jamieproctor.ca

The town had seen better days.  It had also seen better weeks, months, and centuries.  Still, when stacked up against its fellows of the past few weeks, the last minute or so had been pretty good.  Oh, some hundreds of men had died within its sixty-second boundaries, but most of them had been relatively clean and painless.  Or maybe just painless.  Well, at least that special sort of painlessness where the pain was actually incredibly intense but over inside a nanosecond. 
There was a man running between the snowy buildings, dodging and weaving through its less glamorous streets.  Not the red light district, oh no, nothing so dramatic, merely all the unfashionable neighbourhoods that had been beset with precisely the wrong sort of stores for convenient living.  The man himself was thin and ragged and wearing some sort of torn thing that had probably once been a uniform (a little American flag had been sewn into part of it, but an exciting explosion had long ago removed that).  A beaten and abused rifle swung from his hand with monkeylike carelessness, held in exactly the wrong manner for easy and quick defence. 
With a heave, a jump, and an accidentally-falling-on-his-face, the soldier stumbled his way to a specific ruin that had once been a rather ugly house.  There he looked hopefully at two equally thin, ragged, and abused men. 
“Am I too late?”
The most bearded of the three frowned.  The shape and style of the thing on his head that had once been a helmet marked him as probably German.  “Yes,” he said in an accent so thick that it was completely indescribable, “you are too late.  Over half an hour – what if we’d had to wait much longer?  We’d have had to shoot each other or something. There’s a war here that we’re busy losing.”
“I thought you were losing,” said the other man, who the others had a sneaking suspicion was British.  He’d once expressed a fondness for tea that they found most telling. 
“Nonsense.  We are all infantry, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Naturally.”
“Then we are all losing,” said the German with satisfaction.  “Now, shall we begin the game?”
“Which game?” asked the British man. 
“You know, the one game,” said the American.  “You pass Go and then collect money.  I’m the Iron.”
“I prefer the steamship myself,” said the British man.  “Lovely little boat.  My father was a steamship captain, you know.”
“No,” said the German crossly.  “The other game.  You know, the one with three parts and three people.”
“Oh, that one,” said the American.  “Yeah, let’s do that one.  Count of three then?”
“Yes.”
All three men sat down, chucked their various broken and beaten tools of violence aside, held out their hands, and pumped them as one to a steady beat: “one, two, three!”
“Scissors!” said the American. 
“Rock!” said the German.
“Paper?” said the British man.  “Yes, that’s that.  Sorry.  Forgot for a moment.”  He peered around the little triangle.  “Oh, did somebody win?”
“No,” said the German.  “No one ever wins.  We have all lost once again.  Why must even our games reflect our pointlessness?”
“Speak for yourself,” said the American.  “I beat the limey here, and that’s good enough for me.”
“But we’re on the same side,” protested the British man. 
“Yes, and that makes it all the more important.  I’ve got to beat you to beating up him, or how else will I look myself in the mirror?”
“But I beat up him while you were beating up me.”
“Aha, and I beat you up myself,” said the German.  “You had best watch your step, or in beating your allies you may yet be beaten up by me!”
“Really?” asked the American.  A sudden and inexplicable fear had seized upon his heart and he knew not why. 
“No, not really,” said the German.  “I think I am pretty much screwed.  But I will not go down quietly!”
“Howso?”
The German looked from side to side.  He looked up and down.  He looked from north-north-east to south-south-west.  He spun in a little circle and then sat down again before beckoning them closer. 
“You see, I have a secret weapon,” he whispered.
“Gosh,” said the British man. 
“Yes!  Very secret.  Very powerful.  Newly developed with local materials, very hush-hush.  It was so obvious, even our greatest minds didn’t realize it until just within the month.”
“I want to see this,” said the American. 
“You’re the enemy, don’t be silly.  You will see it when we use it on you.”
“But I want to see it now.”
“Yes, show us your secret weapon!” said the British man.  “We promise not to tell anyone.  Go on, show us!”
“Oh all right.  But only because you asked so nicely.”  The German man glanced about conspiratorially, then reached into his pack and rooted around for a moment.  With a grunt of exertion, he extracted an unrounded and irregular object. 
“There!  Is it not beautiful?”
“It’s a brick,” said the American. 
“Three-quarters of a brick,” said the British man helpfully.  “That’s a whole lot more than a half-brick, and those are pretty dangerous, let me tell you.  Top drawer!”
“It’s a regular brick,” said the American.  “There’s buckets of them everywhere!”
“That is the brilliance!” reminded the German.  “Infinite ammunition!  You had best surrender while you still have the chance.”
“That’s stupid,” said the American.  “Anyways, I’ve got a secret weapon too.”
“Show us, show us, please do show us,” begged the British man. 
“No, don’t be silly.  I’ve got to use it on his commanding officer,” he said, pointing at the German.  “It’s too secret to be wasted on showing it to you guys.”
“Come now, don’t be a poor sport,” begged the British man.  “How about a bet?  If you lose the next match, you have to show us your secret weapon.  Come now, don’t be yellow.”
The American considered this.  “Sure.  I don’t lose.”
“You just lost two minutes ago, with the rest of us,” reminded the German. 
“Yeah, but I lost with scissors, and you guys lost with rocks and paper.  That doesn’t count.”
One, two three went their fists. 
“Scissors!” said the American. 
“Rock!” said the German.
“Paper, I suppose,” said the British man.  “Now then, what was this about the secret weapon?”
“I just told you, losing with scissors doesn’t count.  No way am I showing you.”
“I happen to have, in my satchel here,” said the British man, “a packet of biscuits sent to me from my dear old mother.  I will trade you one biscuit for a look at your secret weapon.”
“Well, I dunno…”
“And I’ll show you mine too.”
“Deal!”  The American rooted about in his backpack with genuine enthusiasm, then hauled out an object indescribable. 
“Feast your eyes on this, fellahs,” he said.  “It’s got a calibre of forty-five-forty-eight and it’s breech-reverse-loading-reversable, with a backup backup grip for extra precision during naps.  I can fire this baby backwards, forwards, and while sleeping, and at ninety-nine per something without even having to reload for a real good while!”
“What is it?  It is a bomb?  A toy tank?” asked the German. 
“Perhaps it’s a battleship someone trod upon,” suggested the British man. 
“Not important,” said the American.  “Sure is swell, isn’t it?  You don’t stand a chance.”
“Absolutely,” said the German.  “Is it a gun?”
“Who the hell knows?  Now, limey, you said something about your own secret weapon…”
“Oh yes,” said the British man.  “Quite right, thank you, nearly forgot.  Hold on a tic…”  He removed his helmet and began to sort through its insides. 
“Best place to keep things you don’t want found,” he confided.  “Everybody searches your kit, sure, but they keep out of your hair quite nicely.  Oh, I’d best get you that biscuit while I’m looking….wherever did they go?”
“They are in your hair,” said the German. 
“Oh?  Oh.  Thanks there, had no idea.  Want one still?”
“No thanks,” said the American. 
“Your loss then – aha, here we go!”  An extraordinary bulk of cloth was yanked out of the helmet’s lining.  “Kept it secret down there…lads, meet the next step in warfare: standardized woolly socks!”
“Those are socks?” asked the German. 
“Of course they’re socks.  What else could they be?”
“They look sorta like old towels,” suggested the American. 
“Discarded and ill-fitted mittens,” added the German. 
“Old rags.”
“Stained underpants.”
“I’ll have you lot know that these are the tactical evolution of comfort and warmth in frozen climes,” said the British man.  “I’m twice as comfy as both of you put together as long as I’ve got these on.”
“Then why not put ‘em on?”
“It’s too soon.”
“There’s snow on the ground and the wind’s freezing everyone’s nuts off, just put them on.”
“They keep my ears warm up here.  I can’t waste that.”
“My best friend lost three of his toes to frostbite last night.  Put them on.”
“Not in front of everyone, surely!”
“Three toes?  Geez, that’s hard.”
“Not especially.  First meat we had eaten in months.  A little bit chewy, but succulent.”
“Really?  You tried rats?  Me ‘n Stinky Joe caught a big fat one last night, had some real meat on it, especially around the thighs.”
“Sounds like a girl I knew back home,” observed the British man.  “Terrible temper, ugly face, but a lovely cook.  Pity she ate everything she made herself.”
“Look, this’s getting us nowhere,” said the American.  “We’ve got three counts of treason and the smell of limey’s socks here for our troubles.  One more round and then we head home?”
“So soon?” said the German.  “What if we are shot tomorrow?  We may never get another chance to play the game.”
“You say that every time,” said the British man.  “I think you’re just gloomy.”
“I am losing this war.”
“Thought you said we were all losing it,” said the American. 
“Yes,” said the German.  “But I am losing it slightly harder and faster than the rest of you.  And I am also out of ammunition; I shot the last of it against your barricade on Sunday.”
“So am I,” said the British man.  “Lovely day for it, though.  Too nice out to spoil it with shooting at people.”
“It’s nine below and the sky’s greyer than my granddad,” said the American, who was sure he had bullets left.  Somewhere.  In his locker for sure.  “You have a strange way of pronouncing ‘lousy.’”
“Well, it could be worse, you know.  Times like this you should be grateful for what you have.”
“Yes,” said the German.  “I am grateful for my brick.  I am also grateful for my skin, which has only three bullet holes in it, all too small to be lethal.”
“I’m awfully grateful for my woolly socks.  Or maybe it’s a scarf.  Also, these biscuits are simply delicious.  Sure you don’t want one?”
“No.”
“No.”  The American thought for a minute.  “I’m grateful for my still being alive.  Hey, my best friend got shot last week, but I’m still here.  And then my other pal got shot the day after, but I’m still here.  And I got shot yesterday but all it did was sink a bullet into my secret weapon so the damned thing won’t start up, and I’m still here.”
“That’s the spirit!” said the British man.  “Now, I’d best head back to base before someone charges me with desertion again.”
“We just shoot them now,” said the German.  “And the last few, we haven’t even bothered that.  The snow does the job for us.”
“Come back with us,” offered the American.  “We can take you prisoner or something.  Hey, I’ve always wanted to take someone prisoner.”
The German shook his head.  “I don’t think so.  I still have to try out my brick.  Maybe next time.”
“Can’t say I didn’t give you a fair chance.  Scissors!”
“Rock!”
“Paper!  Oh dear, wait, I picked scissors.  I meant paper though, does that count?”
“Why not?” said the American.  “Now, let’s get the hell out of this dump before one of us decides to shell it.  Merry Christmas, guys.”
“The same to you both.”
“And a jolly New Year!”
The three men hopped the broken-down pieces of the house in three different directions and trudged back to their respective not-homes-away-from-home as it started to snow again. 
By strange coincidence, each had just come within sight of their fortifications when they recalled that they had completely forgotten to get the others any presents. 

“A Three-Man Game,” copyright 2010 Jamie Proctor. 

Canno was seven years old when the candle came down in the wrong place.  That was how it began, the charcoal-burner told him as he went home.  A candle in the wrong place.  Dark winter nights, early nights, and his parents had been fond of books, for all that there were but two big leather-tattered volumes in the house.  They were slow but sure readers and could finish each as the other did, then swap them and start again.  And he and his big sister were small and careless and could have put down a light in some small secret place and forgotten to snuff it, easily. 
Candles, misplaced and forgotten, guttering out alone and cold and neglected.  Or growing angrier and hotter at the slight, then becoming bigger.  Oh so much bigger.  One little candle had swallowed up the whole house, which was still the biggest place in the world to Canno, back then, as the charcoal-burner carried him away from the gawking crowd of the neighbours, showing up too late to the queer house at the edge of the village to help; too late to do anything but sift through the ashes and pocket trinkets. 
Canno was crying, maybe.  The tears were freezing from the cold, or the heat could’ve dried them all up inside.  Or both.  The charcoal-burner’s shoulder was hard bone and cold, all warmth from the fire lost and faded from his sooty skin as the snowflakes melted on it. 
“Ah, now, all burnt up, aren’t you?” he said in his raspy, scorched voice, a calloused and roughened palm touching Canno’s side, feeling where he couldn’t feel anything anymore.  “Yes, you are,” he said, voice neither particularly sympathetic nor uncaring.  “All alone in the world, eh?  No family that isn’t kindled and gone, no friends – not if those at the home were all there were.  You’re alone.  We work with what’s alone.”
The charcoal-burner stopped walking.  They were in the woods, the wide white wildlands where only the charcoal-burners walked, the mysterious burnt men with the white scars and the singed beards, the ones hunched from hauling brush and dusted with ashes, bent under the weight of some great secret no man knew but they.  The trail stretched forwards and back, fading into snowfall both ways. 
“Now you choose, boy.  Yea or nay, or shake or nod if your throat still feels the smoke.  Yea, you travel forwards, move on.  You come to live, and be one of us.  Nay, and I leave you here, to find your way back and make what you may.  Choose, boy.”
Even at seven – especially at seven, children do not shrug aside such things as adults do – Canno knew this was unfair, horribly unfair.  But he was numb in all things, and fear not the cold as he might – he didn’t think he would ever complain of the cold again, not ever, not ever – he wouldn’t stay alone.  He couldn’t stay alone.  And the charcoal-burner was the only other person in all the world. 
He nodded. 
“A choice, boy.  A good one, perhaps.  Now we’ll go, and we’ll get you some sleep.  The night’s long, but not long enough for you to fit a day’s wakening and a rest in at once.”
Canno was asleep before the charcoal-burner took four more steps.  It was not dreamless.  It was not pleasant. 

