimes defense through speech, sometimes force. Cemeteries are not frequently harassed, so we sleep longer there. Turn north.”
“Right, right, I’m on it… don’t you ever have to deal with vandalism? The kids around here are pretty bad.”
“Low threat. The level of consciousness required is barely above passive sleep. Erasure of markings, ejection of intruders, both take minimal energy on myself. Full consciousness is required to form an independent body to locate a thief.”
“Pretty big deal then.”
“Yes. To be separated from myself is weakness.”
“You’re eight foot three and your arms are bigger around than my torso.”
“I am several hundred square yards and extended over two dozen feet underground.”
“Okay, good point. What’d this guy steal from you? A headstone? Like I said, some of the kids around here…”
“A body. We are here.”
The building was some sort of home in a neighborhood that seemed wealthy; there was scarcely any refuse in the streets- but then, I hadn’t seen much so far. Perhaps they’d stopped doing that.
“Right. Let me do the talking. And no violence unless they start it, okay? And keep it nonlethal.”
“Your nonlethal is not mine, and I do know what has changed. Will silver kill them, as I? Physical harm alone, as before? A child’s curse, as a faerie? The touch of living wood, as -”
“No yes no no. Just don’t tear, punch, throw, or choke anyone. Can you do that?”
“Yes. Answers only come from live bodies, Lawman Constable. Even for me.”
She knocked.
Silence.
Knock-knock-knock. “Police.”
Silence.
“He is dead.”
“Pardon?”
“I feel it. He is dead, upstairs.”
She bit her lip. “I think that falls under reasonable evidence for Occult. And assisting a genus loci allows for some pretty loose behaviour anyways, so… what the hell.” She tried the knob. “Locked.”
“I will open the door,” I said, and put my arm to it. One, two, three pushes to test, then a fourth to smash it open, lock spraying apart.
“Nice.” Beckworth pulled out her gun, checked some of its smaller parts. “Upstairs. The bedroom?”
“It is likely.”

It is the bedroom. And the body is not old. A man in his thirties, dead for a few hours from a slit throat, named a man’s name that Beckworth found from his wallet. It does not matter.
“So, he’s the one that did it. Where’s your body?”
“Not here, Lawman Constable. The trail changes.”
“Takes two to graverob, huh?”
“This time, yes.”
“Whose body was this anyways?”
I shrug. “I do not know. It is not theirs any longer. It is mine.”
The constable sighed. “We still don’t have a motive. The stupid-college-kid theory is sunk, and we’ve got someone else running around who-knows-where who values this body of yours enough to murder his accomplice to cover his tracks. If we know whose it is, we might start to find out why.”
“Any of myself has power; the older, the moreso. We can ask for specifics later. There is a fresh trail now.”
“I’ll call Mulroney while we follow it. How do you track these guys anyways?”
“Guilt.”
“Gross. Was it this bad last time?”
“Took longer. Elder Lawman Mulroney had only a carriage, and the city was more tangled. We killed six men to reach the thief.”
“Jesus.”

The constable’s machine that talked over distances was not working.
“This is common?”
“The phone? Yeah. The phone not working? No. Shit luck, that’s all – I thought we weeded out this kind of crap last year. How fresh is this trail?”
“Within the hour, Lawman Constable.”
“Then we’ll go now and sort out the details later. I don’t think you’d wait if I asked you to, would you?”
“No.”
“Take the law into your own…uh… roots, huh?”
“Your law helps me, Lawman Constable, so I use it. Beyond that I do not care.”
“Y’know, that’s the kind of forthright honesty that really makes this job so goddamned fun. Also, would you quit saying ‘lawman’? I’m constable Beckworth.”
“Lawman Constable Beckworth.”
“Fine.”

The trail leads to a tavern, guilt smelling strong underneath the weaker haze of alcohol.
“Here.”
“Whack a guy and then straight to a bar, huh? Pretty confident. He must’ve thought we’d take a few days to find the body. Let me go in first, you wait out here.”
“No.”
Constable Beckworth sighs. “Fine. Not like I can stop you. Same rules as before; don’t start anything. Hell, who am I kidding, just walking in there’s going to start something.”
She reached for the door just as it opened. A very large man with vomit on his shirt blinked in the half-broken streetlight glow and muttered something obscene at the world.
I picked him up and placed him in the middle of the sidewalk. He fell over.
“That was unnecessary.”
“He was blocking the entrance.”
Men yell things inside. There is a crash, and the sound of running feet.
“That’s him,” I say, and begin to run.
Constable Beckworth outpaces me almost instantly; I had built my body for strength over speed, and even if I had, roots and earth are no match for bone and sinew in speed. I wade through the air, rumbling through tiny corridors and doorframes that scrape and twist against my shoulders. Men, sweaty, angry, and drunk, rise in my path – disturbed by the constable’s wake – and fall again, paling and screaming. One, too blind or angry to back down, I run over, his crushed nose gushing fluids into the sole of my foot.
The constable is in an alley at the building’s back, a knee planted in a man’s spine as she attaches metal locks to his hands. His resistance is feeble, and blood is trickling from new bruises on his face.
“I’m guessing this is him,” she tells me. Her bleeding cheek and a knife lying on the ground nearby told her story for her. “And if it isn’t, hey, assaulting an officer’s enough charge for one.”
“It is him.” I pick the man up and stare at him, watching his eyes roll around me, attempting to make me go away. “Where is my body?”
“Right to remain silent,” he mumbles out, saying the words quickly.
“Occult investigation,” said constable Beckworth. “We’re playing by rules that weren’t made by humans tonight. So why don’t you tell the nice graveyard where you put his body? We can handle the murder charges later, after you’ve had a nap or three.”
The man groans and spits. I take his head in my free hand and position his face against mine.
“Where have you taken my body?” I repeat, as the sweat on his face runs slicker.
“Was a job. Gave it to the guy with the money. Paid me extra to do the other guy. Look I needed the money real bad I have to leave the country and-”
“Who was the man with the money?”
“I don’t know I got the number looking for work and he just used the phone please don’t-”
I turn away from him, blotting out the rest. “I have the trail now, Lawman Constable Beckworth. We must go.”
“We’re bringing him with us. There’s enough room in the back for both of you.”
“Yes.”
We march back to the car through the place of alcohol, and not a single face is to be seen.

Constable Beckworth’s phone still isn’t working.
“I don’t get it. All the really shitty ones were supposed to be gone by now; half the force were complaining last year until we replaced them.”
“It is irrelevant. I have the trail. We leave now, Lawman Constable Beckworth. South.”
“You know, you’re a real pain in the ass.”
“South.”
The ride in the metal thing that the constable calls a car is quiet. She broods, I give directions (East. South.), and the thief curls himself away from me and flinches whenever I move or speak.
“East.”
“You know, we’re on Crescent.”
“Don’t you know anything about city geography?”
“No. I do not care about the city.”
“The point, jackass, is that we’re headed straight for, well, you. What do you think that means?”
The world feels very cold to me now. “It makes no sense.”
“Yes. Which is very, very bad and makes me think we’re walking facefirst into something nasty. We’re stopping off at the station first, okay? This guy can’t be more than an hour ahead of us by now, and he won’t be expecti -”
“No. The thief will not cause more harm. I do not require aid beyond transport.”
“Thank you oh-so-much for openly referring to me as your chauffeur, Your Royal Grimeness. If I wasn’t here you wouldn’t have caught that pal of yours sharing the seat with you. If I wasn’t here you’d be walking down Ash in broad daylight by now, looking for a thug that’d caught a nice jet to Timbuktu. And you don’t even know what the hell a jet is, do you?”
“No.”
“Great. If you can’t show an inch of respect for me, at least you’re honest about it. Just one ‘thank you,’ that’s all I ask, not one thing more.”
“I am sorry. As an apology, we will stop at the station.”
The car swerves alarmingly for a moment. “Well. That’s a good start.”
“He is on me. I can feel it from here. If he runs, we will catch him.”
“Right. Good.”