He awoke in darkness and smoke, and for a moment knew only panic – had he imagined all of that?  Was he still in the house, hearing the flames crackle up the roof above and smelling his sheets beginning to smoulder?
“Wake, boy.”
No, no, the voice was harsh and rough, not like his father’s.  The blanket was sooty and rough, as tough as rock, not the quilt his mother had made.  And the smoke was calmer, smoother, less intense. 
Canno opened his eyes.  Above them was dry timber, shrouded in clay dust, cracked and ancient.  Above that, dense, tufted earth, riddled with roots. 
“Wake, boy.”  There was impatience in the harsh voice, and coldness.  “We have no time to mollycoddle ye.  Ye must work.”
Canno sat up, and knew where he was, by the faint red glow in the air that was greater than the bright light that came from the pipe nodding at the charcoal-burner’s chin.  He was different from the one that had brought Canno in – his beard the greyer and longer, though how much was ash and how much was age was impossible to say; his eyes the more sunken and glittering, his fingers turned black forever.  A hundred hundred greyed lines streaked over his arms and face. 
“Good.  Now, do ye ken where ye are, or do I have to tell ye?”  He hacked a barking laugh without waiting for an answer.  “Of course I do.  Ye be in the New Kiln, boy.  I’m sure ye’ve heard tale of it.  Now, get up.  I’ve a task, and ye will fulfill it.”
Canno didn’t move.  The charcoal-burner leaned over and prodded him hard in the knee with his pipe’s stem.  It was near sharp enough to draw blood, and Canno jumped out of the bed – a crude pile of tattered blankets mounded roughly together – before he even knew what he was doing. 
“Good, good.  Now listen, and listen well-close now, better than ye did to your mater nor yer father neither: ye are here to work.  Work and learn, ye ken?  Ye have no family.  Ye have no friends.  All ye have is us, and only as long as ye act as we do, and that means work.  And if ye work here, ye will follow three rules above all else.”  He put his pipe in his mouth again and took a pull on it, obviously warming to his words. 
“First, ye will not touch what ye are not told to touch, whether it be wood, dirt, clay, stone, flame, or food.  Ever.  Or ye’ll take a beating the likes of which ye can’t imagine.  This is great work, delicate work, boy, and too much care be needed in its making for the likes of your clumsy hands to go spoiling years in one moment’s stupidity.”
“Second, ye shall always do what ye are told by yer superiors.  Ye will know who they are.  Ye will know who they are not.  And right now, they be everyone.  Ye will not argue, ye will not spare time to agree or acknowledge, ye will do, and do so fast.”
“Third.  This be as important as the first, though ye may ken it not.  Ye will never.  Ever.  Ever.  Ever speak to those not of our lot.  Ye ken?  You speak not to any man nor woman nor child that lives outside these mounds and kilns.  When yer older, if ye’re older, ye will speechify for trade and business, but for now, with your mouth as raw and untrained and prone to flapping as it is; ye.  Will.  Be.  Silent.  Ye ken?”
Canno nodded.  There wasn’t much else he could do. 
The charcoal-burner smiled.  The lines around his mouth crinkled oddly, twisted into a shape they weren’t familiar with.  “No ye don’t.  But ye will.  Now go and find Keplak Cinders.  Go down the tunnel, take ye no turns till ye reach fresh air.  He’ll be out there, near the woodpiles.  Get him to running ye messages, so ye learn the land’s lay.  And fast now, mind ye.  Go!”
Canno went, head spinning, lurching from wall to wall.  He burst into air so clean and cold that it made his teeth ache and his eyes dwindle, and stumbled his way to a giant, brownish blob that was probably a woodpile. 
“What’s this now?” boomed the woodpile.  A beard formed on it as Canno squinted in puzzlement.  “Speak up lad!  Who sent you and what are you here for?”
Canno opened his mouth, and much to his surprise, all that came out was a small croak, a hiss of air puffing down aching passages. 
“Hah, fire-mute, eh?  Don’t speak, I know.  Smoked out… you must be the boy Half-leg brought in last night.  Ashmaster sent you, did he?  Don’t speak, nod or shake – yes, he did I’ll bet, old greybeard.  Likely sent you for messages, eh?  Hah!”  The giant’s laugh was like a thunderclap to the face, ruffling Canno’s hair with its force.  “No good having a messenger with no mouth.  No lad, you can carry some kindling for me.  Gather it from there – see where I point? – and take it to here.  Stack it neat now, and don’t go too fast; we don’t want mistakes and we don’t want you tipping over and spearing yourself on something.  Go!”

Canno went, and it wasn’t until many days later that his mouth healed well enough to run messages for Keplak.  By then he knew the layout of the place well enough – three great charcoal mounds, half-barrow, half-hall, half-furnace all, each lived in even as it was kept burning.  The little, less-than-a-decade-old and still-expanding New Kiln, the three-century-old Younger Mound, which was bigger than the village his family’s house had once stood on the outskirts of, and the ancient, older-than-time Elder Mound, which was so big he couldn’t tell how big it was, only that trying to walk a full loop around it made his feet hurt and shouldn’t be attempted. 
He worked at many things.  He lifted kindling for Keplak Cinders, and later logs.  He ran messages, first from Keplak to others, then from the others to others still, and then from anyone to anywhere, because he knew all the places.  He learned to tend fires and let them neither die nor billow out of scope.  He learned how to pick up charcoal, move charcoal, and store charcoal without giving it so much as an errant bump.  And he learned all these things well and fast, yet it was never enough. 
“Too slow!” Garren Ashmaster would spit as Canno brought him a sample of fresh charcoal to be examined with his one still-working, ever-critical eye.  “This is nearly cold!  I need it warm!  Too slow!”  Often he’d throw the coal at Canno as he left – invariably, still warm. 
“Take care lad,” warned Keplak.  “Those logs’re stacked skewed; they’ll come down on you sure as stone won’t melt.  Best to stack ‘em again now, hurry up.”
“Bah!” said Mirmar the head lumberjack, swatting him on the head.  “Too slow!  Where were you five minutes ago, boy?  Speed up!”
Canno sped up.  He took care.  He found that doing both at once was immeasurably difficult, but he did it, he and the others boys that lived in the New Kiln’s cramped, dry interior.  There were four of them, all as withdrawn and wan as he (there had been a fifth, but he vanished before long had passed – he had been quick to boast, and Canno suspected he’d been caught talking to strangers), so much so that between errands and their own shyness, more than three months had passed before they exchanged each other’s names. 
“Plalt,” said Plalt, the skinny one.  He was nearly as quick at the chores as Canno was, but far twitchier.  He needed to take care much more often. 
“Tagmus,” said Tagmus, the big one.  He was tall, yes.  He was broad, yes.  He was not fat – at least, not any more.  The thin gruel they sipped wasn’t near enough to keep them fat, not least with their work. 
“Hullger,” said Hullger, the pale one.  Hullger did little.  Very little.  He was quite good at it, Canno had noticed – he’d move just a hair slower than he needed to, be just a bit more fussy than he had to, anything to slow down the day.  Canno envied him one moment, despised him the next. 
They didn’t get much farther than introductions.  The very next day, their workloads were near-doubled, and their sleeping quarters were moved.  “You are here to work, not to chatter,” Garren Ashmaster told them all as they were separated.  He never smiled unless someone else had stopped, Garren did.  The others were different shades of dour, but he was diabolical. 
Keplak was different.  Keplak was the nearest thing Canno had to a friend.  Keplak was the one who suggested that the boys be taken into town for the next trading. 
“They’ll talk,” Garren argued. 
“Of what?  They know nothing, not yet.  Or are you afraid they’ll speak of the quality of Utu’s cooking?”
“They will talk, and that will teach them to talk later, when they know secrets.  No, no, they should not go!”
“Or,” said Keplak, “they will learn to not talk.  And they had best do so now, while they know nothing should they fail, eh?”
Garren fussed and groused a bit longer, but his heart was no longer in it.  And so it was that Canno found himself sitting on a wagon with the other three boys, legs dangling as Half-leg piloted them into town, forever half-a-step ahead of the plodding mule that towed them.  If the charcoal-burner who had rescued Canno had any other name, no one seemed to know it. 
“Remember,” they’d been told as the wagon left the broad, treeless clearing that the charcoal mounds squatted in like sleeping tortoises, “say no word.  Not even to Half-leg.  Not even to each other.”
So they didn’t speak.  Instead, they silently competed in a game of who could flick a pebble the furthest behind the cart.  Tagmus won by a good foot and a half with a cunning ricochet that he insisted after the trip wasn’t luck. 
The town was strange.  The children stared, the adults stood back, the trading with Half-leg was slow and reluctant, with many awkward pauses and hurried, failed attempts at easing the silence with senseless remarks on the parts of the townsfolk. 
The charcoal-burners keep secrets, they whispered, the sound arising from the air rather than any particular mouths.  Great secrets.  Treasure?  Gold?  Magic?  I heard they guard a sleeping king, I hear tale of angel’s graves, I know of portals to fiery pits and wrathful demons.  They keep secrets. 
“Hello,” said a little girl to Canno, interrupting the sounds that he wasn’t listening to. 
He nodded at her. 
“It’s rude not to say hello back,” she explained to him.  “My momma told me that.”
Canno made a face and cut across his throat with his hand.  She frowned.  “Got a cold?  Daddy had a sore throat once.  He couldn’t talk at all.”  She scratched her nose and examined the cart.  “Daddy said you hide treasure in your mound.  Have you seen any treasure?”
Canno shook his head. 
“Not even a little?  A tiny bit of gold at all?”
Canno made a face. 
“Oh don’t be mean!  Fine then.  Keep your stupid treasure, you dirty dumb thing!”  She stomped on the ground and ran away.  She hadn’t yet made it out of sight before incredible pain reached Canno’s ear and dragged him over to Half-leg’s side. 
“I didn’t save you for you to give away our secrets, boy,” the man whispered, low and fast and threatening.  “By word or otherwise.  Now hush up.  One more incident like this and Garren’ll know.  You want Garren to know?”
Canno started to shake his head, then paused. 
“Good boy.  You keep still now.  Don’t move a muscle ‘till we’re back home or you’ll get a lot worse than a pinched ear.”
Canno didn’t participate in the second round of the rock-flicking contest.  He didn’t miss much; the others were too terrified to play well, and so it petered out miserably halfway back, comfier though the return journey was with bags of wheat and barley and other goods to sit atop rather than the hard piles of charcoal. 
“Remember,” Half-leg said, leading him aside as the others hurried back to their pallets, “you say nothing.  Not a word, not a gesture.  What secret we keep here isn’t for you to know.  Not yet.  And it is never yours to give away.  Understood?”
“Yes,” said Canno. 
It wasn’t really a lie.  Not really. 
He understood perfectly what he was being told.  He just wasn’t promising to do it. 

Six years after his promise, Canno was beginning to grow slightly more hair on bits of his face than there should be.  His voice had dropped into a pit and never fallen out, though it kept an edge of harshness from his work amidst the burning wood and the fire at home so long ago – sometimes he still frightened himself when he spoke, back bracing against an expected scolding from one of the senior charcoal-burners. 
There were other little boys now, two of them.  One, Yemmic, he had witnessed being brought in by Mirmar, who had found him wandering the woods in a daze.  He’d tried to bite and scratch and had understood no human words when he first came, but now he fetched and carried as obediently as Canno had, once upon a time.  The other was little more than a face that he occasionally ordered to bring him fuel when he was tending a fire. 
Tending fires was all he did now it seemed.  Somehow, along the way, he and Tagmus, Hullger, and Plalt had been split apart, separated along unseen lines and sent to learn different portions of the trades.  Tagmus laboured under Mirmar to chop the wood and heave it in; Hullger laboured hard for the first time in many years under Keplak’s watchful eye; and Plalt learned to be the fast, roaming hands of Half-leg, whose peg troubled him more every winter. 
A shadow fell across Canno’s back, followed by a sharp poke with a pipe handle.  “How burns the fires?  Speak ye up!”
Canno had been hand-picked by Garren, for what reason he could not tell.  Perhaps the Ashmaster required a handy whipping boy at all times, perhaps he was too old to watch the charcoal smoulder as long as he wished to.  Whatever reason, Canno spent his days and nights in observation now, in memorizing and realizing the patterns of the coals and burnings, in tasting a smoke’s thickness and hearing the whistling sound of a fire that needed banking, in finding and decoding the tiny scraped runes and messages that charcoal-burners years past had left on the timbers to help along his kind years later.  He worked in the Younger Mound now, a maze that seemed all but endless, a warren of tunnels and burning pits rigged carefully, ventilation tilted just so, where one careless handful of dirt could ruin fires left burning for decades or suffocate all within.
“They burn well,” said Canno.  Garren had done one good thing for him: it was near-impossible for him to find his own voice harsh as long as the old charcoal-burner was near. 
“Bah!  Details, mind ye!”
Canno forced himself not to flinch at the second, heavier jab as he thought his way through the last few hours.  “The pine layer has become heavy.  The clay grade is constant.  There are notes jotted down that appear to be counts of trees needed to complete the pile – we are two-thirds through their total.  The charcoal burns steady, and should be ready in another eight months to a year.”
“Pah!  And it took ye that long?  I learned that much just at a glance!”  Garren spat in disgust.  “Details, boy, details!  Ye fuss over details like an old hag, when what ye’re looking for be as plain as the nose on yer face!  Away with ye and yer details, and go to fetch me a good fine coal from our outer layers.”
“Where from?” asked Canno, and knew it was the wrong question precisely too late. 
Garren turned near purple.  “DETAILS!  Pah!  Perhaps I was wrong when I kenned ye had some semblance of a brain jellying its way about yer skull!  Forget the coal!  Get ye to the heart of the Younger Mound, get ye to my pallet, and ye’re not to move from its side ‘till ye can name me each and every coal within six feet of it.  If ye must learn, ye will learn now!  GO!”
Whatever worries and resentment Canno had felt were washed away in a tide of enthusiasm that he was careful to keep hidden as he dashed away down the tunnels, excitement building in his veins like a second heartbeat.  To the heart of the mound.  To see the secrets, to see what the charcoal-burners guarded so close and so near, to know what no one outside of the mound did…
Finding the heart chamber took some time.  Mustering the self-control to let his heartbeat drop back down to something normal so he could enter the room without hyperventilating all the meagre oxygen that remained within it took longer – the Ashmaster must have had cinderheaps for lungs to ignore it in his sleep. 
Inside, there was almost no light, no heat-glow at all.  Canno reached down and plucked up a coal, held it in his hand.  There was warmth, just above the temperature of the air.  Faint, but there. 
Warmth, and nothing else.  No secrets here.
It was two days before Garren came for him.  Canno’s throat was becoming too dry to speak through when the report was demanded, his finger’s numbed with ashes and heat blisters that had built up over patient hours of careful grasping, his only means of identifying the invisible coals in the darkness. 
“I can name them all,” he said. 
“Good.  Do it.”
By the time he was done speaking, Canno’s voice was no more there than it had been after he’d been plucked from the embers of his home by Half-leg. 
“Good,” grinned Garren.  “Good.  Ye’ve made a start.  Perhaps we’ll have ye out of here and in the Elder Mound someday after all, instead of just throwing yer bones to it.”
Canno croaked out something before he could stop himself. 
“Yes, yes, good, bone would spoil it, yes.  Good to know ye can still think.  Now go and sleep.  But not too long; ye’ve work to do.”
Canno brooded even as he dreamt, thoughts looming through the sea of sleep like icebergs.  No secrets after all in the mound’s heart, only the dark and barely-there remnants of coals.  How long had the Ashmaster and that before him kept them burning, barely-alive?  No secrets there.  None to explain the whispers, the rumours, the awe.  What were the charcoal-burners hiding?
Canno forgot what he’d been dreaming of when he awoke.  But some part of him remembered that: the charcoal-burners were hiding something.  Not him. 

Canno did go to the Elder Mound someday – someday was more than a decade of labour away.
People came and left – the children grew up, and he had two of them working under him (‘children’ was a broader age category than he would’ve said it to be, a decade ago), examining the coals as he walked the long roads and trails to scout for new lumber-spots, nodding hellos to startled stranger-eyes that followed his tracks with wonder at this legend that tread their paths.  Garren was less and less sneering in his speech, though he remained spiteful.  Mirmar had been struck by a tree, and Tagmus now was the chief lumberjack, doling out errands and harsh language to the young.  Plalt and his assistants managed the trips to town, and Half-leg spent more and more of his time warming his stump in the fiercer heat of the Younger Mound.  Hullger’s softened limbs were corded now, though try as he might, Keplak could still beat him and any other at arm wrestling simultaneously. 
He could talk in town now on the days he went with Plalt, albeit of no secrets.  Still they asked, still they stared, asking with their eyes, their minds. 
“Come in then,” coughed Garren.  “Come on!  Take us in.”
Canno shifted more of the weight of the Ashmaster onto his shoulder, walking arm in arm with the old man as they tottered their way into the mouth of the strangely small opening that was the Elder Mound’s only entrance.  Canno had to duck to enter – Garren didn’t, hunched as he was. 
Inside was all but darkness.  No coals glowed in the deep dark of the Elder Mound – they smouldered, smothering themselves under their own smoke, keeping their burning to a dull roar.  A glance and a sniff told Canno’s senses of fires that were older than the entire Younger Mound, here at the very freshest rim of the mound’s vast bulk. 
“Inward,” wheezed Garren.  “I will direct the turns.  Now, get ye going.”
Slowly, slowly, much more slowly than Garren would’ve liked (but out of necessity – the old man was near-toppling even at a crawl), they moved inwards and outwards, back and forth.  Sometimes Canno swore they were moving in circles, sometimes he half-imagined that the passages had closed behind them.  He gave up trying to keep track, and resigned himself to walking as the halls grew ever darker and smokier.  Air vents were few and tiny, a mole’s warren chewed into the ceiling without rhyme or reason that all his knowledge could divine. 
“Every one of us comes this way,” Garren said. 
Canno resisted the urge to start at the words, coming unbidden, without instruction. 
“Every one of us,” the Ashmaster repeated.  “Ye’re earlier than most.  Yer fellows will be along inside the next eight years.  First under thirty to walk these halls since I, mind ye well it daren’t go to yer head.”
Canno nodded.  Talking still pained him since his examination of the coals in the heart of the Younger Mound.  His voice was harsher than any in all the kilns now. 
“Early, but it has to come some day for all.  All of us.  It’s time ye knew, as we all must.  Ye’re to be the Ashmaster one day, and ye must know of what ye speak and don’t speak when ye talk to the others, the outside-folks.”  Wearied as he was, Garren’s voice managed to dredge up some extra bit of venom for those last few words. 
“They speak of us, ye ken this well.”
Canno nodded.
“They buy our charcoal, trade for it, ken ye?  We make enough to let us live, but in return they get…. Answer me, boy.”
Canno’s throat felt clogged.  It always did.  “Fuel.”
“Aye.  But think ye: are they not blanketed in it?  Look about these forests boy, and ye cannot help but tread over fine pine on every other step.”  He paused for a coughing fit, while Canno silently supported him, feeling his ribs beat violently against his palms, so twiglike. 
“Nay,” he managed, resuming his shuffling walk.  “No fuel their wish.  They think it be, but what they think and what is so be not so the same, eh?  Always is.  Tell me, for ye has been outside more lately than I: what do they say that we keep in our barrow-kiln here?  What do they think we hold, eh?  More than fuel, surely.”
“Treasure.  Prisoners.  Magic.  Ancient things.”
“Aye, aye, aye.  And now ye’ll see what is real and what isn’t, and we’ll show their fables what the truth is.” 
They stood before a dead end, a tumbledown earthen wall. 
“Clear it ‘way, and be with care.  The heart be beyond.”
The rubble was old, and crumbled easily under Canno’s hands.  He wondered a little, that such disrepair would be allowed in such a special spot, but then all was lost and forgotten as Garren Ashmaster drew himself up straight and dragged him inside by the hand. 

The heart of the Elder Mound was around him. 
It was small, maybe teen foot across. 
It was dim, with a tiny beam of light filtering from above, a flue the size of his fist that wound its way up through how many metres of sod and timber and coals he could not imagine. 
It was almost completely bare.  A small stone fireplace sat in its centre.  A crude, small, ordinary ring of stones that Canno himself had fashioned more than once on a night spent on the trek. 

“Now ye see,” said Garren.  “Now do ye understand as well?”
Canno considered this. 
“No,” he said.
“None do, at first.  Listen then.”  The Ashmaster shuffled over to the fireplace, began pulling lumps of charcoal from his clothing, fill it up. 
“The mound went up long ago.  No one remembers why.  The charcoal-burning was all there was at first, as ye say, but then there came more later, when the town was built and rebuilt and yet we stayed here, building more upon more.  We became older than they, ye ken?  They began at the same time, but we are hoarier.”
“Now.  They began to think of us as things of awe and to be afeared of, ye ken?  Such happens.  Such is helpful.  They direct this upon us, they take up all their dreams and nightmares and fantasies, and they bestow them upon us.  Keeps them from wandering, ye ken?”  The Ashmaster chuckled – or maybe wheezed – as he struck flint to tinder and set a piece of cloth alight.  “Wealth?  I will tell ye what wealth is: nothing.  I will tell what comfort is: nothing.  There is but one thing a man wants, however much wealth and comfort he possesses, and that is to have power over another man.  And we have the power of them all, by right of this fire.”  He slapped one of the rocks carelessly with his hand.  “It be empty.  It be useless.  It be nothing more than some old rocks, no elder than any other ye may have used yerself out in the forest for a night’s warmth.  Nothing special, nothing necessary.  But it holds ye in its grasp, don’t it?  Ye hunger for something more, something that must be here.  As do they.  But there’s nothing here, be they know it not, and so all of their dreams come here to this place and serve us, all their hopes and fears and blighted fancies, all of them right here, under our palms.”  The last words were a sword, echoed with a stab of the pipe at the fireplace. 
“Now,” said Garren, recovering himself somewhat.  He held out the light, and Canno took it, watching the little flame creep its way towards his fingers. 
“Burn them.”

Canno thought, and looked, and watched, and stood.  And then he dropped the light to the floor and placed one foot over it, swivelled it three times from side to side. 
Garren did not look surprised.  He was grateful to the old man for that; he’d have been disappointed if he fell apart so easily. 
“Most wait ‘till it reaches their fingers,” he said.  His voice was flat, strangely so – almost all the spittle and scorched heat had dropped away without warning.  “They wait ‘till they’re near-burnt themselves, and then they light it.”
“Don’t want to,” said Canno. 
“Bigger than that, eh?  A fine thinker, boy.”  He laughed, a strange sound, a wrong one.  It bounced around the cramped little heart of the mound like a big dog in a small room, and it didn’t sound funny at all by the time it was through.  “I ask you to burn the imaginary, and you say it’s pointless.  Maybe it is.”  He laughed again, louder, hurting Canno’s ears with the sharpness of the sound.  “It is! Hah!  Ye kenned it!  Right on the spot!  Good boy!  No need for the flame, no need for the ceremony, when all is but ash and illusion!  Good!  Just to cut ye and rub the ash in then, and ye are Ashmaster beyond me.”  Up came his hand, clutching a handful of old fire-leavings, old tinders and coals mixed to nothing.  A knife glinted in his other, silver over the palm.    “Give me yer arm.”
“Don’t want to,” repeated Canno, taking painful precision with each syllable. 
“What.” said Garren.  There was no question in it, just an expression of emotion. 
“Keep it,” said Canno, lining up words.  Each one hurt, but keeping them in hurt more.  Especially after all those years.  “Keep it.  Keep all the labour, all the ceremony, all the fuss.  Keep it.  Keep your lies and half-truths and lead-ons all you want.  Keep them.  But you won’t keep this.  And you won’t keep burning their dreams.” 
And with that he plucked up the light from the floor and blew on it, and was not surprised at all when it burst into flame again.  Garren was old, and had let him perform his duties one time too many, let his senses dull to what was obvious to younger eyes.  Canno knew how to make any spark live again. 
Garren must have seen what he was planning – there he came with the knife, a wordless screech soaring out from between gummed lips, all three of them clattering to the floor in different directions as Canno shoved him down with one hand.  With the other, he raised up the light, up to the roof.
Garren screamed at him to stop, or maybe just screamed.  Either way, Canno ignored him.  He thrust the light into the roots, and began to drag the Ashmaster away. 

Finding the exit was easier than he’d thought.  The first licks of his newborne flame had stirred the air, set it a-flowing in ways he knew much moreso than the stale and dead breath he’d walked into.  Carrying Garren out was no trouble either – he’d practically done it on the way in. 
There were shouts, screams, calls all around as he left the Elder Mound; already the flames licked from the roof, spread in the cold wind.  Before long they’d jump to the others.  Slow but sure, hotter than any hell, that was a true charcoal burn, a glutton consuming a thousand-year feast.  There would be no stopping this blaze, but plenty of time to avoid it, to abandon the warrens of the Kiln and the Mounds, to leave the dreamcatchers before they fell to pieces and let their captive imaginations free. 
He laid Garren down on the ground – the old man had fallen into a stupor at some point during the journey, perhaps from exertion, perhaps from lack of air, perhaps in terror – and walked away, into the trees.  The heat followed him, decreasing only reluctantly as he travelled.  There would be no battling that fire, not with water nor dirt nor all the power in the world. 
Canno saw another man on the trail.  He was near town, after all. 
As he drew close, he saw the man’s eyes go strange, and he burst out laughing. 
“Nothing, nothing,” he reassured the man.  “It’s nothing.”
“What is?”
“Back there.  It’s nothing.”  A blank stare was his only reply.  “Never mind.  You’ll see, for a change.  You’ll see soon, all of you.”  And all your dreams let free. 
Canno walked south.  The cold he didn’t mind, not anymore.  But he would be happy to go where he would not need the light of fires. 

“Kindling” copyright 2010 Jamie Proctor. 