The station is dark, and the door is locked.
“The HELL is going on here?”
“This is unusual?”
“This is impossible.”
“No.” I turn and cross the road, the constable three steps behind me and already with her hand on her gun.
“You know what I mean, damnit!”
“No. Lawman Constable Beckworth, the thief is on my soil at this moment, and I am going to him. I will have my body back.”
“If you’d like it, you’re welcome to it. I already took the important bits anyways.”
The voice is male. It is lazily happy. It is also recognizable, in more ways than one.
“Lawman Sergeant Mulroney.”
“Yes, that’s me,” said the sergeant. He is leaning against the gates to myself. His badge, I notice, is missing. In its place is a tarnished, nearly-illegible copy “Well, sort of. Just plain Justin Mulroney, if you, uh, please. I’ve left the force. As has my staff.”
Beckworth has her gun out. “What the hell are you doing? You took everyone else with you? Where are they?”
“Well, they, uh, sort of didn’t plan on it. But when I left, well, they didn’t take it kindly.” Mulroney shrugs. It draws attention to the stains on his shirt, which is no longer tucked in. “Suits me fine. I’ll be out of the country by, uh, morning.”
“Was hoping you’d get done for in the chase, constable. But you’ve always been a big, well, pain-in-the-ass. Too much to hope for that the hired knife’d know how to use it, I, uh, guess. The plan can adapt.”
“Where is my body?” I ask.
“Chucked it back in the grave,” he says with a big, beaming smile. “Minus the badge. Dear ol’ great-great-great granddad Mulroney, lifetime hero, family aspiration, the great damned hero of the Occult investigations teams. All he needed to do his job were a few trinkets, and I needed one or two of ’em that he just couldn’t bear to part with. eBay only goes, uh, so far, you know?”
Beckworth fires three times, and the air around Mulroney ripples in a heartbeat pulse, spreading softly from the old, old badge on his chest. He grins, pulls out a worn old gun made more of rust than steel, and fires once. She drops.
“Still works,” he said with a grin. “Gargoyles said it killed one of their bulls with one shot, eh?”
I rush forwards, arms raised, legs in full sprint – clods are falling with every step; this is not a sustainable movement, it is a killing charge. Mulroney’s eyes are so very large as I close with him – his squeal echoes through my knot-wood heart as he tumbles over backwards. Up come my fists and down I tumble, feet burned away to the knees so suddenly that there isn’t even time for confusion. My soilflesh is burning, being scalded away wherever it meets dirt.
“This isn’t yours anymore,” hisses Mulroney, scrambled away on his knees and elbows, crablike. “Not anymore! Warded up the entrance good and tight, you overgrown hummock! Good and tight! You gave me your name freely, arrogant cadaver’s-bastard! Me, descendant of the Occult department’s golden boy! Did you really think we were that weak and stupid now? To back down and let you do what you want?”
I am in too much pain to reply.
Mulroney is pulling something shiny and silver from his pocket, thin and deadly. “Just one little cut, and it’s all over, uh, all over. Take heart, haha, that’s all there is to it. No ritual, no suffering, just one little cut. Like a needle. One little cut, and that’s all I need. Forever. Give me forever.”
The blade needles at my side, and is in. Whole chunks of my body go dead, sloughing away into the hostile soil beneath me.
Mulroney is humming, what I’m not quite sure, a tune out of patience and out of mind, in time with the digging numbness. And there, right at the root, I feel the tickling prod of something nudging my heart of yew.
“Beautiful,” breathes Mulroney. And he fell over with a bang, fingers slipping from the knife’s hilt even as it dropped from my side.
I lay there, unmoving, as a scuffing sound and a careful hand scrubbed away the hidden runes laid across the arch to Saint Martin’s cemetery, removing the bane from the soul, the venom from my skin.
“Lawman Constable Beckworth?” I ask. As I slide upright, an ache seizes me. I shake myself, and a sliver of heartwood drops from the gash in my body. It will regrow, in time.
“Yeah?”
“Are you injured?”
“A bit.” A cough. “Nicked me – no, got me – real good. But the idiot didn’t put two and two together. If you use the gun of a famous Occult officer, you use it on Occult problems.”
“Lawman Constable?”
“My nonlethal isn’t your lethal. The thing was loaded with yew splinters.”
“Lawman Constable?”
“Wonder what the idiot was going to do with the heart anyways? Get away and live forever in Jamaica somewhere?”
“Beckworth?”
“Oh, yes?”
I lean over and carefully place the yew splinter in her hand. “Thank you.”
And as I sink into the ground, back into the myself that is larger, the self-that-sleeps, I hear her laughing.

“Graveyard Shift,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

Teresa Aoki leaving the bonsai to her estranged daughter was no surprise, not even the bit in her will where its delivery was to take priority over checking her pulse or contacting her other, less isolated relatives. It had been her most prized possession, and her mother’s, and her great-uncle’s before her.
It wasn’t the most elegant bonsai (a bit too squat, a bit too unkempt – several of its largest branches had sprouted in odd directions centuries before pruning for beauty had been suggested), but it gave whatever home it sat in an air of quiet, pine-scented authority that was most pleasant. Particularly on the southern wall. Teresa’s great-grandfather had raised it from seed himself using a small packet he’d brought with him to America (and then later brought it to Canada), and in the good old days before Mary shaved her head (well, good old days for Teresa; Mary didn’t miss them much), she’d told her daughter long stories about how hard he’d had to work, teaching himself bonsai as he went out of half-memories from his grandmother and careful, nervous application of shears. Mary had enjoyed those stories, and Teresa had enjoyed telling them.
It was just such a pity that she’d gone and died (a quick aneurysm, not at all unpleasant as deaths go, if a bit of a shock) before she’d told her the ones that weren’t lies.

And so it was that on the twenty-third birthday of Mary Aoki, daughter of Teresa Aoki, daughter of so-on-and-so-forth, she received a Fedex box slathered with more DELICATE PARCEL and THIS SIDE UP labels than its surface could support before she was even through putting down the phone from Uncle Jerry’s call wishing her happy birthday oh and your mother, my sister, is dead. Sorry.
Mary opened the box, stared at the heavily-wrapped contents like some people stare at live snakes, tore it open, put it on the table against the north wall of her apartment, and stared at it for five minutes with indecisive and angry eyebrows.
It was then that the bonsai stretched itself and sighed.
Mary was a sensible woman. She checked to see if she’d left a window open for a breeze, and she examined the doors for any trace of a draft. She put her ears to the walls and listened for any hint of her next-door neighbours having inconspicuous, quasi-muffled sex.
The tree interrupted this by coughing politely.
Mary was a sensible woman. She pulled up a chair opposite the table, leaned forwards, counted to ten, and asked: “What the fuck is going on here?”
And so the pine tree, who had a voice that strongly reminded Mary of a stuffy grandmother despite being gender-neutral, began to tell her what her mother hadn’t had a chance to.

“This is not an old story,” said the pine tree. “But it has an old start.”
A man stood near a riverbank one day, watching the very last bits of heat escape a little firepit he’d dug. A short distance from the shack-thing that was his home, there was clay.
There was less of it than there had been five minutes ago.
The man brushed away the cooled ashes from the pit-kiln, stomping briskly on a few dejected coals, and looked at the thing that he’d made. It was just a little bit too big to be a proper bowl for a human, but just right for a spirit of the powerful sort, and he left it in front of the big pine tree where it lived a little ways up the forest trails on the hillside slopes, and said some very respectful things with care.
“A bowl, your wish delivered,” he said. And other pretty things. “Your protection, please grant it,” he said. And other polite things.
The pine sighed in the wind, grudgingly satisfied. It considered its options, then decided. A seed dropped into the bowl.
The man bowed at the pine’s feet, retreated with his gift, and had a long discussion with his wife that night about what he was meant to do with this. She took some dirt, he took some water, and together they planted that seed right where it fell. The next day, a freak wildfire burned down the big pine tree, the forest, and everything else that wasn’t within a perfect circle centered on the seed in its clay-baked bowl, which just barely contained the couple’s hovel.
They took very good care of it after that; and so it grew up, but not far. And then, one year after the fire, it started talking. The words were slow and grinding at first, the struggle of adapting a tree’s perspective to a human’s noises, but it pulled through, and it made its point: I will protect you.

A small tree in a pot was odder than it seemed, in those days, to say nothing of one that could speak. The couple kept it hidden away, and when they died, so did their children. And so did their children. One thousand years later, contemporaries started to appear, and the family could relax and put it on a nice shelf somewhere where it looked pretty. It wasn’t the most elegant bonsai (a bit too squat, a bit too unkempt – several of its largest branches had sprouted in odd directions centuries before pruning for beauty had been suggested), but it gave whatever home it sat in an air of quiet, pine-scented authority that was most pleasant. Particularly on the southern wall.
And of course, there were the adventures…

“I’m sorry,” said Mary at this point, “the what?”
The adventures, said the pine tree, rattling its needles irritably.

For instance, the great-grandchildren of that first couple had been harassed somewhat thoroughly by an ogre. It could smell the delicious spirit-smell in the air around their house, and first it ate their dog, then their home, and finally it was about to eat them before it realized the smell was coming from the pine tree.
Luckily enough, the pine tree had given them some advice after their dog went missing. As it raised the pine tree to its lips, they
“Stabbed it in the back while it was busy?”
No, they
“Why not? It makes sense.”
They were less than peasants. Where would they get a blade sharp enough to kill an ogre?
“A pointy stick would’ve done it – hell, you can kill elephants with pointy sticks if you hit the right spot. Besides, they’d had enough time to hatch a plan, they had enough time to find a pointy stick.”
They didn’t find a pointy stick. They called its mother many insulting names, and when it turned around to kill them the pine tree dropped itself on its skull and killed it.
“That’s weirdly sensible. How did you do that?”
The pine tree was a spirit’s-scion wrapped in a blanket of clay passed down a family line for generations; it had opportunity to soak up plenty of power.

“How vague. If you’re so powerful why do you need me?”
I was getting to that.

Anyways, that sort of thing was always happening to the family, and not always just because the tree was there, either. In the 700s, one of the tree’s possessors
“‘Owners’ would be too touchy?”
One of the tree’s possessors had come into contact with an extremely angry and volatile young warlord in a way that had caused offence, leading to a long journey to retrieve his archenemy’s sword from a locked vault, during which the tree had provided counsel each night as he slept. The theft was successful; accomplished by dint of looking so much like an ordinary peasant that there was no possible chance of anyone suspecting him of burglary of the most secure estate in the land.
And a small, perfectly alert, unnoticeable lookout temporarily embedded in a garden. Though there had been a hairy moment or three when one of the gardeners grew suspicious, and it had to persuade him that he was imagining things from too much drink.
There were many others, of course. The defeat in a duel of an angry dragon in front of a whole city of witnesses, the burning of the most wicked castle in the world to avenge a murdered wife, the flight across the ocean from an angry magician…
“Does a single one of these ‘adventures’ have a basis that isn’t horribly stressful and nerve-wracking? If you’re such a good-luck-charm, I’m not sure why Grandma didn’t just chuck you in a dumpster. She was a practical lady.”
… the destruction of a witch that had been riding ghosts and chaining souls since longer than the span of a man’s life added to all his grandmothers’, the freeing of the lost little boy who lived up in their attic, and the weeding-out of the flood of spirits that had infested their lawn.
“Hang on, was that the time Mom said she used pesticides and the grass smelled like sauerkraut and firecrackers for a month?”
Yes.
“I should’ve known something was up.”
And so down on and down on the line went, without much change, until it reached Teresa Aoki and her daughter; Mary.

Who hadn’t been let in on this, apparently.

“There are so many ways this is stupid that I can’t even begin to count them all,” she said. “I’m going to take you to a greenhouse or a garden care professional or someone else who can prune you into a reasonable shape and not forget to water you, and who can tolerate all the stupid adventures they can handle until their arms get chopped off and eaten by a demon or something.”
“You can not do that,” said the tree.
“Yes I can. Watch.”
“No, I mean you can not. This bowl is a heirloom of your family, and it is filled with two thousand years of memories of being nothing but that. If you give me away in it, it will return to you as sure as your wandering mind does. And I have been in it since the day it was molded; it is mine as much as yours, and will not be parted from my person. I am as much a part of your family as your mother; as it lives, so do I.”
“Shit,” said Mary sullenly. She drummed her fingers on the table in syncopation, thinking various ugly thoughts.
“You should answer that,” said the tree.
“What?” said Mary, then heard the door. Thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk, the constant, incessant rapping of a five-year-old wanting to know if you were home, or a very excitable Jehovah’s Witness.
“Don’t you say a word,” she told the pine as she rattled at the needlessly elaborate lock on her door. “The baldness is enough of a conversation starter; I don’t need anyone talking to my trees too.”
The tree said nothing. Satisfied by this, Mary opened the door and was face to face with someone’s belt buckle. It had a skull on it, she noticed. Then a hand closed gently around her head and lifted her into the air, and she corrected herself: it was a skull. It and its accompanying belt were also the only clothing her visitor was wearing.
The face that invaded her personal space was strange: flat as a board except for a very protruding nose and two extremely large things that were either fangs or tusks or maybe both good lord that was bad breath he (definitely he) smelled like rotting meat and
Crunch.
The thing’s eyes went unfocused and Mary was dropped to the floor, where she immediately rolled out of the way of a quarter-ton of tumbling…
“That is an ogre,” said the pine. It was sitting on the floor from where it had tumbled, from atop the ogre’s skull. Much of which was now a reddened crater.
“Wonderful,” she said. “What did you do?”
“I came back to you.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Near you. It takes quite a lot of effort; I would rather not have to do it again anytime soon or I would not be able to talk for some days. Movement is not natural for a tree.”
“And how did you do that?” The bone that was visible through the ogre’s matted blood and hair looked to be three inches or more thick.
“I am very heavy,” it said mildly.
“Then how did I pick you up and put you on the table?”
“I let you.”
“Why didn’t the bowl break?”
“It is very old magic. The only thing that can break magic is still older magic. This ogre was not very old.”
Mary gave up and slumped in her chair, defeated. The floor was going to be a bastard to clean, she thought.
“It appears we are on another adventure,” said the pine.
“Wonderful,” said Mary. “How do I get off?”
“Ogres are simple creatures, and not at all anxious to seek out fights unless there is obvious gain for themselves,” said the pine. “You find whoever sent the ogre.”
“And ask him to stop?”
“No, you defeat him.”
“How? Call the cops? Stab him and bury him in Nevada?”
“Eternal imprisonment would also do the trick,” said the pine. “I recall an angry typhoon that was sealed in a bottle and buried in a hole in desert.”
“That’s not eternal, that’s one idiot and his shovel shy of a disaster.”
“There are many deserts, and many holes.”
“I don’t know how much TV mom let you watch, but there are many idiots. And many shovels too, probably.” Mary sighed. “So, how do we find this guy?”
“I suggest a walk,” said the pine.

They went on a walk. Well, Mary walked. The pine rode in an old baby-carrier that her mother had fobbed off on her ‘just in case.’
“Take a deep breath,” said the pine, “and let it out.”
Mary took a deep breath, let it out, and rolled her eyes.
“Shake your head three times and roll your eyes twice more.”
Mary shook her head three times and rolled her eyes twice more. And once again, for good measure.
“Now sneeze,” said the pine, and Mary sneezed involuntarily. And yelped, because it felt like someone had stuffed her nose with peppers.
“Too many rollings,” said the pine. “Still, the extra potency is appreciated. Can you smell that?”
Mary could smell that. Although maybe ‘smell’ wasn’t the right word. It was more like hearing with a bit of taste, transmitted through her nose. It made the hair on her spine tingle.
“That is magic,” said the pine. “A broad trail, left by an over-eager amateur at most, I suspect. Follow the spell of the one who sent the ogre.”

Mary hiked through parking lots and up hills and down long, stupid streets with barely any sidewalk and too many idiots driving on them. She walked past fast food that she couldn’t begin to imagine qualify as half its name, and by restaurants where she would’ve had to forfeit her month’s rent to afford an appetizer. She was walking in an underpass when her cellphone rang.
“Hello?” she said. She stopped walking and used the opportunity to adjust the tree’s weight a little; it and the pot were surprisingly light, but their combined bulk stretched the straps of the baby carrier uncomfortably against her.
“Mary Aoki?” said a carefully, professionally calming and neutral voice.
“Yes?” She started walking again.
“This is the Toronto police department.”
Mary glared at her phone. “I told you before, that was self-defense. And I had a witness. And he dared me to do it.”
“It’s not about that. Your sister is missing.”
The rest of the conversation floated by in a haze. Jennifer Aoki (age nineteen), better known as Jenny to her sister, as well as Jenners, Stupid, and Jen-Jenners, was gone. She’d come home, said goodnight to her roommate, gone into her room, and vanished into thin air. No, there were no leads yet, no, no suspects had been determined so far, no, no one else had heard from her, no, no, no, no, no.
If she found any evidence she was to phone and so on.
Click.

Mary stared at an ancient, broken car with an ancient, bitter man in it, who was shouting something profane and inaudible at her past his windshield. At some point she’d stopped walking again, and she noticed that she was in the middle of a road she didn’t recognize.
“Did they get her?” she asked.
“They?”
“Him. Her. Whoever. The ones who sent that thing at me.” She wasn’t ready to start saying the names of these things aloud; that made them too real.
“Probably. Your police are not especially good at magic. They have one man, underpaid, who only half-believes half of the things that he finds. Which he misses half the time.”
“An eighth of a clue,” said Mary. “Should we ask him for help?”
“No. He would slow us down, and probably ask all sorts of questions about me, or try to confiscate me as a dangerous illegal possession.”
“Are you?” asked Mary. The old man was pressing hard on his horn, producing a tremulous, dying wheeze from thousands of his car’s orifices.
“By his laws, yes.”
“Comforting. More or less illegal than my pot?”
“Pot?”
“Marijuana.”
“Ah. Less.”
“Well, then we don’t have anything to worry about,” said Mary. The car was vibrating in place now, practically panting to zip forwards and claim first blood. She pulled out her apartment keys, scraped them slowly and carefully along its hood as she passed, and strolled to the far side of the road.
Suddenly the smell was clean and there, fresh and new.
“He’s here,” she said. Rising up in front of her was a rather elegant condominium. The whole building smelled like roasted habaneros, and her eyes were nearly streaming from it.

The ground floor of the building was saturated with the scent, one big uniform blob with no directions or sense to it at all.
“We should at least narrow it down to a floor,” Mary said as she stood in front of the elevator and vainly tried to tell if any of the buttons was more nostril-clearing than the others.
“It will be four,” said the pine.
“Why?”
“Four is death. To send properly death-dealing foes and vicious curses to you would only be helped by working as closely with four as possible. It will be the forth floor.”
“Hmm,” said Mary. “What was the building number?”
“Four hundred and forty-four.”
She sighed, and noticed she was drumming her fingers again. No pattern this time, just aimless, breathless fluttering. She couldn’t bring herself to stop.
“My sister will be there?”
“I am sure of it.”
“Be more sure.”

The fourth floor was positively incandescent with the smell, and Mary had to plug her nose with a pair of Kleenex walrus-tusks before she could bear to leave the elevator. It left without a sound behind her as she looked around.
“Apartment four?” she asked, thickly. The tree didn’t even bother to answer; the door was making her entire head spin. She took a deep breath and raised her hand to knock.
“Stop.”
“Why?”
“Or you will be set on fire.”
“Why?”
“Because the door is sealed with a vicious curse.”
“Why?”
“Because there is a small, malignant symbol scratched inside just inside the doorframe, above your head.”
“There, was that so hard?” asked Mary. She pulled out her keys, still flaked with the paint of the old car, and swiped them back and forth through the tiny, intricate drawing until all that was left was a wooden pustule.
“It is harder. There is an ogre behind that door. And its two brothers.”
“Shit. Four, right?”
“Of course.”
Mary examined the intimidating one-and-a-half-inch blade of her keys, then pocketed them with a sigh. “Suggestions?”
“They will be extremely wary after feeling the curse dissipate. They will suspect it is either an intruder, or their brother being clumsy with anger as he is returning so much later than planned.”
Mary put one hand into her purse and began to rummage.
“What are you doing?”
“Finding my equalizer.”
“Find it quickly. They are about to open the door.”
“What?” said Mary.
The ogre opened the door.
Standing a few feet away, Mary had a much less confused view of him this time. He was a little over nine feet tall – stooped very low in the doorframe – pot-bellied, rippling with muscles, and not even bothering to wear the skull-belt his brother had, but armed with a big club made from half of a burned tree. His face was different: the squashed-face with its protruding nose were absent in favour of having just one eye planted where his left nostril should’ve been Other than that, he was almost handsome.
The ogre stared at Mary, which gave her the perfect second-and-a-half for her to overcome her shock an instant before him and pull out her can of mace. By the time he was reaching for her, it was too late.
“Up the nose and in the eyes all in one,” she muttered as she ducked away from the flailing body, trying to scream and cough at the same time. “Vicious.”
The next ogre tripped over his flailing brother and inadvertently kicked him, leading to a vicious wrestling match during which each used the other’s burnt club to poke his brother in his eye – which, in the new one’s case, he had three of.
The third grabbed Mary by the head as she was dodging hurtling limbs. He had no eyes whatsoever.
“Not twice,” she said, and grabbed him somewhere important with both hands. Very hard.