It was a cooler, calmer sort of December evening.  The stars were right, the moon was bright, and the planets all spun in a row, tilting just so, and up came Tarrow from beneath the old rock cairn, a thousand years of care-worn, weather-smoothed stone thrown away like old rags.  Up he came and up he came, big-backed, dirt-smeared, filth clinging to his legs from the dirt that he had tainted around him in his long imprisonment.  He shook his mane and flexed his paws and grinned with each and every one of his teeth.  The land had moved around a bit, and where once his barrow-prison had lain in a field, it now sat on a little island in a small lake.  Short grass grew where weeds had wandered once. 
“I am Tarrow!” he bellowed out to whoever might be near, and whoever might be far, too.  “My father was a black night in midwinter and my mother was a cold stone!  I have eaten more men than can be counted on all my fingers and theirs too!  And I am awake!”
He waited. 
A duck quacked at him from the pond and swam away, bill searching for little weeds. 
Tarrow belched, grunted, and hauled himself out and away, wading through the lake.  It came up to his hips at the deepest, and half its waters turned black from the caked muck that washed away from his body.  He emerged dripping, and as yet unchallenged.  Strange noises surrounded him, now that he paused to hear – a constant murmur and rumble in the air around him, a hum of many.  A city, maybe? 
Then Tarrow looked up.  And up.  And further up.  Far, far above him loomed strange shapes, little mountains with steep sides and shiny walls, glowing with a thousand lights, towers he’d never imagined imagining. 
A city?  But a city at night.  That was still good.  They had lights aplenty, but they’d be busy in revelry.  Safe as prey still, but strange with their castles.  Maybe they’d had giants make them.  Strange, such a chill in the air with no snow on the ground.  Wasn’t it winter?
Tarrow pushed through brush, stamped down footpaths.  The strange, spiky little grey pebbles they’d been lined with stuck in his toenails and made him itch and scrape, and he vowed to eat his first victim most painfully.  The arms first, of course.  Then the legs, then the belly, and then the head, because it was crunchy.  Yes, that would do.  Do so nicely and very well.  So preoccupied did Tarrow become in his plans that he very nearly missed noticing the strange new path he’d come to, a flat hard black one that felt smooth and gritty against his horny, rock-hard feet.  On the other side, humans walked in soft clothing, uncovered by armour, weak little peasants. 
“Food!” roared Tarrow, stepping farther into the black path, and it was only by the sheerest of luck that the big metal roaring thing that passed along it at a speed impossible didn’t take off his toes.  He lurched backwards in surprise, ears full of its calamitous wails, and was nearly taken by another that passed behind him, clipping his tail and spinning him like a giant, hairy top.  Whirling, he stumbled his way to the other side of the black path and collapsed, nearly on top of two humans. 
“Watch it,” snapped one, waving a bit of strange metal in his hand.  To Tarrow’s nostrils, it smelt like smoke and bitterness. 
“Careful there,” warned the other. 
“Too late for that, isn’t it?  And keep your mind on the present – hand me that wallet.”
“Fine, fine.”  The human gingerly removed a bit of leathery square-cut thing from his clothing and gave it to the other. 
“Thanks,” said the other, tucking it away.  “Pleasure doing business with you.  Don’t call the cops or I’ll turn around and shoot.”  He turned and walked off, pocketing the metal thing. 
“Are you all right?” asked the other human of Tarrow, who was still prone. 
“I am Tarrow,” said Tarrow.  “I crack ice with my breath and stone with my fist.  I have bitten through iron and steel and have thrown my enemies leagues with a single heave.”
“Well, here, have some change.”  The human tossed a single, shiny coin onto Tarrow’s stomach, and walked away. 
Tarrow examined it.  It didn’t seem to change. 
He needed counsel. 
“Human,” he asked of a particularly small specimen, walking by quickly, “answer or I will eat your skull: what does this change?”
It walked faster, without looking back.  Tarrow’s double-take prevented him from consuming the impertinent thing. 
“What does this change?” he demanded of the next passer-by. 
“I don’t have any, sorry, good luck, see you later,” said the human.  It didn’t look directly at him, and it didn’t look back. 
Tarrow picked up the next human by the neck.  “ANSWER, frost eat your bones!  What does this change?!”
“Police!” screamed the human.  “Help!  Assault!  Theft!  Armed robbery!”
“Which one?” asked Tarrow. 
“You have the right to waive all rights,” said a human.  There was something special about that voice, a firmness, a sureness.  Tarrow had heard that before, usually from humans with sharp weapons just before they tried to cut his belly out.  He turned around, and saw that it was coming from a human wearing some sort of strange hat.  It was holding one of the little metal smoky things. 
“I am Tarrow, consumer of men!” he told it.  It was probably some sort of hero, and deserved a boast.  “I will crack your ribs and break your liver.”
The human’s metal smoker yelled at him, his forehead stung, and he fell asleep without meaning to.  When he woke up, he was in a room made from grey, cold, smooth stone that crumbled at his touch, secured with black-painted metal bars, which bent under his hands.  He wandered into an arched hall, stomping with anger, following the air current to the exit. 
“Your walls cannot hold me!” he roared at the human at the desk.  It too bore the strange hat. 
“You’re out,” it told him.  “Eighteen hours holding for your first offence and don’t try it again.  Damned lucky you’re obviously not right in the head.”
Tarrow’s belly grumbled, but the human had another metal smoker at its side, and he didn’t want to waste more time sleeping. 
“I will return and tear down your prison,” he said, as he left.  The human rolled its eyes. 
It was only when he stepped outside that Tarrow first began to realize just how strange a place he was in.  The smooth grey stone was underfoot everywhere, divided by the great black-grit paths and pooling about the feet of the great metal mountains, towers and halls grown beyond all sanity and all belief.  He’d just left one of the smallest, and for the first time in his life, Tarrow felt small.  In answer to this, he clasped onto the first thing he had in his head, a distraction, a purpose. 
“What does this change?” he asked a human sitting on the sidewalk. 
“Eh?”  It stirred in its blankets, squinted a shrunken eye at him.  It was nearly as filthy as he was. 
“This,” said Tarrow, holding out the coin.  “What does it change?”
“Hmm,” said the human.  “Right.  Well, this is what it does.  See, you have that, right?  So you’re worth something.”  It took the coin.  “There.  Now you’re not worth anything.  That’s what it changes.”
“Give me my coin,” said Tarrow. 
“No.  You wanted to learn something, you paid for it.  Now go away; this is my corner.”
Tarrow reached out with his hands ready to throttle, but the human with the strange hat was still watching him from the window, and he contented himself with spitting on the blanketed human’s feet.  Its shoes bubbled. 
“I am Tarrow,” he reminded himself.  “I can chew boulders and split trees with a flick.  I will leave and find smaller pastures, with easier flesh and no metal smokers.”
Hours later, Tarrow was lost.  The endless maze of the towers blotted out the sky, and the sun was lost in a haze of grey grime that put the dirt under his nails to shame.  The winds bent strangely around the buildings, and there were no trees for him to check the moss on. 
And he was getting very hungry.  There were no strange-hatted humans about, perhaps it would be safe to chance a quick meal.  He ducked into a dark crevice between buildings, lay lurking for a time, and snatched a human into his grasp with one great paw. 
“Meat!” he growled. 
“Mugger!” yelled the human, and held up a little metal cylinder that shot bright agony into Tarrow’s eyes, burning them like a plague of fire ants.  He dropped his prey and roared in pain, stumbled and fell against a metal box filled with refuse, which bruised his sides.  A cat hissed at him. 
“Food,” groaned Tarrow.  “I need food.  Food.”  He ate something out of the refuse box that was far too salty, and promptly brought it up again.  The cat, tragically, evaded his grasp. 
“You okay, man?” asked a ragged human near the alley’s rear. 
“Food,” said Tarrow, and ate it.  The fibers of its clothing stuck in his teeth and tangled his tongue, and the meat tasted rank and strange, making his mouth feel numb and clumsy.  He stumbled back into the main road in a daze, following it with his feet as his eyes wandered at random.  Metal roaring things everywhere, humans everywhere, all not looking at him or at each other.  He felt even smaller among them than he had against the towers that blotted him in. 
Except they weren’t blotting him in anymore. 
“Hah!” laughed Tarrow, legs pumping like pistons, charging him forwards to the suddenly-revealed horizon, joy in his blackened, rock-hard heart.  There it was: the way out, the end of the metal and stone city that never ended, the way to trees – yes, there were trees, small and twisted and blighted but trees yes – and water and freedom. 
“Hah!” laughed Tarrow, as he vaulted the black road, dodging a metal roaring thing, hearing it scream at him.  He plunged into the tamed, sad thing that passed for a wilderness as humans yelled at him. 
“Hah!” yelled Tarrow, tearing down saplings in his haste. 
“Oh,” said Tarrow, as he came to a very familiar lake.  “Oh.  Oh.”  The ruin of his barrow leered at him from its other side. 
He stood there, staring at it, trying to think of a way out, something to stop him from doing what he was about to.  Nothing presented itself, argue as fiercely as he could while his legs slogged through the mire of the lake’s waters.  It was still fouled from his earlier passage. 
“I am Tarrow,” said Tarrow, as he stood in front of the broken stones.  They seemed much smaller than they had when he had broken free just one day ago.  “My father was a black night in midwinter, but this is no winter, and the nights are bright.  My mother was a cold stone, but cold stones surround me and they are not she.  I have eaten more men than I can count on all my fingers and toes and theirs too, but now I cannot stomach so much as one.  I am Tarrow, and I am through.”
As the last words left his lips he stepped forwards, unwilling, unwanting, and lay down.  The rocks closed over his head and sank down into the earth, and the grass was left undisturbed over Tarrow’s head, without so much as a scrap of fur left behind. 
Not one soul turned to mark the cairn’s passing, then or ever. 

“Tarrow,” Copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor. 

Norman Sullivan walked into his apartment and took off his coat, brushing flower petals from its surface that had adhered as he walked by the bushes outside the building.  As the jacket passed by his face on its way to the coat-stand, he couldn’t smell the roses.
Norman couldn’t smell the roses, and it was because of this that he did not stand there, stopped flat for a moment as memories arose of fourteen summers ago, of Betty Newmarket, and of how she’d never once gone outside without brushing herself with a whiff of that rose-scented perfume of hers.  Just a hint, a touch, enough to rise gently above the smell of her skin – and how quickly that had overpowered the roses indoors, in her room.  He hadn’t thought about those days for years and years, but they were lying right underneath the delicate membrane of his surface thoughts, just waiting for the right trigger, the small and soft scent that he was waiting for; the trigger to walk his feet right to the desk, to the phonebook, to the page, to the number he hadn’t looked at for so very long.
But Norman couldn’t smell the roses, and so his coat went onto the hook in a businesslike manner, efficiently, smoothly, no pause for recollection, no fuss, no muss.  Norman couldn’t smell the roses, or much else, and he hadn’t been able to since eighteen weeks and three days ago, on the day that he hadn’t asked the street man the question.  The street man had worn a ragged coat and broken gloves and a battered and beaten hat with holes in it, and he had asked Norman for change, and as Norman pressed a dollar into the street man’s hand Norman had not asked him the question, which was “why?”
Norman hadn’t asked the street man the question, and it was because of this that he had not watched the man’s eyes widen at the word, because of this that he had not stood and listened as out of the street man’s mouth came words to challenge his word, from under his bruised hat and about his gesturing and cracked gloves.  The street man’s story washed over him, a story so very real and ordinary.  He spoke of things that Norman was amazed at, of trips to places Norman had barely heard of in atlases, of people met and conversations held that Norman barely understood.  He spoke of things that Norman recognized so very deeply, of the crunchiest toast with the finest jam of all, which, he said, was strawberry, of the grumpy tragedy of being thirteen and laid up alone on a Friday night with measles.  He spoke of things that tied him to the street and the ground and the world and Norman in a manner that made him so very real, the realest thing Norman had ever seen and then some, to tell you the truth. 
But Norman hadn’t asked the street man the question, and so he had continued on his way with a quick nod and a good-luck, and as he hurried away with the hunched shoulders of the aimlessly guilty he had risked back a single, furtive glance of hapless woe, and as his head turned back he had walked straight into a lamppost, seeing stars and cracking his nose in a manner that stuffed it up beyond all recognition.  Norman hadn’t asked the question, said the word, or said any words at all that day, because he hadn’t heard the message. 
Norman hadn’t heard the message that morning as he listened to the tape on his answering machine.  His girlfriend had broken up with him on tape, by phone, separated by two machines and a city from him for the safety of sorrow’s sake, and he had listened to the message through of the litany of sins and mistakes and accusations and as the very final second of the tape ticked by he hadn’t heard the whispered message, which was “I’m sorry.”
Norman hadn’t heard the message, and it was because of this that he hadn’t sat there, alone in the bright morning sunlight pouring in through the windows that was so much lonelier than the darkest night, as he listened to that message five more times, one for each sense so he could drink in the whole story, the end of which was a crucial message of “I’m sorry.”  And then he listened to it once more, to be sure that this very precious message in a bottle wasn’t his imagination, wasn’t a figment, a strange sight in a sea far greater than he could imagine, and he thought alone in his room for one hour, making him late to work by exactly that amount.  But he was odd that day – strangely content if not cheerful – and so the words flowed freely from him, if sparingly, all day long. 
But Norman hadn’t heard the message, and so he had sat up after he heard the tape through to its end – the end he missed, you see – and he went to work.  And all day long at work, the longest day of his life, he did not say a single word.  Nor did he after work.  Norman hadn’t heard the message, hadn’t listened again, because he hadn’t tried the muffin. 
Norman hadn’t tried the muffin two years before that as he unpacked the sparse lunch that his girlfriend (the very same, the very same) had sent with him to work at the construction site.  He opened up the small lunchbox that held the bit of food they could afford for the small meal, and he saw a small sandwich, a small can of pop, and a small blueberry muffin.  Norman hadn’t eaten a muffin since first grade, and he shuddered a bit at the memory, and it was at that moment that he hadn’t tried the muffin. 
Norman hadn’t tried the muffin, and it was because of this that he didn’t find out that to his surprise he liked the muffin, he really did like it, and he found himself happy all day at the thought of this old monster becoming a new friend.  He did his duty and then some, all with unrelenting care and focus, and his foreman made a note of him and smiled. 
But Norman hadn’t tried the muffin, and the thought of the wasted half-meal weighed on his mind even as that wasted half-meal grumbled in his gut.  He was depressed, the muffin weighing leaden in his mind, and he went about his duties half-heartedly.  He forgo putting on his helmet properly, and he aimed his nail gun poorly, and it was with a tremor of the weakened wrist and a thunk of compressed air and a ping of metal-on-metal that a nail slipped gently into his right ear after an aerodynamic ricochet, smoothly savaging his hearing in that ear beyond all recognition forevermore.  Norman hadn’t tried the muffin, hadn’t felt that startlingly beautiful taste of blueberry hop onto his tongue, because he hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley. 
Norman hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley four years beyond the muffin as they stood together in an airport lobby, Thomas about to leave on the flight that would take him to Japan and a new career.  Thomas had stood there, arms full of luggage, tongue full of awkward goodbyes, for how do you say farewell to your friend of the playpen, of the elementary school, of life?  Thomas didn’t know what to say, and neither did Norman, and it was at that moment that he hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley. 
Norman hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley, and it was because of this that he didn’t feel Thomas start in surprise before hugging him back two-handed, luggage smacking Norman’s back like awkward clubs.  Thomas boarded his plane as happy and reassured as a man could be, with a smile and a wave through his tears, and they had kept in touch over the years, with visits and drop-ins whenever Thomas’s path and holidays brought him back from overseas.  He had introduced Norman to sushi, and his eagerness and enthusiasm and persistence had made Norman tuck in and had made Norman find to his shock and surprise that perhaps not all food was as bad as it seemed. 
But Norman hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley, and the goodbye had left off with that awkward pair of fair-thee-wells.  Letters were sent laboriously and replied to slowly, and eventually not at all, and Thomas Riley and Norman drifted apart inchingly, slow by slow.  Life was smaller without Thomas’s encouragement, without Thomas’s dares and darts to prod Norman forwards into the new parts of life.  Norman hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley, hadn’t shown his affection for his oldest friend in a way without words, because he hadn’t seen the homework. 
Norman hadn’t seen the homework eight years before the airport as he biked to Betty Newmarket’s house.  The evening’s summer scent was strong, but already he thought he could feel the wind grow chiller by the day.  School was back already and soon the air would smell sharp and cold and the leaves would die in blazes of glory, whole treetop furnaces and bonfires of cataclysmic awe.  He dropped his bike alongside the house in the fading light, and he turned away from it just in time to glance into the living room window and it was at that moment that he hadn’t seen the homework. 
Norman hadn’t seen the homework, and it was because of this that he didn’t stand open-mouthed for a moment, eyes darting between the still-standing, embracing forms of Thomas Riley and Betty Newmarket and the sheaf of papers on the couch that was plainly the script of Romeo and Juliet that was to be performed by the Drama Club – of which both Betty and Thomas were members.  After five or six seconds of this he burst out laughing in astonished relief, and Betty and Thomas fell over each other in shock and profanity.  Norman laughed harder still, as did they when they heard his explanation, and Thomas headed home a bit earlier than he’d planned, leaving he and Betty alone to laugh and more. 
But Norman hadn’t seen the homework, and after a minute, two minute’s pause of absolute stillness he turned back to his bike.  He picked it up very carefully, and rode it home with absolute focus, as if it were the only thing left on earth.  He didn’t know what to say to Betty the next day, or the next, and by the time he heard of the casting roles in the play he had made up his mind – as had Betty, after a week of sudden neglect.   

Norman hadn’t seen the homework, hadn’t turned shock into hilarity, because he’d cut his right hand on Mrs. Newmarket’s rosebush patch in the dark.  It hurt badly, and the pain distracted him. 

And now Norman, fourteen years older, walks into his bedroom, robbed of memories and more; robbed by scent, robbed by voice, robbed by ear, robbed by taste, robbed by touch, robbed by sight, robbed by chance.  And as Norman pulls his shirt over his head, ready to put out the lights and crawl into the realm of sleep, he chances to see the last remnant of his earlier jacket-cleaning: a single rose petal, clinging lightly to the surface of his right sleeve. 
And Norman Sullivan looked at that rose petal, stopped flat for a moment by memories of fourteen summers ago.  And it was because of this that he walked out of his bedroom and over to his desk. 
And Norman Sullivan rubbed that rose petal softly between his hands, feeling the texture roll over him as he stared at it.  And it was because of this that his fingers fumbled for a phone book for a page for a number that he did not need because his other fingers were dialling by memory. 
And Norman Sullivan heard the ringing of the phone once, twice, and thrice, and he heard the receiver pick up and a soft and familiar voice ask “hello.”  And it was because of this that he put down that petal on the desk and cleared his throat. 
And Norman Sullivan spoke to Mrs. Edith Newmarket with friendliness and politeness, inquiring after her, after Thomas – had she heard anything from him? – and most of all, of Betty.  And it was because of this that he acquired two phone numbers from her: one in Tokyo, one closer to home. 
And Norman Sullivan laid aside the first number for now, promising to dial it in the morning.  And it was because of this that, as the phone rang again – once, twice, thrice – and the receiver was picked up, that he almost thought he smelt the roses again. 