“Unusual, but effective,” commented the pine as Mary locked the apartment door behind her. She’d taken the precaution of dropping it on top of the moaning ogre after it doubled over, and it was slowing making a dent in the exquisite floorboards. “Your grandmother would be proud.”
“Nice of you to say so,” said Mary. The magic-scent-charm-thing was wearing off, letting her breath a bit easier but also drawing her attention to the unfortunate smell of the ogres again. It was something between a bull and a wet dog.
“She always feared that her daughter was too kindly to deal with these troubles, and when she was proven wrong there, she worried that you would be raised unprepared, in charitable ignorance.”
“I was. Not that I minded it.”
“It does not appear to have affected your capability.”
“Why thank you oh so much, o fuckin’ wondrous talking ornament,” said Mary. “Now tell me: where is it? Are they. Is he or her. Whatever; where is my sister, damnit?”
“In room four,” said the tree.

A fine door. Maybe even real oak all the way through. Or maple. Or not. Mary wasn’t good with plants, which was what kept sneaking back into her head every time she stopped thinking about finding Jennifer fast.
The pine’s bowl was dripping something black and sticky down the rear of her shirt as it rested in the baby carrier; the ogre’s back had been ground into something that made Mary never want to eat hamburger again.
“Strike boldly,” said the tree as she put her hand on the doorknob. It was warm.
“No ‘be careful’ this time?”
“It has served you very well so far. And I do not think your enemy will have expected you to deal with his ogres so aptly. If at all.”
“Works for me,” said Mary. She twisted the handle (unlocked) and kicked the door so hard that it nearly rebounded into her as she charged through it, nearly tripping over her own feet. Which was a good thing, because it brought her to a stumbling halt before she could run into the sofa that Jennifer was propped up on, fast asleep but not snoring.
That was wrong. Jenny snored louder than backed-up diesel trains; Jenner had driven away three boyfriends one sleepless hour at a time, Jen-Jenners had been teased by Mary for countless hours about it to the point where she’d wondered if she’d been forcing the poor girl into a habit.
In fact, a silent, sleeping Jenny was so otherworldly and bizarre that it completely distracted Mary from the quiet crackling, hissing of the only other person in the room, until it said something, which was “You.”
It was wearing a charcoal-grey suit. That was the most obvious part of its outfit, the bit that really pulled it all together. It had started with that central piece, decided it made a statement, and then repeated it several dozen times over. Its tie was charcoal-grey. Its shirt was charcoal-grey. Its socks, shoes, and buttons were charcoal-grey, and all of this was accentuated nicely by its complexion, which was charcoal-grey with reddish undertones because it was made entirely of still-burning charcoal.
Quite human, though. Apart from the absolute lack of a face. Or a proper head; just a mish-mash lopsided lump like the single shape Mary had ever managed to make at a pottery course.
Mary waited. It didn’t say anything else. She suddenly wasn’t sure whether the awkwardness was heightened or lowered by the fact that one of them wasn’t breathing.
“Yes?” she said.
“A long time,” the charcoal man said. It flickered softly as it spoke, lighting up the walls with beautiful patterns. The shadows made Mary’s eyes cross and teeth hum if she looked at them head-on.
“Never met you before,” she said. “I think I’d remember. Tree, what is this thing?”
The tree didn’t say anything.
Mary heard a hissing, wheezing whistle, so flat and dead that it took her a minute to realize it was coming from the charcoal man; a laugh like a lazy man’s bellows. “Rightfulness,” it said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Mary. “And what did you do to Jenny?” Any fear she’d been feeling had been left back at the moment before she’d crushed an ogre’s testicles, and this goddamned thing was too annoying for her to start worrying again. If she hadn’t been wary of burns and confused, she half-thought she’d have started punching it already.
The charcoal man stretched out its hand, a single digit extended towards the pine, and Mary felt warmth spread across her front like a summer bonfire at marshmallow range.
“Spelled the human, in the perfect moment, with no knowing eyes watching, warding. The wise one gone, her daughter gone, nothing left but ignorant you, innocent her. Innocent her: bait for you: bait for it. Its rightful death. Cheater. Coward. Refugee.”
“Life is cheating death, no death is righteous, and all of us are refugees at some time in our lives,” said the pine. “You are in error. And I do not know you.” Its needles were quivering against Mary’s back, and for a moment she had to stifle the urge to giggle.
“Liar,” breathed the charcoal man. “Hider in human shadow. Years promised as mine, years waiting for I to come to burning, scant hours for I to burn and find you gone. Gone to hide in human shadow, human blood. Chased you, haunted you, hounded you, and never you tell them what I am and that you hide. Hide from I.” It laughed again, and Mary felt herself start to sweat.
“What is it talking about, tree?” she asked.
“Nothing. It is a liar.”
“Liar, liar, liar, liarliarliar,” chanted the charcoal man. “You were mine to burn, and caught alone. You knew the rules. I strength against yours, greater. Your fear, strong-smelling, stinking. You demanded human tribute – begged. You hid in man’s vessel, formed from earth, baked with I strength, before I could arise, and stayed shrunken and small. You stole of I infant strength to avoid my doom on you. You dragged I doom with you through centuries, on the backs of men, waiting for I to die. I do not die. Not with you unburned. You are sad. You are stupid. You are the younger magic to I. You are prey. Give I yourself.”
Mary shifted uncomfortably.
“This fucker telling the truth?” she asked the pine.
It didn’t answer.
“That’s an answer,” said Mary. “Mom told me that. Answer me this now: did you piss this thing off into chasing my family for thousands of years just to kill you?”
“yes” said the tree. Very small.
“That’s a better answer,” said Mary grimly. “Not a good one. But better. Some protector.”
“Give I yourself,” repeated the charcoal man. “Give I it.”
Mary thought very hard and very fast and maybe even a bit carefully.
“Sure,” she said. And off came the baby carrier, into her arms with the pot, holding it carefully and with a wary grip. One finger stroked the tree’s base ever-so-slightly and gently.
“Go on,” she said. “Take it.” Her arms strained a little as she held it out.
Charcoal man leaned forwards, hands glowing kiln-hot now for the first time since he was born by a river thousands of years ago. He couldn’t not reach for it. No matter how loud the instincts screamed of a trap, or the mind warned itself of deception, when the reason you exist is right there in front of you, you can’t help but reach for it.
He was quick too. The melting pile of his face was only a few inches away when Mary heaved the bowl into it.
Pottery met charcoal, earth met fire, elder met eld, and the only thing that can break magic… broke magic.
Very loudly.
Shreds of charcoal-grey suit rocketed into Mary’s face in the sudden glare, a quickly blurred image of perfect fabric vaporizing in impossible heat.

When she woke up, it was because Jennifer – Jenners – was snoring again. Very loudly. She sat up, groaning at what felt like the worst sunburn she’d ever had and spitting out a few half-melted threads of silk.
The condo was a wreck. Everything inside it down to the interior walls had burnt down, leaving it a strangely smokeless husk. Not an ounce of colour was left except for the pine; ever she and Jenny were dyed grey by the ashes coating the floor. She considered the very real possibility that she was coated with a small amount of charred ogre, then immediately stopped.
The tree was a sad sight. Its bowl was cracked right down the centre, and every last one of its outermost needles was crisped to a stump, giving it a shrunken, shamed look which it might’ve managed anyways.
“Is it dead?” she asked it.
“Yes.”
“Forever?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“… yes.”
“Good.”
Mary got to her feet and dusted herself off. “First things first,” she said, “we’re getting the fuck out of here. And then we’re getting you a new bowl. One that won’t start some sort of bullshit millennium feud. But we’re waiting ten minutes first so Jenners can get a nap, got it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then we’re going home and you’re telling me everything my mother forgot, got it?”
“Yes.”
“Great.” She yawned and sat down next to her sister. “Oh, last thing…”
“…yes?”
“No more adventures?”
The tree thought.
“No more adventures,” it decided.
“Pity. We’ll just have to make our own.”

“Small Trees,” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor.

My gramma
by, Tammy, age, seven.

My gramma is my momma’s oldest relative, and, she is a Good Lady. She is nine, hundred years old and she has long grey hair and is bald on top like daddy’s grampa was before he caught the cancer and went away to live in a box. She is very tall and very wide and she can pick me in one hand and my sister who is six in the other and take us out riding on Sammie, who is her Bird.
Sammie is a big big bigger crow, who is bigger than my momma’s car. He can fly very reelly fast, and he says his name is Sawmeall, but gramma says to just call him Sammie because it irritatitatites bugs him a lots. He says his momma was a dark cave and his daddy was a dank wind and he helps gramma ever since she beat him with a riddle he couldn’t solve so now he had to promise to help her wich seems very silly but we don’t tell him because it would hurt his feelings.
Sometimes Sammie flies us to gramma’s house far, far, far, far, far away, but we’re always back in time for dinner because gramma won’t feed us dinner because she says we’d get sick. Gramma’s dinner is made from things that she won’t tell us but most of them are red and slimy and gross. She says if you eat them raw it’s not so bad but we think it’s disjusting. Gramma’s house has no doors and you have to come in through the chimney because all the windows hide when you look at them from outdoors. Gramma says they do that because they are shy but they are not good people and you should never try to feed them anything or they will bite your fingers rite off to the nuckles.
Gramma’s house has good books. Some are bigger than you are and some have, teeth, and some are both and gramma says to stay away from those but we already do because they growl at you and have meen eyes. Some of them are cookbooks and some of them are dictonairys and some of them are Very Special and gramma says we can reed them onse we are older.
In the attik of gramma’s house there is an old chest. We cannot open the old chest because it is lokked, and gramma doesn’t have the key because she gave it to an old, old, old, dragon to look after as a favour after she put an terribul curs on a sword that somebody said was going to kill him one day. We have never met the old, old, old, dragon, because, gramma says he is her x-husband, and he would be, cross to meet us and maybe eat us or breath poyson all ovver us. I told gramma that dragons breath fire but she says no, this one doesn’t, he breaths horribul poyson and you drown in it there is so much. It sounds gross and bad and I am glad we did never meet him but my gross little brother thinks he sounds cool because he is stupid and four. Gramma says he’s not as special as me and my sister because he is a boy and that meens he is stupid about this stuff.
Gramma takes us swimming sometimes in the lake that her house is nex to. It is big and misty and the misty trys to talk to you so you have to ignor it and, keep your eers underwater or it gets loud and angry. If the misty gets too angry gramma chases it away and says she’ll give it the back of her hand but not the whole hand because I guess it would be too much. The lake is full of ded fish but they are still moving, so, they are not reely ded fish just pretending like my sister pretends to cry, they like to nibbl your tos and it tickles. Gramma never swims with us because the water makes her teeth ake so she stays on the shore, and, tells us stories. One story gramma told us was about how she married a handsum prins one day and then she had children and lived happy ever after, but then the prins got jelus and had her loked up and she had to lern lots of magic to get away. Then she loked the prins up insted, in an, iron box, and she keeps it in her cupbard. The box is very small and has a little hole in front and she let us feed him bredcrums. He says bad words.
My favvorite thing that my gramma ever did was when we were visiting her and we got lost in the woods. I met a man who was like a doggy and had big teeth and he tried to grab me but I bit him first and ran away when he chased me. Then I hid in a big tree that gramma showed me because it was her friend, and it wouldn’t let, the doggy man inside no matter how many meen things he said to it. I hid in the tree for hours and hours and then gramma came walking down the path. I new it was gramma because I can see her no matter what, but she looked like an old little lady. The doggy-man tried to jump on her and she picked him up by his scruff and yelled bad words into his face and his face ran away. Then she threw him into the big tree and gave me a hug and spanking for going missing because she told us how bad the woods are. It hurt a lot but then she took us to a place with ice creem made from reel ice and it tasted like sweet snowflakes.
The other favvorite thing that my gramma ever did was when she was visiting us and it started raining so she had to take us home. It was a lot of rain and Sammie was flying fast but not fast enough because there was a thunderstorm, so, my little sister started crying because she is only six and that makes her cry a lot. I didn’t cry at all a bit. Gramma gave us hugs and told us to shush-shush and then she shook her fist up at the clouds and told them to Nock It Off. And they did not nock it off. So she stood up on Sammie’s back and told him to fly strait and then she reeched up reely high and she punched the stormclowds rite in there faces. And she punched them three more times and said something Very Special in between eech punch and then she pulled all the litning rite out like a string and she put it in her hair and all her hair went all sparky and sparkly and pretty so she started laughing and so did my sister and me. That was very nice and there was no more thunderstorm and my sister stopped crying but I didn’t because I wasn’t.

I love my gramma a lot and she is the best gramma in the world. Sumday she says I can tell mummy and daddy about her.

Tammy.

“My Gramma,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

What?
No, what’s with that face you’re making? Don’t give me the silent treatment here, I don’t take passive-aggressiveness well at all, young lady. I’ve been waiting tables in holes like this part-time on and off for years, and you lose patience with bull pretty damned fast.
Really? Oh for goodness’s sake, you need an explanation for THAT?
Well, if you insist… what the hell do they teach you people in schools nowadays. Here, budge up and let me take a sit-down.

So, the issue started when I woke up five minutes early today. I shut off my loud-ass alarm before it could go, and unbeknownst to me, my upstairs neighbour sort of relied on that to wake her up for work in time – I think her name is Stephanie or something. Anyways, she slept in for two hours and only woke up when her cat bit her arm so he could get some breakfast, and didn’t check the clock until she was done waking up, kicking him, and feeding him.
So Stephanie went in to work – hours late – and when her boss saw the scratch marks all over her arm and heard her half-assed excuses for the time she thought that Stephanie was the burglar she’d had to chase out of the store after-hours last night – landed a good buncha punches on the intruder’s arm with a stapler. Boss-lady’s a bit paranoid and jumpy and living on more caffeine than sleep (comes with running a coffee shop, I guess), so she just freaks out in Stephanie’s face, Steph yells at her, and then before anyone really knew what was going on half the office was fighting the other half. Total sum of injuries was in double digits.
Well, one of the secretaries there – Charlotte, I think – was just about due for lunch break, so she takes advantage of a built-in excuse to leave and heads out for her bagel early. But the morning rush hasn’t really died down yet and she gets stuck in a crowd, where some crazy dick steals her purse. That’s even worse than it sounds because she was planning to pay her sister back that big loan she took out before she had to have Charlotte’s kneecaps snapped later in the evening.
Hey, you got a light? Thanks.
So, Charlotte needed ten thousand dollars, and she needed it fast. So she went to her bank, tearfully pleaded with them, was redirected to the ATM, and, well, went a little postal. Ripped off the closest cashier’s stocking, threw it over her head, and held her hostage with one of those horrible little pens they make you write with in there until they opened up the vault. The whole thing was over pretty fast, except for the car chase. Charlotte doesn’t have a license – she’s environmentally conscious and uses public transportation – so it started off a little rocky, but by the ending nobody’s speedometer was in double digits anymore and the highways were being cordoned. Pretty satisfying all around, I say, especially for the officer that finally took her down – Margaret, that was her. Never “Marge,” was real firm about that – “sounds like margarine or the Simpsons character, or maybe a withered little ninety-year-old lady with prune breath.” Yeah, Margaret shot out her tire, let her skid into a barricade, and then handcuffed the arm that was still working. Poor Charlotte. At least her sister took pity on the whole thing and decided she’d learned her lesson enough – and I think she hired a lawyer for her free of charge. Said she’d make a good getaway driver once she figured out braking.
Margaret didn’t take the whole thing that well at all; she went straight to the bars after work, got real maudlin, and ended up going home late with three other women. One of them – Candice? – got up at five in the morning to take a piss and tripped over…uh… was it Margaret’s cat, her own feet, or both? Both. Yeah, both. Anyways, she tripped on them and managed to set off the fire alarm, which put me (this was my apartment building, didn’t I say?) and about a hundred other people out on the streets a bit early and pretty damned surly. And to make matters worse, one of the girls with Margaret ran into her friend-with-benefits in the crowd – Tammy, yeah – and Tammy got all snide and snippy. Bit of a prude, she always was. A very good hypocrite though, as the girl pointed out. Well, that turned out a mite uglier than it might’ve, but Margaret still had a pair or two of cuffs lying around (can’t imagine why, can you?) and the whole thing was smoothed over fast enough.
Tammy wasn’t a fan of her jail much, and she used her call for a lawyer. Of course. Problem was, her lawyer was busy with Charlotte. And when she told Tammy so, well, Tammy broke the phone. And guess who got called in to fix it the next morning, huh? My sister, Antoinette. And guess who found her ex-girlfriend in a cell for punching up half a bar? Antoinette. Hey, while you’re at it, guess who hadn’t told her ex-girlfriend yet about the ex-girlfriend part? Antoinette.
Got a smoke to go with this light? Aw, thanks, you’re a sweetheart.
So they started fighting. A few snide remarks, a few hurtful comments, and by the time half an hour had gone by the phone was half-fixed and ignored and they were screaming – Antoinette about how she’d never called her back after she let the iguana starve to death, and Mary about how Antoinette had always been too fat.
And after that Antoinette felt so betrayed and used that she just snapped out the first thing that popped into her head, which was that Mary’s quasi-incestuous relationship with her step-brother that she’d confided in her was in fact non-incestuous because she knew for a fact that he was adopted, which just about completely ruined the whole thing for Mary on the spot. Poor kinky thing crumpled like cardboard and started crying, and that got Antoinette booted out.
Now, since she was tired and cranky, she phoned me up to whinge about it. Only now I was busy working my other job, which involved driving, and I ended up rear-ending some SUV-driving twit who decided that slowing before braking was for the little, insignificant people. Put my fist in her teeth and cracked a knuckle, so me and the car both had to go separate ways for repairs.
While I was at the hospital, the doctor received a phone call from Stephanie – her best friend – about how she’d just been fired, got depressed, and perked herself up before the surgery with a hit of something she’d written her own prescription for. She must’ve slipped a bit too much, because she sort of confused me for someone else, put me under anesthetic before you could say kiss-my-ass, and I woke up with my wisdom teeth removed and my knuckle still swollen, but with a bandaid on it. The doctor was sorry, and gave me some meds to kill the swollen mouth and stop the drooling a little. So that was THAT problem solved, only my goddamned shiftless coworker needed a pick-me-up and swiped ‘em while I was in the bathroom five minutes ago. Not a problem, I think, sure I can cope. Except on the trip between the kitchen and your booth here I think I gained five pounds in pure saliva, and it was either drop it in front of me or spray it in your face.

And that’s why I spat in your eggs just now. Christ, why’s it so hard to get young people to understand something so simple.