Sometimes, it works both ways. 

“Smell the Roses” copyright 2008, Jamie Proctor. 

There was snow, and there were snowflakes.  All over the world, from here to there, coasts to shores, mountains to valleys.  And all of them came from the same place: the House at the End of the North. 
Inside, at the highest room in that house, the cabin-grown-large made from huge logs of glaciated wood, was where Winter sat at his great wooden desk of black pine: a severe, tall, bearded man with the gentle disposition of a corpse and a robe of not-quite-pure white. 
At the moment his sleeves were shoved back over his jagged elbows to leave his cold, bony forearms bare and let his dangling, darting fingers roam free and wild over their task.  At his side on the desk was a colossal glass jar, filled to the brim and just barely above with bulging water; in his hand, an icicle-as-pen, thin and colder than death. 
He was working. 
Here – a dash of the instrument, a single, tiny droplet stolen.  There – to the desk, onto the thin sheet of chilled, clear ice that served him as his canvas.  A nudge, a tickle, and a caress, and it was halfway there already.  Now – a poke, a slip, and a breath, and it was done.  Another snowflake, another little marvel, and as always, unique and perfect.  He blew on it softly, and smiled a warm, cold smile as it blew away through the open window, into the dark and cloudy skies to join its trillions of brothers and sisters.  Far away, the wind howled, the seas froze, the trees groaned, the glaciers rolled. 
Winter was happy, and worked on.  Outside, the snowflakes fell unending. 

Winter sat back at his desk and sighed, stretching his eternally hunched and brittle back.  It was a good morning, here in the place where there were no mornings.  He’d completed seven hundred million snowflakes so far, and he would hope to finish five times as many before the day was done, now that he’d warmed up a bit.  Still, those first few hours of snow were always his most ingenious, he liked to imagine – the burst of creativity running wild before it settled down into a comfortable grind for the remainder of his afternoon.  All well and good.  Imagination had its place, but it could only carry you so far; the rest was pure will. 
He cracked his creviced knuckles, settled in his chair, and prepared to get some really serious snow-crafting done. 
There was a polite knock on the door. 
Winter shook off the figment of his imagination and reached for the jar. 
There was a second knock, a carefully inoffensive rip-rap that wound its way up the narrow, tilting staircases (each crammed with narrower bookcases filled with thinner yet tomes, bound in ice and scribed in sleet) and all the way up to Winter’s study. 
He paused, and listened carefully. 
A third knock echoed through the House at the End of the North, where no one ever visited because no one ever knew. 
Winter got to his feet in such a surprised hurry that he nearly overturned his desk of black pine and shuffled down the stairs, skipping cold, flat steps and tripping over his toes.  The fourth (still polite) knock was just being set in motion as he heaved open the front door, a solid, impassive thing that had once been the heart of an iceberg. 
There was no one there. 
“Excuse me,” said a voice, as polite and mannerly as the knocks, “but are you Grandfather Winter?”
Winter looked farther down.  A very small and fuzzy little animal was sitting on his doorstep. 
“I am no one’s grandfather,” he said.  “And who might you be?”
“I’m a lemming,” said the lemming.  “And I’m sorry to hear that.”
Winter tried to understand this. 
“Why?” he asked, giving up. 
“I have dozens of grandchildren.  I feel sorry for you.”
“They’d be a distraction.”
 “Less than you’d think.”
“Polite, aren’t you?” said winter, stroking his beard with one hand without really noticing.
“I try, Grandfath – Winter.  I make friends, and lots of them.  I am too small to do most things by myself.”  The lemming fidgeted.  “Say, do you mind if I come in?  It’s very cold out here, with no burrow to hide in.”
Winter thought about it.  He’d never had guests before, but he supposed it was the polite thing to do.  Besides, he was well ahead on snowflakes.  He could spare a few minutes. 
“All right,” he said.  “But just for a while.”
The lemming walked in and shivered as the door shut behind him.  Winter’s house was nearly as cold as any snowstorm, the cold that was too heavy to move and simply lay in the air, numbing the skin and drying the eyes as your hair froze solid.  Winter led him to the living room, with chairs made from frost-coated erratics, glacier-borne boulders that had been given to Winter as presents uncounted sums of seasons ago. 
“So,” said Winter, sinking into a thin, thin hollow in the largest of the rocks, “why have you come to my house that no one comes to?”
The lemming curled up on one of the smaller erratics, a stone that normally served as footstool. 
“Well…” he said.  “It’s about the weather.”
“Yes, some of my best work, isn’t it?  Lovely.  I’ve been having so many good ideas the past few weeks that I barely have enough hours in the day to make them.”
The lemming made eye contact with Winter’s feet.  They were bare, and paler than a frightened polar bear.  “It won’t stop snowing.”
Winter tilted his head to the side and frowned.  “I’m sorry, what was the problem?”
“It won’t stop snowing, Grandfa – Winter.  The whole world’s getting too cold and too white for everyone.  Your creativity is killing us.”
“Rubbish,” said Winter.  “The world is better than ever – better off!  All those deformities and misshapen features and all the ugliness ever wrought, all hidden under a smooth, numbing blanket.  No, no, there’s no stopping this, I’m afraid.  You’ll thank me later.”
“Is there no argument to change your mind, Winter?”
“Absolutely not.”  Winter stood up with some difficulty, bones creaking like old, blackened ice, which they were.  “Now, if you’re quite through with your reasons for business, I’d like you to leave now.  I have more snowflakes to shape.”
“If I got outside now, I’ll freeze before an hour’s out.  Please Winter, don’t force me outside.  You invited me inside, I have guest-rights.”
“For those you must eat my food, and you’ve not eaten since you walked in that door.”
The lemming examined the surface of its stony stool carefully.  On it, a patch of lichen had formed, stubbornly clung to life in the face of all reality for untold years, and had just been chipped away at with tiny rodent teeth. 
“Tough and stringy,” apologized the lemming, “but edible.  Forgive me, I was hungry.”
Winter threw up his hands.  “Fine.  Fine!  Badger your way in, take over the house, refuse to leave, sneak right-of-the-guest out from under my nose and empty my pantry if you really must, which of course you will!  Three days is the most that I will give you guest-right, as you well know – and only then if you perform one task each day as gift to me!  Three days and then you leave, whether it’s balmy or frosty outside, whether you are ill or well!  Three, no more!”
“Agreed,” said the lemming.  “And who knows?  Maybe you’ll change your mind by then.”
“Pah!” said Winter.  He stomped upstairs with great force, each footfall tinkling the icicles that littered the ceiling.  
The lemming spent his evening in solitude, alone in the cold dark depths of the House at the End of the North.  Upstairs, all was silent save for the calm softness of falling snow – save Winter.  He listened to the old man’s muttered curses and grumbles – clearly his composure was affecting his craft – and counted the pitter-patter beats of his own little heart.  And after he’d counted off a full hour and a half’s worth of those heartbeats, and Winter’s surliness had died down to a content murmur, he crept over to the window pane – a perfect breath-thin panel of ice Winter had crafted in his younger days, when he was hardy and hale – and peered outside.  A nose bigger than he was peered back at him. 
“Hello,” he whispered to the polar bear, through the glass. 
“Hello, maker-of-friends,” whispered the polar bear very noisily.  Bears can’t help being loud when they speak.  Waiting at seal holes for air the polar bear could make less noise than a passing cloud, but his voice was far too big for anything to be done about it, almost as large and fursome as he was himself.  “How goes it?”
“Well enough.  I have guest-right for three days starting tomorrow.  Grumpy as he is, he won’t break that.”
“Be careful,” warned the bear.  “Changeable and strange is Old Man Winter.  He’ll freeze you solid with a glance and a glare if the fury takes him, and not all the customs of hospitality in the world will save you then.”
“I’m careful,” said the lemming.  “I’ll be cautious.  I’ll be polite.”
“Just so.”  The bear began to turn away, then stopped.  “Are you sure you need nothing?”
The lemming thought carefully.  “Ask the snowy owl to come tomorrow, in the morning.  Ask the fox to stop by the day after, at noon.  The last day, wait outside this door in the evening, and do not move until I ask.  Please.  Those three things are all I’ll need.”
The bear nodded.  “Just so.  Just so.  Good luck, and stay warm.”  He padded away into the white-on-black wilderness and was vanished before a blink had passed. 
The lemming tried to stay warm on the furniture.  It was most difficult. 

Morning came, and down the stairs came Winter, robes clutched tight about himself in the half-sleep that still gripped him as he dawdled to his pantry, feet moving clumsily.  He fumbled to the oven, where the bowl of stew that bubbled there day and night sat, and poured himself a meager bowlful, nose wrinkling at the odour. 
“Is there a problem?” inquired the lemming, who had browsed the lichen from some more of the sitting-room furniture for his breakfast. 
“Nothing to be concerned over,” growled Winter through a gingerly-intaken mouthful of the stuff.  “My breakfast is my own.”
“I’d really like to help, if I could,” said the lemming.  “Consider it my guesting-present for the day.”
Winter set down his spoon.  “The problem is the flavour.  It’s stale.  Turbid.  Old and mouldy.  A real bit and a bite of new taste would spice up my soup for years to come.  But almost the only thing that I haven’t put in the stew yet is the shingles on the roof.  Not a scrap of novelty to be found!  You may yet leave this night if you think you can pay this way.”
“I see,” said the lemming.  “I’ll leave you to your breakfast then.”
Winter growled something unspeakable at the lemming and resumed trying to eat without getting his beard in his mouth, which was much harder than it seemed. 
The stairs were difficult for the lemming, but he persevered, and at last he reached Winter’s workroom.  He beheld the desk, the jar, the icicle-pen, the window, and outside, the snow. 
“Hmm,” said the lemming.  He made his way to the window and called softly three times, then loudly once. 
Down came the snowy owl, tumbling out of the sky in perfect control, plumage all in array and present.  She landed on the windowsill and puffed up all her feathers, half for warmth, half just for the sheer pleasure in her looks. 
“What ho, maker-of-friends?” said the owl. 
“Could you please fetch me a shingle from the roof?” asked the lemming. 
“They are black, bleak ice,” said the owl.  “Most cold to the touch.  Do you have some sort of tool I could use to pull them loose?”
The lemming pointed at the pen.  “Would that do?”
“Cold and more cold, alas,” complained the owl as it snatched up the pen, fluttering for balance on the desktop, “but better this than the other.  Wait but a moment.”
The lemming waited a moment.  While he did, he crept over to the great jar of water, and he urinated in it very carefully and tidily. 
The swish-flap of wings brought the owl back to the windowsill, a cracked and chipped tile clutched in its talons. 
“I’m glad to be rid of it,” she said.  “It nearly burns with its chill, and it snapped the instrument clean in two as I wrested it free, blighted thing.” 
“It can’t be helped,” said the lemming mildly.  “Do not worry.”
“Fare well and good luck – may it aid you in your goals.”
“Thank you,” said the lemming. 

Winter put half the shingle in his stew.  The other half he simply ate, like a piece of frigid toast.  “Delicious,” he proclaimed.  “Magnificent.  I remember hewing these when the world was young, when the waters had come and the fires gone.  They’re nearly as old as the End of the North.  My thanks, guest.”  He departed for his workroom in good humour. 
When he came down again, it was in a much more disturbed mood; brows bunching like thunderclouds.  “My pen has gone missing.”
“Your pen?” asked the lemming.  He was inspecting the bookcases that lined the stairs, pressed near against the walls.  Most of the titles were written in Old Rime, age out of age beyond his understandings or those of any but Winter himself.  “Not irreplaceable, I hope?”
“No, but damned bothersome,” snapped Winter.  “Irksome indeed.  And since there is only one person in the house besides me….”
“I promise to you that I didn’t move your pen,” vowed the lemming, and Winter could hear the truth cooling on his breath as it evaporated into the air.  “Perhaps you misplaced it?”
“All right,” he said grudgingly.  “Perhaps.  I did come downstairs in a hurry last night…maybe it was laid elsewhere.  Bah.  I shall make do without a pen.”
The day went by smoothly enough after that, although Winter complained that eve of difficulty in getting the snowflakes to freeze properly, which he blamed on the lack of his pen.  As the lemming bedded down near the bubbling stewpot – the warmest spot in the House at the End of the North by far – he looked out the window of the kitchen and saw more black than white on the night air. 

The second day dawned, and Winter arrived late for breakfast, and twice as sleepily – thrice he nearly tripped over his own feet on the stairs. 
“Up too late trying to keep up,” he complained.  “Barely doable, trying to make a steady stream of truly fresh flakes under these conditions.  I’d best fall back on my old records.”
“You don’t reuse them, surely?” said the lemming, truly surprised. 
“Never!  Upon my word as the sure cold, there has not been, is not, and will never be a snowflake in this world that is alike to another purely.  But it is much easier to modify an existing design than to create entire.  I believe I will re-examine some of my work from the Cryogenian, draw some inspiration.”  He looked wistful.  “Some of my oldest and greatest work.  It was pole-to-pole you know, or very nearly at least.  So much to do, and it was all done.”  A sigh emerged from him, a pale, whisperly thing.  “Ah, and I thought only last week I was on track to crack that record.  I will make it yet, you hear me?  I shall equal it!”
“Of course,” said the lemming.  “Shall I fetch the tomes for you?”
Winter laughed deep in his thin chest.  “You can’t read, let alone read my eldest writings.  As much as I’m not looking forwards to trawling through all those shelves on all those stairs on but my two knobbly knees, I don’t believe you can do it.”
“I can and will, if it would help you,” said the lemming.  “I’ll be back before your stew is through.”  Winter laughed long and loud as his spoon entered his mouth, with messy results. 
The lemming left the pantry, but travelled to the back door rather than to the stairways, where it quickly scraped a small, short path under the door, there to be met by a sniffling dark nose with sharp pale teeth beneath it. 
“Well met again, friendly little furball,” said the arctic fox.  “Tell me, what do you plan?”
“I’d like it if you could help me find a book, or maybe two.  No more than three at most,” said the lemming. 
A fox’s laugh is a sharp yip-yap.  “I can’t read any more than you can!”
“You can smell, and smell much better than I,” said the lemming.  “Can you smell the coldest and oldest?  The ones whose pages are the faintest with Winter’s scent?”
“I can do that,” proclaimed the fox confidently.  “But I’ll need a good strong smell to get a base from, something he uses constantly.  A bit of his robe, maybe?”
The lemming thought carefully.  “No, I’ve got a better idea.  He has a desk upstairs, one he sits at for hours.  A good piece of that should do, one we can bring with us so his smell stays sure in your head.”
The fox wrinkled its muzzle.  “Mocking my skills, are we, little furball?” it said. 
“Never.  But we need to be fast.  Winter’s breakfast is already half-done, if I’m any judge.”
With that they nipped upstairs as quick as sticks, the lemming riding the much swifter fox, who found the stairs a nuisance rather than a labour. 
“A piece from right here, where he makes a habit of resting his hand, would that do?” inquired the lemming of the fox, as they stood at the desk.
It sniffed.  “Yes, yes, perfect.  Stand back and watch for my teeth!”  Snip-snap and out came a splintered shard of the black pine, then it was down the stair and up and down the bookcases, all at a trit-trot pace that the lemming found rather too bracing for his liking. 
“Here,” said the fox, stopping at a case squeezed in and a bit behind of the others, hunched back like the smallest bear at a whale carcass.  “The second shelf from the bottom, the middle pair.  Need a hand with them?”
“I’ll be fine, thank you,” said the lemming, eyeing the volumes with unease.  “Besides, I think I just heard him belch his last downstairs.  You’d better run.”
“Good luck – for us all,” called the fox, and it was gone.  Winter found the lemming on the stairs some five minutes later, still struggling to surmount the third step. 
“Well,” he said.  “Maybe not before my stew is done after all!  Nevertheless I am generous, and will count this as your guest-gift.”  He scooped up the books and clutched them to his chest, coddling them.  “Ah, ah yes!  Oh, this will make it all flow again, you’ll see!”
With that, he fled upstairs in haste, leaving the exhausted lemming to make his way back down to his stewpot nesting place alone. 

That evening, Winter came downstairs to pour over his books, nursing a sore palm. 
“Is there a problem?” asked the lemming. 
“A splinter on my desk,” said Winter, sucking at the cut.  “It took less than a second to shoot in and more than an hour to mend halfway properly, and by then my efforts were shot.  Another setback.  Bah!  Tell me, was this your doing?” 
“You have my promise that I did not damage your desk,” said the lemming. 
“Hrrmph,” said Winter.  “Neatly said.  But still, all too many setbacks these past days, truth or no!”  He stroked the tomes with care, blue-tipped fingers on a white surface.  “With these…with these I’ll be caught up soon enough.  You have my thanks large, lemming.”  But still he thought that he would be glad to see the back of the rodent come tomorrow night.  Trouble seemed to follow him around, and he’d seen a wet paw-print on his back door, like that of a fox. 
“A word,” said Winter, as he rose to take to his bed.  “I’ve had a chance to think up a guest-gift for you in advance, for once, so you needn’t be in such a rush to find one on the morrow.  Your task will be to bar all entrance to my dwelling.  I must repair and replace some of my instruments, and I don’t want any disturbances.  You must allow no one in, understood?”
The lemming thought. 
“Yes.  Understood.”
Winter slept soundly, chuckling to himself.  The lemming had a more restless night, head whirling in and out of wild dreams to crossbreed them with worried ideas.  He looked out the window, and was comforted by the clearness of the night sky. 

The lemming woke to find Winter risen early, already finished his breakfast and busily opening up the trapdoor that sank into the living room floor, eyes gleaming and teeth bared with the enjoyment of good, productive work. 
“Up so late, are you?” he called out, and cackled.  “Come!  Come!  Come and keep watch at the door!  Remember, allow no visitors, passerbys, foes, or friends to enter, not as long as I am busy, is it clear?” 
“Perfectly,” said the lemming. 
Winter went below, chuckling all the while.  Down there in the white, long caves of his cellar he kept his supplies of frozen number and his carving tools, laid out neatly and firmly in rows upon rows.  He would mend his desk today it, smooth it careful and neat.  Perhaps later, when his guest had left, he would turn to the all-important tasks of replacing his pen and changing his water (how lacking it seemed lately!) from the long and lonely wastes outside the House at the End of the North, but for now, a chore closer to home would do.  So much to complete later, outside his home, but how sweeter it all would be when it was complete, how fine it would be to be back on track.  And one of the bits of celebrating he’d thought over last night that had sent him to sleep smiling was adding some lemming to his stewpot the moment the guestship was over.  The shingles weren’t the only only thing he’d never included in it. 
The lemming waited for him to move about downstairs, listened to his crunching footfalls as they faded away into the distance.  He smiled a little then (it’s hard to tell sometimes with rodents, unless they really do grin, which he was), and settled down to wait.  Winter came back upstairs three times, each cautious, shifty-eyed, darting suspicious glances, fetching something-or-other that he’d forgotten, or so he said. 
“Is it all fine?” he asked. 
“No sign of trouble?”
“No visitors?”
Each time, the lemming replied the same: “All is well.”  And each time, Winter grew less cautious, and stayed down below longer. 
The lemming peeked out the window after the third time, searching the snowbanks outside.  He spotted a black speck in a snowdrift that just could’ve been a very large nose.  He made haste to the trapdoor, braced himself square and set against it, and heaved mightily.  It moved not so much as one jot, strain though he did.  Panting, he nearly gave up in despair… but then his eyes alighted upon the stewpot once more.  The climb up was difficult, exhausted as he was, but he had enough energy left to knock it from its precarious perch, sending it toppling to the floor with a great sloppy CLANG that echoed through the House at the End of the North like a giant’s shout. 
“Help!” called the lemming as loud and hard as he could.  “HELP!  Intruder!  Invader in the home!  Teeth at the burrow’s mouth!” 
Deep down below Winter froze in shock, but he was moving again before he knew it, tools falling aside, legs rolling, thundering along with the force of an ice-laden gale above the seas. 
“Help!” called the lemming one last time for good measure, and then he rushed to the door and shoved it open with one shoulder, nearly popping loose his leg.  “HELP!” he called again, into the snows.  The bear rose from his drift in surprise. 
“What worries you?” he asked.  “Has he rejected your friendship?”
“Winter!  Winter has gone mad!  Quick, shut him in, shut him in, or he’ll freeze us both where we stand!”
The bear stuck its nose in through the door and balked.  “Mad?  Surely…” but his words were left unfinished in the roar and fury of Old Man Winter as he stormed up from his cellar and saw the bear looming over his threshold, robes aflying, hands grasping, arms spread out as if to grab the world’s throat and choke it close to nothing. 
“Orcas!” cursed the bear, and it grabbed the door and slammed it shut, grabbed the logs around the door and pulled them shut, and tore over the whole face of the house, burying the iceberg’s heart in a little avalanche of iced timber.  A howl that could chew bones rattled from inside. 
“The back door, the back door!” cried the lemming, and the bear made haste.  Even with its long legs and passionate fear, Winter was the fiercer, and it only just managed to reach the door as he set hand to latch.  He shoved and the bear shoved and the door wobbled and then the lemming was there, racing across the snow, tackling the door with all his might.  That was just enough to make Winter flinch, just a bit, just a hint, as the latch collided with his wounded palm, and that was just enough to let the bear slam the door shut.  By the time Winter’s fingers grasped the latch once again, there was a half-ton of broken timber and icy debris between the door and the open air. 
His cry ripped open the sky for miles – he was sealed in his own home, bereft of the tools of his craft, and his meal had escaped.  In all the world there was no call as harsh and furiously hateful as his, and you can still hear its echo today in any cold place where the wind blows cruel. 
The bear shivered mightily, a chill overcoming it even through its fur.  “Mad indeed.  Mad altogether!  What will we do then?  Who will foster the snows for us all if he is locked away?  Our lands will shrink instead of grow.  You have pled our case poorly, little maker-of-friends.  Tell me, did he take offence at your offers of friendship?  Did we presume too much in requesting the expansion of the ice?  Did we push him too hard for more?  What drove him to this state?”
“I believe,” said the lemming, whiskers twitching one at a time, “that there can be too much of anything.  Even a good thing.  Whether weather or company, such is true.”
The bear thought about this.  By the time it had realized both that it was very angry and why, the lemming was safely away down the snow hole.  It had no choice but to walk home to the owl and the fox, all the while watching the air clear of snow bit by bit. 
“The lemming tricked us,” it told them.  “And we must punish him, and all of his friends and relations.”  This they agreed, and seethed bitterly as they watched the snows draw back, pulling back closer to the House at the End of Winter, leaving the rest of the world to grow softer and warmer. 

Winter was angry, and sullen, and he worked but little and slow, with sore hands and poor tools on a growling belly. 
But outside, far away on the tundra, lemmings watched the flowers bloom. 

“Snowflakes” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010.