“A Simple Explanation” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

My suit is itchy, scratchy, and new. It squeaks when I walk, like a rat in a trap. The bundle of crudely-printed pamphlets is a comforting weight in my left hand, slightly sticky with low-quality ink in the aimless humidity of summer.
The house is slovenly, ill-kept. Its lawn lies in ruins, of the two cars in the driveway, one is missing all its tires, half its hood, and its engine has been stripped bare three times over. The other doesn’t appear to have benefited much from its brother’s donations.
I knock on the door, and a dog barks, sound muffled by its flapping lips and drool.
A creak, a crack, and a suspicious, pudgy face with too much stubble and too little beard.
“Greetings this day, sir or potentially madam! Have you heard the –”
The door slams shut with an indecipherable curse and a lot of creaking. I bow politely to it and place a single loose-leafed pamphlet on the misspelt-by-wear “welco” mat. Perhaps it will be enough, perhaps not.
This home stands firm. It has been tended to – with care, if not obsession – and someone has even put in the effort to do some halfhearted weeding in the flowerbeds, where overstuffed bumblebees are even now ambling. The face that opens the door is puzzled, not wary, and I don’t smell the aroma of an interrupted meal. Perfect opportunity.
“Hello there,” the owner says. It’s scrawny and leathery but not particularly tough-looking, like an old shoe.
“Greetings this day, human,” I say politely, taking care not to appear over-eager. “Have you heard the soundless word?”
The expression is probably puzzled – the eyebrows are doing that thing again, where one of them twitches a lot. “I’m sorry?”
“The scream that speaks! The wailing and gnashing of teeth delivered by the prophets, who speak the word of the one-who-begins!”
The owner scratches himself in an idle, indolent sort of way. “Sorry…which prophets? I’m not sure I’ve heard of much of this before.”
“The Worm of Terror and the Unending Maw, mostly,” I say. “Mostly the Maw. It’s still proselytizing, I believe, in the temple-without-bottom-or-depth. You can travel there when it speaks on the eighth Tuesday of every month.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, sorry, I’m, uh, catholic. Good luck.” This door clicks when it closes, but is no less final than its neighbour’s thud-whack.
I fantasize about tearing it into millions of pieces smaller than a spider’s breakfast, then control myself with an effort. I represent something greater than myself here, and to look poorly is to make it appear so. I’d have to eat the whole block to cover it up, and I’m sure that Father Breath would know somehow, no matter what I did. He just does, and then he gives you that very sad, drawn, disappointed look with all five of his eyes.
Courage and persistence in the face of it all, I remind myself, and leave a pamphlet, faintly oozing blue-ringed octopus ink and venom. The last page said something about how the faithful would be rendered immune to its effects, and it would be a good idea to convert now, which was probably true or at least close enough.
“May your agony be holy,” I say politely to the closed door, and with a heavy heart I turn towards the final home of the street, the last of many. It is small and poorly-painted and there is a fat, monstrous cat on its stoop, sunning himself indolently. It hisses at me, as they tend to do.
Knock, knock, knock. A proper old-fashioned doorknocker. None of this electric buzzer claptrap, or a bare, bald-faced door. Maybe this one will be different.
The face that answers it is wrinkled and pale, with many spots. Peculiar little metal and glass things are cupping its eyes and possibly restraining them from toppling out of their sockets thanks to the permanent forty-five-degree hunch their owner possesses.
“Hello?” it asks. Its voice is thin and wavery, like an elder forced to speak above the waterline, but slightly more comprehensible without the bass hissing underlying every other syllable.
“Greetings this day, heir of decay and slave of reason,” I say. “Tell me, have you put any thought into the state of your impending demise at the hands of your flesh-shell?”
It blinks at me, so very slowly that the gesture doesn’t seem to merit its connotations of quickness. “Are you the postal man?” it asks.
I decide to employ strict truth. “I am a messenger of sorts.”
“Well that’s just peachy then. Come on in, you’ll catch your death of cold.”
I step inside the house – which is notably cooler than the outside – and am confronted with forty-five tonnes and sixty-year’s worth of bric-a-brac and trinkets. I am vividly reminded of my father-spawner’s mindhoard, if it contained less cursed idols and more chintz.
“Would you like a drink or something mister…”
To claim a name at my slender age would be most presumptuous, but I have permission granted for short-term pseudonyms, provided I express proper horror and self-disgust after the affair is through.
“Walk,” I say. “Brother Walk.” A small, tiny, miniscule title, but still outside my reach. “Water would be appreciated if gifted freely.”
“Wong? Funny, you don’t look it.” On a less shrivelled face, that look might have passed for critical, but here it looks entirely lost. “But I suppose you do look a bit foreign. You speak English so well though, mister Wang.”
I casually check my face as it busies itself at the kitchen. No wonder the last few houses had gone sour so quickly – my left cheekbone had sunk out of sight. I gingerly pop it back into place with only a slight sucking sound, easily masked by the nattering of the human.
“… lovely to get a visitor. And how’s Sherry?”
“I do not know a Sherry,” I respond, truthful.
“Well, I always knew she’d up and do that sort of thing. Dreadful tramp, if you’ll pardon my saying so, and you’re all the better for it. Plenty more fish in the pond and all that.” A half-glued mug of some manner of fruit juice is thrust onto me. “There you are, mister Walker. And the children?”
I am a child myself, and would not dream of bifurcating this century, let alone actual spawning. But my younger brothers and sisters provide an easy way out of once again speaking nothing but truth, and I can echo “they’re fine and growing,” with nothing but a light and free hearts.
It nods aimlessly and produces another mug for itself.
“Miss resident of Oakview two-hundred-forty-three,” I say, deciding it is time to get down to business, “have you heard the soundless word?”
“Every night, mister Wally,” she says firmly. “Every night. They simply can’t keep it down next door. I know, I know, I was up to some pretty fishy things at that age too, but I was quiet and discreet, no matter what. Self-restraint is simply too rare in this day and age…”
I think of how many of my younger brothers and sisters I’ve had to consume after they’d eaten themselves into torpors, becoming comatose, useless lumps of nothing. “Indeed.”
“And they’re at it every night! They’ll wear all the fun out of it, they will – without novelty, nothing’s enjoyable! Why, me and Herbert only did it maybe three times a month. And we planned ahead; none of this willy-nilly stuff and nonsense.” It snorts into its mug.
“Hominid,” I say, attempting to return to the topic at hand, “when I speak of the soundless word, I refer to that which is spoken by the one-who-begins, the great consumer, who swims in the center and feasts. Do you know anything about that?”
“Can’t say I do,” it says brightly. Then it frowns. “Unless you mean your uncle Eddie. He just wouldn’t stop eating, you know. And he never did wait half an hour before swimming afterwards. Poor man. At least the shark choked on him, so they got it too.”
“It is scribed in the fortieth tablet of the ninth verses of the tales of the lost starfisher that the shark is the ruin of all hope of life,” I say helpfully, in an attempt to keep the conversation on track.
“Do tell!”
“Yes. You see, mister resident, we are all as larvae, adrift on the empty waves and battling the zooplankton of doubt, hope, and remorse. We distract ourselves in our efforts to gorge upon our younger, less-apt siblings, while ever trying to ignore the gaping maw that lurks beneath.”
“Yes?” It appears to be paying attention for the first time, and I feel my ichor begin to pump a little faster as I got into the sermon.
“And the thing about this, resident, that must be understood: that maw does not care about you. You are incidental to its purposes, and it is only going about its business – seizing a nearby fish, perhaps, which itself is an entity that is barely within your tiny perspective. The shark is the ruin of all hope of life, and this can only be a good thing, for without hope, understanding may be found, and only those who understand can begin to thrive. Though, of course, not survive.”
I watch as she thought this over, feeling rather pleased with myself. Stirring stuff, even if I had borrowed some of the broader metaphor and a few of the specific lines from Father Breath. It was only tribute to him, really.
“Tell me, mister Wilbur,” she says at last.
I wait. For quite some time.
“Yes?” I ask after about thirty cycles of my digestive tract, once it has become apparent that it is asleep.
“I’m sorry, young man?”
“You were about to tell me something,” I clarify.
“Oh yes! Tell me, mister Wallace… you see, that’s all very fascinating, but I just have one little question about your church.”
I’m willingly to ignore its inaccurate terminology for the sake of expedience. I’ve seen several human churches in the past few days, and comparing the widetombs where the low sermons are held to them is like comparing a decaying whale to a healthy human.
“Tell me… do you have Sunday school?”
“Every day is a learning experience for elder and young, resident,” I say. “From when to hide when the ur-beetles shriek and when they are merely sporting, to the correct suns to curse and pray to when the moons lie a-synch.”
“Yes, but do you have Sunday school?”
“We teach our children on every day of any week, every lesson they must learn. Except the ones they need to learn themselves on pain of purge.”
“Yes, that’s quite lovely, but do you have Sunday school?”
“Yes. We have schooling on Sundays.”
“How lovely. I know a few of my great-grandchildren would simply adore the chance. And your church, is it near?”
“Wherever futility is made idol, sapient.”
“That’s just lovely,” it says. “Do you have the address?”
I hand over a pamphlet, taking care not to touch its skin directly. I know that you can’t CATCH mortality, but superstition runs in my family. Knock on iron.
“Everything you need to know,” I say with absolute truth, “is in there. And now I am afraid that I must be off. I have spread the soundless word to this road, and my task is done.”
“Oh, aren’t you a good boy,” it says fondly. “Here, have a cookie for the road.”
I accept the small, nutritionally dead bit of charred grains and eat it through one of the orifices in my face. I’m in a hurry now, and just guess at which one is socially acceptable.
“Now, you stay safe out there,” it calls after me as I walk down the sidewalk, innards grating away the baked layers of its gift. “There’s all manner of nasty things that can happen after dark, and I’d hate to hear of a nice young man like yourself coming to harm!”
“The scream that speaks will mask me,” I reply to it, “and concern is the great lie that voids the unending pain.”
“Be sure to wear bright colours on the road at night!”
“Thank you, anthropomorph!”