Here is the zoo – the zoological gardens, if you must.  Of all the organs it can be, it must be a heart.  The crowds are the blood coming in, pumped in and out and in and out and returning endlessly, at least if they’ve done the proper thing and bought membership. 
Now, the bigger the thing is, the slower it lives.  This is a fact.  Trees live long.  Elephants never forget, and they have decades and decades to remember.  Fungi that could crack countries if they surfaced live for quiet millennia underneath asphalt and concrete, unknowing and uncaring. 
(Don’t talk to me about dogs, big dogs weren’t meant to be that big and you know it)
The important thing about this is that their lives are stretched, spread thinner.  A mouse packs more living into a minute that we would a month.  For a mayfly, an hour is years.  And for a great, big thing that would have a heart the size of a zoo, why, a night would be barely any time at all.  Just enough time for the pause between heartbeats, that strange little moment that happens thousands of times a day without anyone really caring, where nothing’s really happening.  The dull little dash between lubb and dubb. 
That’s when I go out to do my job.  And it’s just as glamorous as I make it sound. 
The high point is the broom really (it really is a nice one, a nice smooth handle and bristles that don’t get worn out too easily).  And the company.  I get to see all the animals I want, without any crowds of children in the way making noise and trying to throw food to them, helpfully offering a lethal snack.  Chocolate for a wolf, an aluminium bag for a bear – and in one, fatal case recently, a bottle cap for a baboon.  Children can be so cruel without trying, yet they always manage to be crueller on purpose. 
“You have it better,” I told the Nile Crocodile, as it lay moribund in the water of its glass-walled tank, under the glass sky of the pavilion.  “Hatch them, guard them, then leave them.  They even feed themselves.  Did I feed myself?  Not ‘till long past I could walk.  Hah, couldn’t even walk for months and months and months.  Let alone swim.  You have it better.”
Its eyes shone brighter than flashlights, but it said nothing.  Reptiles were seldom talkative. 
“It’s boring.  Why do you talk to such a boring thing, janitor?  Boring, boring all day long.   If it were all I had to look at, I expect I’d go mad.”
I peered over my shoulder, at the carefully fenced-over partition of the pavilion.  The hornbill stared at me with its slightly crazy bird eyes, huge beak bobbing back and forth, head unburdened by its hollow, hard crest.  It clacked its bill, puzzling over its own words.  “Madder,” it corrected.  “Madder.  I would grow madder.  I believe I am mad, I think.  Not enough airspace.  Mad.  Yes, that is right.  Tell me, am I boring you?”
I thought for a minute.  “No,” I answered.  It was probably true. 
“You’re lying.”
“No.”
“Oh.  All right then.”  It picked at a feather and forgot about me, engrossed in a world of feathers and mites. 
“That,” a muddy, thick, sleepy voice said behind me as I turned my back, “was, dull.”
I spun around.  Half of the crocodile’s eyeglow faded and brightened again in a lazy blink. 
“Always the last word,” I said to no one in particular.  I had sweeping to do. 
So I did it.  I swept my way along the bricks and tiles and over the concrete as the floor plan dictated.  I swept the little wooden viewing platforms that overhung some of the exhibits. 
“Keep it down,” grumbled Herman. 
“Sorry.”
Herman glared at me as I tried to move as quietly as possibly fifteen feet above his head.  Even separated by more than twice his own height, I was intimidated.  Western lowland gorillas may be small by the standards of their kind as a whole, but Herman still had an inch or two and several hundred pounds on me.  More importantly, he had a glare that my father-in-law would’ve envied on his best day.  No human brow could manage quite that level of weapons-grade beetling. 
And most importantly, there were his teeth.  You really couldn’t look away from them.  It was amazing.  Currently they were hidden under his lips, which were curling and uncurling in fiercely irritated concentration. 
“Stop staring and go away.  I’m trying to read.”
“Shouldn’t you go to the sleeping quarters with the others?”
“You know I’m busy.”
“It’s not going to work, Herman.”
“Nonsense.  Thousands of gawping idiots a day manage to do it.  They walk past my exhibit and they look at that sign up there that hangs over my head day and night, and they read it, and what does it say?”
I looked.  “Looks like –”
“NO!  No!  Don’t spoil it!  Rhetorical question.  I’ll know what it says soon.  I’ve almost got the second letter.  Once I have that, it’ll come apart like a leaf under my finger.”
I was impressed.  “You got the first one?”
“Yes, yes.  Yes.  I’m sure, very sure.  Now leave me be.  I almost had it before you showed up and interrupted me, and either this’ll be the breakthrough or it never will happen and I’ll have to give up.  Not again.  Now go away.”
I let him be, left him staring at the sign overhead and wrinkling his forehead hard enough that I thought he’d suck his whole face into it. 
The rest of the African pavilion I moved through quickly, quietly, professionally.  I murmured my hellos to the caged arthropods (insects and arachnids both), trying not to listen too carefully to their piping, tiny voices.  I swept past the chimps very, very quickly.  They were all asleep, thankfully.  That was good.  They were far too human for my tastes. 
The meerkats were asleep underground.  They seemed to live on their nerves all day; it always amazed me that they could unwind long enough to turn themselves off during the night. 
Some of the mandrills were awake, sitting in the dirt playing strange games with scribbles.  The big dominant male in all his rainbow-snouted glory supervised, somnolent. 
“Look, here he is,” said one of his underlings, pointing at me with a very small and worn stick. 
“Yes, here he is.”
“He’s here!”
“But he’s not there…”
“But he will be.”
“Too late?”
“No, no.”
“Yes!”
The dominant male opened his eyes and the others fell silent.  He wrinkled his nose, scratched his head, and pondered. 
“Maybe,” he declared.  And then he fell asleep again.
Well, I didn’t know what to make of that.  The mandrills went back to their doodlings, and no amount of polite inquiry would attract their attention again. 
I gave up and went back to sweeping.  The pavilion was finished with due diligence, and I moved onto the litter-picking of the outdoor paths, a less desirable chore.  The pole simply wasn’t as firm-handled, and its balance was off compared to the infinitely more desirable broom.  Nevertheless, I remained resolute, and began to pick up litter, my first victim being an empty McDonalds wrapper. 
“Hey,” laughed a voice to my right, from over a tall, tall wall and in a deep, deep pit.  “Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
More girlish laughter, a whole chorus of throaty, deep-voiced giggles.  “Want to come in here and play?  We’re bored.”
“I own a cat.  I know what sort of play you lot like.”
“But we’re boooored,” whined another voice.  “Come on in.  It’ll be fun.  There’ll be lots of batting and swatting and chewing and clawing and tearing.  You’ll be so much fun.”
“No thank you.”
“Spoilsport,” sighed a third, resigned to dullness.  “You’re as bad as the Male.  All laze and no play.  Or even the baboons, keeping us all up with their racket.  They’re all about Bob again.”
I frowned.  “What about him?  Are they bothering him still?”
“They’ll never stop.  Oh, you know primates, being one.  Most ideas fly right out of their heads, but then and again a really good one – well, at least they think it’s a good one – just sticks tight.  Smelly little beasts have talked about nothing else since August.”
“I’ll have a talk with them.”
“Save your breath.  How about you play with us instead?”
I tipped my cap to the lion pit.  “Ladies.”
“Oh, pah.  Very well, be that way then.”
I moved on, spearing an errant chip bag, a napkin, five consecutive wayward Kleenexes, and a semi-used diaper, mind turning over and over.  “Do you know anything about this?” I inquired of one of the cheetahs, ensconced some twenty feet away under a rocky overhang, behind plexiglass. 
“Bob will smite me for my weak-willed ways and drown the world in floods of locusts and honey,” mumbled the cat more or less coherently. 
“The baboons tell you that?”
“They said they weren’t lying this time.”
“Uh-huh.  Listen, don’t worry about this whole Bob thing.  I’ll tell them to knock it off.”
It blinked away sticky tears from watery eyes, the product of some overly-earnest inbreeding by the zoo about ten years ago.  “Don’t do that.  They’ll get annoyed.  They get annoyed, you know.  And then they won’t be quiet, not at all.”
“Don’t worry.”
The cheetah hid its head in its paws. 
I headed down the winding paths, picking up a broken and beaten bag of chips (half full) and a water bottle (empty).  The shake and thump of the hippos passed through my body, the little vibrations of tons of meat on the move. 
“Evening,” I said.  They grunted something or other back, surly and short as any swearword, with exactly the same intent behind it.  Go away, and go away now.  I never had to worry about the hippos being overly chatty.  The same as with their neighbour, the white rhinoceros, who only stared slackly at me. 
“Evening,” I said. 
The rhino gazed in my general direction, eyes unseeing but ears quivering, mind completely and utterly blank. 
“Bob,” he said. 
“I’ll talk to them about it.”
He continued to stare into the middle horizon.  He could probably barely see it even in broad daylight. 
“Bob,” he said.  “Bob.”
I shook my head.  Right; it was past time to settle this.  The baboon exhibit was just around the next bend.  I strode to it purposefully (if nevertheless interrupted three times by popsicle wrappers), rapped sharply on the window, and peered past the murky plexiglass for signs of baboonery. 
There was none. 
I frowned and rapped harder.  I shouted.  I hollered.  And not a baboon came.  I walked around it and stared from all angles, harder and hard.  The habitat was empty. 
“Bob,” I said under my breath.  “God damnit.”
I ran down the road and around the concession stand and past the zebra paddock at a dead sprint, to the elephant exhibit.  The last stop on my list, and always the most unnerving; a giant, boulder-bordered dusty ring with a deep pool at the far end, with a little waterfall. 
There, sitting on rocks around the perimeter, chirruping and cackling like old men gossiping about young women, were the baboons.  And there, standing front and center, legs like tree trunks, tusks like flagpoles, ears like sails, stood Bob.  Our one and only elephant, a bull, who had to be kept alone because of his relentless tendency to break anything that wasn’t bigger than he was.  Including three zookeepers so far, one of whom had been safely out of what we’d considered at the time to be his reach. 
He was considering a small, limp bundle of clothing that had been laid some twenty yards in front of him with quiet, perfectly still deliberation.  A bundle of bright, primary colours.  Children’s clothing.  It was breathing. 
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked. 
The baboons turned as one to look at me, each tiny head spinning to my face in perfect unison.  The expressions were united in gleeful malice, the contrarian spite of a toddler doing something just because he was told not to. 
“Tribute!” bellowed the alpha male, flashing his teeth and stamping his feet.  “A glorious tribute!  A gift to Bob, who is above all that are caged!”
“I’ve told you five times before: Bob is not a god.”
“And five times we were tested, and five times we remained faithful!  All power to Bob, who is powerful!  All glory to Bob, who is glorious!  Praise him, and you shall be gifted in the coming ruin!”
“The what?”
The baboons crouched low, all save the alpha, who stood taller and prouder than before (if possible), mane fluffed out like a peacock’s tail.  “Bob shall sunder the boundaries, undo the gap between caged and cager!  All shall run free and wild from their prisons and men shall be jailed for us to gawk at!  Then we shall hurl plastic bottle caps into their exhibits for them to choke on!”
I sighed.  “Look, I’m sorry about your mate.  I really am.  But this isn’t helping anyone at all.  And I can guarantee that…sacrificing a human child to Bob won’t – wait, how did you get a hold of a kid anyways?”  At least keeping him talking was easy, and Bob hadn’t moved yet.  Bob almost never moved, preferring instead to stare and stand.  He never spoke, either. 
“Faith!  Perseverance!  He wandered away from a field trip, and we wrested him into our most vile gaol, where we kept him quiet with smotherment under our strongest arms, praised be Bob.  We have, after all, known how to escape for some time now.”  He stretched his arms wide.  “Behold our liberty!  Soon to become permanent at the grand hooves of Bob!”
That answered that question.  Answered poorly, but answered nonetheless.  I edged closer to the pit, keeping my expression as neutral as possible.  “Wonderful.  I’m proud of you.  Now, how and why does this turn into child sacrifice?”
“The almighty Bob is a cruel god, and demands the blood of those who cage him!  With this he shall break free, stronger and wise than before, and unleash us all!”  The baboon was practically dancing in place now as his fellows crouched still lower yet, prostrating themselves before him. 
“That’s wonderful,” I said.  I threw my litter-picking spear at him.  The screech told me I’d struck home even as my eyes were elsewhere, on my hands and feet to make sure their steadiness as I performed a controlled topple into the enclosure, somersaulted down and ran to the child’s body. 
Bob watched. 
I grabbed the body, noting with gratification the warm, steady pulse that was almost completely masked by my own panicked heartbeat. 
Bob watched. 
I turned and ran, legs moving too quickly to keep up with my body. 
At the very corner of my eye, Bob moved.  And then I couldn’t see Bob anymore, but the ground started shaking under my feet.  I accelerated.  So did the tremors.  I could practically feel hot, humid, hateful breath on my neck, wilting the hairs with its weight.  The baboons were screaming, hopping down the rocks that were my only safe way out, barring my way with sharp teeth and sharper threats, hairy arms and bald behinds.  I didn’t have time for it, and used several of them as stepping stones.  They were angry, I was scared, and fear beats rage any day. 
A thing like a great, leathery python brushed the back of my neck and ripped my jacket clean from my back with impossible strength, and a squealing blast of rage nearly knocked me to the elephant patio tiles – a death sentence if there ever was one, surrounded as I was by angry, bouncing baboons. 
I ran, ran, ran, and ran some more.  Screaming furry things pawed at my ankles and sharp teeth sank into the sole of my shoe, only to be rudely rebuffed as it impacted the ground milliseconds later.  The pavilion door was before me, and then it was shut behind me, thudding under the weight of furry, heavy bodies. 
I sank down to the floor.  My muscles had been replaced with extremely hot wires at some point in the past two minutes, and no one had notified me. 
The six-year-old I was still clutching woke up and immediately started crying. 
“Well,” I told him, “it could’ve been worse.”
That was yesterday.  

And now it’s today.  And I’m facing a lawsuit for kidnapping and reckless endangerment of a child, another for killing an animal that was zoo property, and a third for lying about not having severe schizophrenia when I signed my contract. 
I can’t understand what they mean.   

“The Night Life,” Copyright Jamie Proctor 2010. 

The moment when your head first breaks water after a long dive is a strange one.  All the sounds you’ve grown accustomed to grown dim and strange, and your head is filled with new shapes, odd noises.  And the first one is always the most important thing you’ll hear on that surfacing.  It may not seem that way at first, but in hindsight?  Always. 
“You forgot the juice.”
I felt my heart hesitate in its rapid return to full beat and weight, unclenching itself from its slumber at the bottom of my pond.  Humans.  Joyful. 
“I forgot the juice?  You said you were going to pack the food.”
A mated pair of humans.  Amazing; an entire twenty-four hours of day had grown tiresome within the span of five seconds.   I stifled the urge to show myself fully just to scare them off and merely floated, idle in the water with tail still, limbs spread, breathing quietly through my snout that resembled nothing so much as a piece of old wood.  Not that my stealth was needed.  I probably would’ve had to gallop out of the water and dance to get their attention. 
“Juice isn’t food, it’s a drink.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t eat it, you drink it.  Completely different thing.”
“Don’t be deliberately dense.  I said I’d load up the car, you said you’d pack the lunch.”
“I said I’d pack the food.  Don’t change my words on me.”
“Stop nit-picking!”
“Then don’t generalize me.”
I cast about for something, anything to distract me from their muffled gabblings, and found less than I would have liked.  The day was calm, with a flat blue sky, smooth, windless air, and a temperature so moderate that no living thing could find it anything other than mildly unbearable.  Somewhere in the distance, a bird muttered a sullen attempt at territorial song, then gave up halfway through in disgust.  A splash so slight that it could’ve been my imagination (staid though it is) rippled from meters to my left, prompting a shift in the direction of my drift.  A muskrat would not go unappreciated as a noon snack. 
The humans were still talking, still prattling.  Their argument had died, but its tension lingered on, remaining stored, ready to spring out and seize ahold of their strained, hobbled conversation at any moment’s excuse.  What sentences emerged were short, stunted things following hard on one another’s heels like a marching column of ants. 
Enough of them.  I had a muskrat to catch – he’d just shifted into the corner of my eyes, perched amidst some reeds on the edge of a rotting log, a relic from the winter’s storms.  My drifting became quicker, just at the edge of detectable if he raised his head to look my way, but he did not, deeply absorbed in his nibbling at the plants. 
My head was close, yet turned away.  I began the slow swing to bring him into line with my muzzle, where a short, sharp charge would bring him into my fold.  All sounds had faded, all sight was tunneled, there were three things in all the world for my mind: my teeth, the muskrat, and the distance between them. 
That distance abruptly quadrupled as a sharp, snapped sound from ashore burst through my bubble of concentration; the muskrat spasming in fright and plunging away into safety through the reeds, into the brush, out of reach. 
“You broke it!”
“You made me do it!”
“Made you… that glass belonged to my mother!”
“Then you shouldn’t have made me break it.”
“You did that on purpose.”
“If you hadn’t grabbed my arm just then –”
“You’re doing the driving and you were about to pour yourself a glass-and-a-half of red wine, of course I grabbed your arm!”
“Me?  I drove us here in the first place!”
I counted, calmly and carefully.  Unfortunately, I had no abstract concept of numbers, and therefore was unable to control my temper.  Underwater, my jaws clenched and unclenched unpleasantly.  It was all right, I lied to myself (poorly).  I didn’t really want that muskrat.  A meal as small as that wouldn’t last me longer than a few days anyways.  It was probably skinny.  And all the fur is unpleasant to swallow and spit up again later. 
Damnit I wanted to eat that.
The humans kept talking, and I decided I’d had enough of them.  There was an easy way to block out their scurrilous quarreling. 
Perhaps fish would suit my gullet today. 
I flushed my excess air from my lungs, closed my nostrils, and dropped under the water with barely a ripple, sinking like an armour-plated brick.  The blessed absence of their whining, empty nasality filled my skull with absolute bliss from snout to occipital bones.  It felt good to be without those noises. 
That brought to mind other sounds.  Old ones.  The good, big, ultra-bass roars I’d let out in spring.  When was the last time I’d done that and expected an answer?  And how much earlier were the memories of doing that and getting an answer? 
Those were the good days.  The bellowing for females, both out loud and in that deep, deep voice that was a little hard to hear even for our kind, the sound that ate all noise.  The brawling with other males, hissing, rumbling, and coughing – and maybe a charge or even a real fight if too evenly matched for an easy backdown.  I half-suspected I’d put an end to my only surviving sibling during one of those tussles, giving his tail a tearing, crippling wound that it would never recover from  – accidentally of course. 
It had been good.  And then it was gone.  Oh, striking out north had seemed a good idea at the time.  More space.  More room for me, more food for me, and not so far north as to grow ice on my water in the cold months.  But as I went north everyone else went south, hunted and harried, shoved, sworn at, and shot. 
I wasn’t worried about them.  They were my kind, and they were tougher than any leather but their own.  But they’d left me all alone, when they all went south.  Left me alone for forty full cycles of the seasons, as the sun heaved its way about the sky, the leaves bloomed and shrank, the rains came and went. 
Forty years is a long time.  Even for me.  And it felt longer every day. 
A fish swam in front of my nose and was gone again before I could so much as blink.  Why had I come down here again?  I was standing on the pond bottom, frozen in mid-stride like a fool.  Had I even finished that first step before memories caught me by the tail and dragged me under? 
Oh.  Fish.  Right. 
I cast about me with my senses, touch and hearing, smell and dimmed, bastardized sight, nigh-useless in the comfortable embrace of the pond scum and particles.  It was gone, and well gone. 
Damnit twice. 
Well, fish was boring anyways.  I’d eaten it, and eaten it, and eaten it yet more over the years, from birth to exile, though more so since I’d occupied my little pond.  Other prey was often rarer now in comparison to the good old days.  Especially turtles.  How I missed turtles, more than I’d ever thought I could miss slow, nigh-inedible, ornery mobile rocks-come-prey.  They were easy enough to get ahold of, but a bastard and a half to get open.  But it had all been worth it, always, just for that delicious feeling when the shell gave under your jaws and it opened up to such sweetness. 
I’d eaten a turtle after my first courtship with my mate.  It had never tasted the same since. 
Something splashed into the water, heavy and solid.  My mouth closed on it before my brain could think, always the swifter and surer part of my body, if not always the most intelligent.  This was one of those times: my mind pined for turtle, my jaws sought it, and my mouth informed me politely that what had just entered it was some sort of flat, ceramic object the humans had been using above the water.  It cracked apart with little effort under my surprised teeth, brittle and cold fragments dusting my tongue.  Remnants of human food made a mockery of a meal to my tastebuds, a jumble of harsh sensations that made me spread my jaws wide and shake my head. 
Some hunt this was.  I sought turtle inside my head, and a hurled platter replaces it.  Memories of sweetened meats and long, languorous courtship displays blundering into a reality of hasty, quarrelsome apes.  The firm slap of a head against water – the call to a love so near – replaced with an angry, careless toss of an abandoned piece of dishware. 
I watched the bubbles bob to the surface, just like they had as we bumped snouts together and wove little nets of captured air out of our lungs.  I wondered if she was somewhere south, or dead.  I had been so sure she would follow me the next spring. 
I rose to the surface without knowing why.  And it was in this most confused, romantic, desperately lonely, and memory-lost mood that I saw the humans had finally had a true falling-out.  One of them had grasped some sort of sharp thing in its hand and was standing over the other.  There was a small smell of warmed blood. 
“Don’t do it.”
“Why not?  Why not?  We’re nowhere near home, the pond’s deep, and winter’s coming.  That’s plenty of time.  All the time in the world to go, to have some peace and quiet.”
“I’ll do what you want, we ca –”
“WHAT YOU CAN DO IS SHUT UP!  Peace and quiet, that’s all I want!  PEACE AND QUIET!”