I count my pamphlets as I walk off the edge of the street and into the empty that wraps around it, out of sight and mind and soul’s understanding of its residents. I started with… I struggle to remember my training in numbers… four…ty. Then I put (hmmm) thirtish on doorsteps. Then I gave one away.
Still, one convert is a gateway to dozens more. And the spawn would be intrigued to meet young of another species. Perhaps humans would be more intellectually and spiritually sensible at a younger age. What was that line of Father Breath’s? Ah, yes.
“’Give me a pupae before it reaches full bloat and bursts,’” I quote, in humanese, “’and it will belong to the broken dreams of the one-who-begins until it is drained away into the meme-pools of its far-descendants.”
Really, it lost a lot in the translation.

“Door to Door” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

Once upon a time, there was a lonely boy. His father was dead, his grandparents were dead, he had no brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles, and one day, his mother (who was a very powerful and much respected witch) died too.
Now, this boy was lonely, but he did not live alone. In his mother’s village, there were many who mourned for her, and who would have taken him in if he’d asked. But when he looked at the villagers, all he saw were the angry faces of the other little boys, the ones who made fun of him because they were jealous of his mother, who fought with him when the grown-ups weren’t looking.
So the lonely boy turned his back on his home, and he went travelling.
He walked to the far east, where he cut his way into the heart of a baobab tree and slept for three nights in it, drinking up its sap and its secrets in exchange for three headfulls of his dreams.
He walked to the far west, where he showed a hairy wild man how to shape blades to kill his kin, and learned the names and powers of every animal in the world.
He walked to the far north, where the world turned into sand and the air screamed insults that gnawed on his skin, and he learned the fiercest and most fiery curses in all the lands.
He walked to the far south, where the ocean slept in its bed, and after throwing three of his most favourite teeth into it he listened to all the whispers that came out of the oceans, and earned his new teeth from a shark.
He traveled, and he traded, and when he grew strong enough he simply took, seizing and grasping. He fought with a demon in the night in a wildfire and they each tore out the other’s eye – he put it in his socket and forced it to serve him. He stayed in a village and disrespected the chief, and when the people grew angry with him he ate their shadows and left them to wither away for years, ignoring their pleas. He forced spirits and ghosts to do as he pleased, and he hurt them when they begged to be let free.
By the time he came back to his home the lonely boy was an evil man, and a strong one, with arms that could uproot small trees and magic so strong that the air around him tasted like honey and iron. He walked into the center of town and he cursed the well dry, and he told them all that from that day on, they would do as he said.

Now. That was the end of that boy’s story – in a way, it wasn’t a boy’s story at all, not from the moment his mother died and he left home. But another one starts right here, right there.

This little boy had friends. Not many, but good enough. He had a family, a small one, but a pretty good one. Sure, his mama and his papa fought, but only with words and they never for keeps. He knew how people could be cruel, but also how they could be kind. Which was why it made him angry to see the magician as he hurt them; cursing anyone who dared to step across his shadow (which was three times as long as it should be) beating children who made fun of him behind his back (not that you could, with his stolen, blood-glowing eye watching all the time); and taking food and property from people without asking or bargaining, or drinking up their water in the middle of the driest time of the year. It made the little boy so mad that he mumbled words that his father used, and got smacked by his mother.
“Mind your tongue, little boy,” said his mother.
“She’s right,” said the little boy’s uncle, when he complained to him about it. They were outside the little boy’s house – uncle’s sister’s house – throwing small sharp wooden darts at a tree trunk, aiming for the knothole. Uncle was losing, as usual. “You’ve got to mind your tongue. You speak too fast and too free.”
“But it’s true,” said the little boy. “The magician really is an evil old” so and so.
The uncle bopped him, but lightly. “You listening? That sort of thing doesn’t help you any and it might hurt you. You really want to do something about this man?”
The little boy nodded so hard that his neck wobbled three ways.
The uncle gave him a thoughtful, feelful look. “That’s good. That’s right. You just need a plan then. You make the right plan, you can do anything. You got a plan?”
“I will kill him and throw him in the river,” said the little boy. Fwwt, his last dart sank into the knothole’s center.
The uncle sighed, and tossed aside his final dart carelessly. “That’s a goal. You want a plan. How you going to do this?”
The little boy thought. “I will fight him,” he said.
“Remember the last man that fought him? What happened to him?”
“Oh,” said the little boy.
“Look,” said the uncle, “he’s got magic, you’ll need magic. Here, I got a little bit left over from years back before, when his mother gave me a hand with something.” Uncle gave the little boy a smooth, shiny rock. It was a nice rock.
“This is a nice rock,” said the little boy, who could be polite when he tried.
“That it is,” said uncle. “Magic too. What you do with this is you take it in your hand – like so – and you hold it real tight – like so – and then you walk four times around your house thinking real hard – like so. Then you’ll have a plan. Got it?”
The little boy nodded, held the stone in his hand real tight, and walked around his house four times thinking real hard, then four times more, then four times more.
“I have a plan,” he told his uncle.
“That’s good,” said uncle. “What is it?”
“I will steal his eye,” said the little boy.

Now, the magician was standoffish by nature and necessity, and his home lay apart from the rest of the people, in the middle of a bare and burnt clearing. Four withered trees with four withered branches each were his guards, on each side of his home, and he slept with his demon eye open and awake, ready for intruders. Nobody ever went near that place.
“That’s a big job,” said uncle. “You got a plan for that too?”
“Yes,” said the little boy.
“That’s fine,” said the uncle. “You need help?”
The little boy thought it over. “Yes.”
“I’ll help then,” said the uncle.
“Thank you. The first thing we need, we need a dead cow.”
“Don’t think your papa would like us doing that.”
The little boy thought it over some more. “Then we need a dead antelope.”
So they went out there and got themselves a dead antelope. Uncle was a good hunter.
“The second thing we need,” said the little boy, “we need to lure out a lioness.”
So they went further out there and tied up the antelope and shooed off jackals and birds and all other pests, and then a lioness showed up.
“The third thing we need,” said the little boy, “we ask her for her lullaby.”
“This is some plan you’ve got here,” said uncle. “You sure it makes sense?”
“Yes,” said the little boy, so uncle nodded and asked the lioness, who was a bit surprised to see uncle pop up out of the grass like that. But they’d given her some food, so it was a fair trade, and she taught them all ten verses of her lullaby to her kittens, which was full of deep, throaty purring and blood and bones.
“Strong stuff,” said uncle. “I think I know what you’re up to. What’s next?”
“I don’t know,” said the little boy. “I can’t count past three yet.”
“Four’s next,” said uncle.
“Oh. Then fourth, we’re going to need a bone.” So they took one of the split leg bones of the antelope once the lioness had sucked out the marrow, and the little boy said they were ready.
“Now we just wait for sundown,” said the little boy. “And then I will go to the magician’s home alone.”
“You be careful, got it?” said uncle. “Your parents would skin me four times over if anything happened to you because of this.”
“I’ll be careful,” said the little boy. He walked all the way to the magician’s home, and by the time he got there it was pitch dark, too dark to see or do much but sleep. He took out that cracked, split marrow-bone and he squeezed and wiggled and snuck himself inside it – tight, but he managed. Then he started creeping up along the ground, inch inch inch, towards the magician’s door.
“Psst,” said the first, burnt tree. “Who’s that at my master’s door?”
“I’m just a bone,” said the little boy. “I’m doing no harm, I have no arms and legs to harm with.”
“That’s true,” said the first tree, “but if you want to come by, you’d better pay me a gift of some of your bonemeal. No free passage,” it said firmly, and scraped the dirt viciously with its four withered, charred branches.
The little boy didn’t have much choice, so he scratched and scraped away a bit of the bone with his knife until the tree was happy, then crept closer.
“Psst,” said the second, burnt tree. “What are you doing there?”
“Just a poor old bone, wanting to pass through, with no arms and legs to hurt anyone at all” said the little boy.
“I heard that,” said the tree, crossly. “But I want a gift too. If the others get bonemeal and I don’t, I’ll be smaller and weaker, and they’ll make fun of me.”
The little boy couldn’t refuse any of the trees, so he shaved and scraped and gnawed at the bone with his knife until there was almost no room for him to hide in it, and all four trees had been satisfied.
“Hang on,” said the fourth tree. “Did you say you have no arms and legs to harm with?”
“Yes,” said the little boy.
“Then what are those things peeping out from under your sides?”
The little boy rubbed his stone and imagined walking around his house four times.
“You’re seeing things,” he told the tree.
“I have no eyes,” it said.
“Then something must be really wrong,” he told it. “You should ask a doctor.”
“Oh no!” said the tree, and it was so busy wailing and mumbling to its friends while they cursed its noisiness that it didn’t notice the little boy sneak inside.
There, on his big bed that was as tall as the little boy standing, was the magician. He was sleeping cross-armed, legs straight, his one demon eye open and watching. Now and then he cursed in his sleep and the air in front of him burnt up and vanished.
The little boy crept up closer, right under his bed – he kept having to hold still and press himself into the cracks in the walls when the eye glared near him – and started to hum, then whistle, then sing the lioness’s lullaby. Bones and blood and sinew, crackling marrow, long dark nights and the smell of prey, all wrapped up in a big grumbling purr that tied a hug around your heart eight times over.
The demon eye blinked, yawned, and napped, lulled off to dreams of its hunting days, and then it started snoring. The little boy counted one, two, three, four snores, and then he leapt up, plucked it out, and ran out the door with his stone in one fist and the eye in another, too surprised for it to even yell. The trees were still arguing, and their four sets of four branches didn’t so much as pause from their slapping and punching at one another even as the little boy ran past right under their trunks.

“I have it, I have it!” called the little boy as he ran into his home, interrupting mama and papa from their talk with uncle about the sort of relative who let little boys run away in the night.
“Have what?” asked papa.
“The magician’s eyeball,” said the little boy. “Didn’t uncle say? Here, look.”
“No!” said uncle. “Don’t look! If it sees us, he sees us. Can’t let that thing take so much as a peek at anyone here.”
The eyeball was struggling pretty hard by now, so this was more difficult for the little boy than he thought it’d be at first.
“Here,” said mama, and she pulled out a big jug and they put the eye in there and shoved in a stopper, leaving it to curse and rattle and rail at them all it liked. None of it mattered; the eye couldn’t see them and they were safe.
“So, now what?” asked uncle.
“You don’t even have a plan?” asked mama.
“It’s not mine,” said uncle
The little boy took out his rock and walked around the house four times, then came back in.
“We need some salt,” he said.
They didn’t have much, but they had enough. A few handfuls. Papa opened the jar – pointed away from everyone’s faces, to be safe – and before the eye could start up its cursing again, the little boy asked it “how can we kill the magician?”
The eye said words that the little boy would’ve been thumped for. Mama dropped a pinch of salt into the jar.
“Aiieee!” said the eye.
“How can we kill the magician?” repeated the little boy. “You should know how, and you have no reason to help him.”
“I am his most faithful servant,” hissed the eye, with a voice like a snake caught between two sticks. “I am the only thing that lives that he very nearly trusts, and in return he does not harm me! There is not a single thing you can do that would hurt me as much as he could.”
Mama’s lips pursed a little at that, and she dropped in another bit of salt. The eye wailed like a lost hyena.
“Maybe we could put in ants next,” said the little boy.
“No!” shouted the eye.
“Or maybe a hungry spider,” said papa.
“Not that!”
Uncle scratched his beard. “Could try giving it to the dog, see what he makes it,” he said. “Been a good boy too, he deserves it.”
“Mercy!” begged the eye.
“Then tell us how to kill the magician,” said the little boy.
“You can’t,” said the eye.
“We could stab him with weapons,” said papa, “or hang him.”
“He knows the secrets of the plants and the stones and everything underroot,” the eye said. “They cannot harm him.”
“We could tie him up and leave him out on the plains at night,” said mama.
“He knows the names of every animal that lives there,” said the eye. “They will not harm him.”
“We could throw him in the river, like you said,” said uncle to the little boy.
“He has council of the oceans,” said the eye. “A little river shall not harm him.”
“What about fire?” said the little boy.
The eye thought. “Hah,” it said. “A good try, but that will fail too. At a single flick of his eye – his other, lesser eye – his shadow will wrap him up in its cold dark-bitten self. Not even the sun could scald him through that!”
For a moment there, no one knew what to say. So the little boy took his stone and walked around the house four times.
“Tell us how to stop the magician’s shadow,” he asked the eye.
“It is made from many, many, many shadows,” said the eye. “You must split it into pieces; how, I do not know. I have told you everything: now leave me be!”
“Right,” said uncle. He put the stopper back in the jar and gave it to the little boy. “Now what?”
The little boy took up his stone again, and started to walk around the house. One, two, three times, and then he had to hide behind a tree before he was finished, because the magician was walking up to the house, taller than papa and wider than uncle, single eye glaring and teeth showing in an angry snarl. His shadow was stretched out long, long, long behind him, and its hands were clenched into fists. The magician struck the house with the flat of his hand, and he yelled “Open up!”
The little boy heard nothing. Mama and papa were pretending they weren’t home.
“Come out now!” yelled the magician. “I know my eye was here – the thief’s tracks led this far. Come out now and bring me back my eye or I’ll eat all your shadows and curse your land into burnt crumbs! Open up!”
About then, uncle came back. He saw the magician up there in front of his sister’s house, and he knew what was going on.
“That’s my cousin’s cousin’s house,” said uncle. “What are you doing?”
The magician stomped over to uncle and glared down at him. “Your cousin’s cousin is a thief, and a scoundrel, and a leech, and I am going to sear him down to the spirit and then mangle it for my dinner. Where is he?”
“Gone hunting down by the river,” said uncle. “Been gone a week or more, the lazy man. A thief he is, and trouble for me and more than me. I’ll help you find where he is.”
“Good,” said the magician. “Show me where this lazy man is, and maybe I will let you live.”
So uncle walked off with the magician.
“He’s crazy,” said papa.
“Always,” said mama. “What are we going to do now?”
The little boy finished walking around the house once more, and even though his thoughts were a bit of a jumble, he made something up that seemed good to him.
“I know what to do,” he said. And he chased down the trail left by uncle, who had made a point of walking through mudpits and other damp places to leave good clear tracks.
The magician left no footprints, but here and there plants had been crushed and small things eaten by his shadow.

Down at the river – a good river, still flowing, even in the driest time of the year – uncle was leading the magician from fishing hole to fishing hole. “Not here. Not there. Not near, but where?”
The little boy watched and waited. He had a plan, and he hoped uncle did too. He hummed a bit of the lioness’s lullaby, as loud as he dared, and saw the magician look up and around with a start.
“Did you hear something?” he said.
“Just a lion,” uncle said casually. He looked very closely across the river and winked at the little boy, who was peering at him from between the rushes.
“I know every lion and lioness’s name,” said the magician. “And I do not know that lioness. Not properly. She sounds…muffled.”
“Maybe she’s sick,” said uncle. He was looking in the water, then back at the little boy, then waggling his eyebrows.
The little boy uncorked the jar with the eyeball in it and threw it into the water before it could scream. As it sank, fish swam to it, churning about the water.
“Look! See down there, in the water!” called uncle, pointing frantically at the swirl. “There, there, there! It’s my cousin’s cousin!”
“At the bottom of the stream?” asked the magician.
“One knows he’s a lazy, lazy man,” said uncle, raising an eyebrow across the river to no one in particular. “He only catches the fish that are two tired and old to bite bait, and just scoops them off the bottom of the pond three at a time. Laziness! Look, see here, you can see him in the water.”
The magician bent over to look into the pond, uncle yelled “FOUR!”, and the little boy threw his stone at the magician’s head. It bounced off with a clang, without so much as a dent, and vanished into the river, but it did what it had to do, which was put him off balance. The magician’s shadow lunged up into the air, peeling itself off the ground and ready to jump across the water, and then uncle shoved the wobbling magician off his feet and into the stream.

The eye had been right, of course. The waters parted around his lips and gave him breathing room, and he was swimming back to the surface with murder in his face quick as a blink. But his shadow could not swim, and it was dragged down after the magician and torn to pieces in the swift-shining currents, sending peels and dashes of smaller shadows everywhere that flittered away on the wind.
“RUN!” yelled uncle, and he and the little boy were off like shots, out into the dry long grasses by the time the magician had stepped onto the riverbank. But the magician was tall and strong and fast, and each of his steps was three of theirs, and he was driven on by mad hate now. There was no way they could outpace him.
“Hide,’ whispered the little boy, and they ducked into the grasses without a sound.
The magician came stomping up seconds later. His shadow was the size of a big man’s, and his one eye shone with nothing but sweat. He was tired and angry and he’d lost the trail of his prey, without his eye to watch and his shadows to lead, and he was furious.
Such a mood leads a man who was raised without attentive, admonishing relatives to words. Bad ones that made the air curl bright red and spark apart.
“Don’t say that,” said a voice to his right.
The magician whirled around and snarled at the bushes that had made the noise. They smoked.
“That either,” said something to his left. “Mind your tongue.”
The magician turned around again and yelled something that shredded apart half a grove of young acacias. A gazelle sprinted for cover.
“Don’t say that!” repeated the first voice, and a little wooden dart came zipping out of some grass that he was sure he’d cursed just a moment ago. It bounced off his head and made him wince. He screeched at the grass and it collapsed into hissing ashes.
“Carelessness!” said the second voice. “That isn’t helping and it might hurt someone!” Another dart, this one poking him in his good eye, setting him blinking and making his vision run watery. He yelled something really nasty at whatever he could see, and a shower of embers fell apart where stalks had sprouted.
“Stop it!” said the first voice, and it launched a dart right up the magician’s nose.
He swore and he stamped and he screamed and he bellowed and he let out a curse that caught the air on fire, fwoosh, and up went half the plains around him in flame. All around him, at the driest time of the year.
The magician ran, but you can’t outrun the wind. The magician roared, but you can’t outroar a fire. And the magician, and all his secrets, and all his bargains and threats and power all went up in a great sour cloud of smoke that hung low and sullen over the plains for four days before the rains came and washed it away.
Uncle and the little boy were all right. They’d run back to the stream, where they’d hidden beneath the surface as the smoke ran wild. And when they’d been nearly too weak to swim, who had held their heads above the water but the little shadows – their trips back home to their bodies delayed by the blaze, and thankful for deliverance? Mama and papa came down to the stream when the fire passed by, and dragged them home the rest of the way, where they forced them to eat until they left to go play darts again.
“That was a pretty good plan,” said uncle to the little boy.
“I thought it was yours,” he said.
Uncle shrugged. “Makes no difference. Want me to find you another rock?”
“No thank you,” said the little boy. “I don’t think I need it.”
“Good for you,” said uncle. “Now, beat that,” he said, and he threw a dart straight into the knothole.
The little boy said something and something else, and uncle smacked him on the ear.

“Eyes,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.