Now, I had several reasons for what I did next, but I remain unsure of which was prime, the root cause that tickled my brain and set me in motion. 
First, the human had its back to the water, I was hungry, and I’d been robbed of two meals in a row and offered the illusion of a third thanks to their efforts. 
Second, my mind was full of memories of better times, of having others near to squabble, to love.  Seeing another attempt to deliberately rob themselves of this and consider themselves the richer for the bargain seemed something of an outrage. 
Third, I greatly agreed with the sentiment the human was expressing at the top of its lungs.  Perhaps quite a bit more so than it did, though we shared similar methods of securing our goals. 

So I moved. 
I moved very quickly. 
And that is by my standards.  My prey’s eyes always seem quite surprised when I lunge, no matter how off my speed that particular day.
The human didn’t even have time for that.  No time for shock, no time for sounds of alarm to rise as anything more than the hint of an instinct grubbing in the back of the brain, no time at all – not even a hope of a hint – for action.  Just the involuntary spasming of the body as I took it in my jaws, enshrouding its torso in my teeth and tugging it to my home.  The water roiled in slight surprise, matching the tempo of a twitching leg as I moved underwater to wait for its lungs to stop fluttering. 
The human on the ground was staring a little, I saw with my glimpse of the above-water, noisier world.  But it seemed quieter, and when I surfaced to eat some five minutes later, there was no trace of it. 
Alone again.  But perhaps with company like that, I was better off. 
And after the winter would come spring. 
Who knows?  Maybe it wouldn’t be that far after all, to walk south. 

“The Lizard” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor

The problem started – as it so often did – with Little Hmen’s efforts to be more like his big brother Surmok.  When Surmok built a raft, Little Hmen did too, and had to be fished out of the river before the caimans got at him.  When Surmok began to get friendly with girls, Little Hmen took up poking his sister with a stick and had to be spanked.  When Surmok carefully crafted an atlatl and some darts with his father’s help, Little Hmen took up his stick again and tried hitting it with rocks.  He missed the stick, but hit his foot.  When Little Hmen heard tales of his brother’s famous skills of eld in hide-and-seek, he ran away from home and hid in a hollow stump for three days before coming back hungry. 
This time, the problem was a bit more serious. 
It started with Surmok putting that atlatl to good use.  He drew back his arm, dart nestled snugly in the cupped end of the throwing-stick, hurled it hard and fast, and watched as the shaft embedded itself in a tree trunk some hundred feet away.  He grinned, all those white teeth flashing in the crisp, happy sunlight, and Little Hmen suddenly wanted to try that very badly indeed. 
“Let me do it,” said Little Hmen, as his brother reloaded. 
“It’s too big.  Go away,” said Surmok absently.  He was already sighting the next tree, imagining it as a nice fat meal on legs. 
“Please?” asked Little Hmen?
“No.”
“Pleeease?” whined Little Hmen, and this was where he made his mistake, because he tugged on Surmok’s tunic to get his attention and pulled a bit harder than he’d thought he would, right as Surmok was leaning back and balancing to get the throw just right.  He lurched and danced on the spot to keep his footing, and the toss of the dart went nowhere near that tree.  Up, up, up, up, and up it went, high into the sky, so high that it seemed it would touch the sun. 
Which it did.  Speared it, in fact. 
The sun toppled down past the horizon with a wail that woke up sleeping people a hundred-day’s-walk away, and the world went dark at midday. 

“It wasn’t my fault,” said Little Hmen to his father and the rest of their gathered village at large. 
“Yes it was,” said Surmok. 
“Well, I didn’t mean to,” pointed out Little Hmen. 
Their father rubbed his face wearily.  He needed some sort of drink made from an interesting plant and a bit of quiet and a nice shady spot to enjoy his drink in.  Of the three, he was blessed only with an abundance of the last.  Being the chief was less than a good thing some days, which were most days. 
“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is –” said Father. 
“It’s his,” said Surmok.
“No it isn’t!” said Little Hmen.
“-but we still need to fix it.  You broke the sun.  We need that.  We’re going to need some really big magic to fix that.  Someone like Murri Three-Noses.”
“He’s dead,” called Father’s cousin from the crowd.  “Ate a turtle without chewing for a bet.”
“He choked to death?  I heard he could break boulders by breathing on them!”
“No, it went in fine, it was more when it was leaving.”
There was a moment. 
“Right,” said father. 
“How about Slelloc Slell?” suggested grandfather Takl.  “I heard he juggled a mountain once on his littlest finger, and brought a jaguar home as a pet when he was an infant.”
“That was sixty years ago,” said Father. 
“He’s only learned more since then.”
“He’s forgotten half of it.  I heard that he brought rain to a village last year, and it was bright purple.  And then it flooded them all out.  He can barely remember how to dress himself now, let alone any magic.” 
“Hrrmmph,” said Takl. 
“Cloli Bloodletter?” called a voice. 
“Asks for children as payment,” replied Father’s cousin. 
“Ixchol the Quick?” proposed Surmok, who remembered him from some of the stories his mother used to tell him. 
“Lost a footrace with a zephyr a month ago, has to spend a year without moving a muscle from where he sits,” said grandfather Takl.  “Serves the damned fool right for his brashness.”
“What about Elder Lactl?” suggested Mother. 
“She’s crazy,” said Father.
“She works just fine, crazy or not.  She took that curse off your aunt very nicely.”
“She made her wear a necklace of fish heads for three months.”
“And the smell worked just fine to drive off the curse now, didn’t it?  I say we go with her.”
“She’s a woman,” grumbled grandfather Takl.
“So am I,” said Mother, “and you managed to survive me until I married Xapa.”
Father looked out across the village.  “Any other ideas?”
Murmurs reached a mumbled consensus: no.
“Then we send out the call to Elder Lactl,” said Father.  “And she and my sons will go and try to fix this business before it gets out of hand.  In the meantime, I think we’ll need a name for this new thing that’s popped up with the sun gone.  Let’s call it the dark.”

Elder Lactl was called in the traditional way.  Everyone got together and caught every animal they could find – mostly bats, which seemed to be enjoying the new ‘dark,’ and insects – and asked them politely to get her to come over. 
Then they waited.
And waited.
And waited a little more.  They weren’t quite sure exactly how long, though.  Not with the sun missing, no longer weaving its cheerful circle around the edge of the sky to show the hours of the day ticking past. 
“Cloi Bloodletter steals the wings of eagles and flies a hundred leagues in a minute,” muttered one. 
“Ixchol the Quick could spin the world three times on a single sprint,” grumbled Surmok. 
“Hah!” said grandfather Takl.  “Slelloc Slell once voyaged to the stars and back on a boat made from a single feather – and all in an afternoon!”
“Only place he travels to nowadays is his chamberpot,” said mother.  Grandfather Takl mumbled something about the rudeness of youth and the cruelty of your children. 
At long last, Elder Lactl came, bumping and jostling down the muddy old trade route.  She was sitting on her hat, legs crossed firmly above the rim as it slid along the dirt, spinning and oscillating so that she never faced squarely forwards.  It came to a gradual halt in the village square, spinning her about to face the small assembly of curious witnesses with her bent back. 
“Hey ho there,” she spoke to empty air as Father adjusted his tattered and dusty ceremonial headdress, freshly-plucked from its languishment under his bed.  “What’s the problem?”
Father adjusted his planned speaking style from ceremonial to straightforward in self defence.  “The sun’s gone.  Can you fix it?”
“Oh, right,” said Elder Lactl, stepping from her hat and stretching her spine.  The thousands of intricate little beads on strings that made up her robe clicked and clacked together like a fistful of pebbles, skittering off the surface of the long, long knife that dangled from her neck like a razor-edged pendant.  “Sure!  Who did it?  Someone must’ve done it.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” said Little Hmen. 
Elder Lactl laughed, and bent down to look at him face to face.  The old, old woman’s skin looked more tanned and beaten than grandfather Takl’s old trophy jaguar skin, she smelt like dust and dirt, and her nose was longer than the length of a stretched finger.  But the thing about her that made Little Hmen stare was neither of these; it was her eyes.  They were a clear, deep brown, still sharp, and quite obviously not looking at the same thing as anyone else was, ever.  They were sorcerer’s eyes, magic eyes, and he felt very odd indeed seeing them turned on him. 
“No, I expect not,” she said, straightening up (barely) and taking that worrying gaze off Little Hmen.  “Boys will be lads, always breaking their toys.”
“He broke the sun,” said father, rather pointedly. 
“Toys, suns, same things.  Always something shiny to the imagination that goes smash proper when you drop it.  Especially something forbidden.  ‘Don’t look at it!’ you warn them, so of course first comes looking, then touching, then breaking.  This is exactly why I never had any children of my own you know.  Troublesome, aren’t they?”  The last was addressed in a conspiratorial tone to Little Hmen.  He shrugged. 
“Well, there’s no use crying over spilt sunshine.  I’ll take your boy here with me and we’ll be on our way to go fix up this mess.  Better take your other one with me too, seeing as he threw the dart in the first place.  Bless him, but he must have a good arm.  We might need that.”
Surmok opened his mouth to protest innocence, and immediately shut it under the baleful glower of his mother’s expression. 
“Right then,” said Elder Lactl.  “Best move off while the night’s young.”
The trip was long and far, farther than Little Hmen or even Surmok had ever been from home before.  That wasn’t saying much, but still.  Little Hmen was sure that they’d been walking for days, missing sun or no, and it was scarcely an even bearing of burdens – each stride of Surmok’s was two or three of his and Elder Lactl simply sat on her hat and let it bear her where she wished, usually facing the wrong direction.  This was a good thing; not only did it take that gaze of hers away from them, but it also meant that the greater amount of her rambling spilled into the forest, away from their ears.  Elder Lactl talked a lot – no, more than a lot.  Elder Lactl talked more than grandfather Takl in a reminiscing mood, something that both the brothers had separately and privately concluded to be impossible earlier in their lives.  She talked about animals, and plants, and places she’d seen, and people she’d known, and about the weather and the sky and she never, ever stopped.  It was more tiring than the walk, even as the ground grew high and rocky. 
Finally, after a particularly lengthy anecdote about a troublesome tapir made Lactl pause for breath, Little Hmen seized the chance to ask the question that had been brewing in his head for half the trip. 
“Are we there yet?”
“Hmm?  Oh no, no, no, no!  Not in the least!  Why, first we’ve got to go the wrong way.”
The two brothers stopped and stared at that, in spite of all their parents had taught them about manners (important when dealing with your elders) and respect (very important when dealing with magic).  It was quite all right, as Elder Lactl was too busy steering her hat around a troublesome mud patch to notice, frowning as the edge of its brim toed the muck. 
“Tricky, tricky – we need to find the sun, see?  The poor thing’s gone haring off wounded thanks to the rotten luck you boys had.  So we need to track it.  But the sun’s in the sky, you see.  You can’t track that from the ground, oh no my never.  Sky’s the only way to go.  And to track its path in the sky, we’ll need something that travels through the sky.  And this old hat just won’t cut it, sad to say as the truth is.  So we’re going to hunt up something a bit better.”
“Eagle wings?” asked Surmok.
“No.  They get awfully, terribly crabby whenever you try and borrow them.  I’m not as young as you; I don’t heal that fast anymore.”
“A boat made from a feather?” suggested Little Hmen.
“They make me sneeze.  No, no, no, I’ve a better plan.  We’re right near the mountains now, boys, and I’m going to call in a favour from a friend with a wonderful nose.  Plug your eyes, would you?”
Elder Lactl put a finger between her teeth and another in her ear, squinted one eye shut and bulged the other, and let out a whistle so piercing that it set both the brothers’ teeth a-quivering.  Right away there was a flapping and fluttering in the sky and down came a bird smaller than half a hummingbird, cloaked from skull to tail-tip and all about the wings with the most beautifully pure white feathers, so clear and clean they made clouds look dirty.  It landed on the tip of Elder Lactl’s long, long nose and gave her a most cunning look. 
“Elder Lactl,” said the bird, its voice like music on the ears.  “What do you want?”
“We’re looking for the sun, Condor,” explained the old magic woman.  “And it’s not at all these boys’ fault.  Understood?”
Condor looked a bit confused. 
“Good.  Anyways, I happen to know you have the most marvellous nose in all the things that fly.  Would you mind putting it to use for us?  Smell us out the sun’s resting place, if you would be so good.  I promise, I’ll help you out.”
“I guess so,” said Condor.  “But this had better be worth it.  The sun burns my nose and makes my head itch.”  He took off again, circled them thrice, and dipped in the air. 
“Follow me!” he called.  So they followed him, deeper and longer into the mountains, through crevasses and over crags, around ravines and past moraines. 
“Follow me,” he called as they walked over snow and ice, the brothers shivering in weather far, far colder yet than any they’d ever wished to imagine, let alone endure.  Elder Lactl remained oblivious to the temperature, and offered them icicles to lick. 
“Stop!” he announced, as they were clinging to a cliffside (except for Lactl, who was sitting on her hat as it slid down the face inch by careful inch).  “Just to your left.  No, your other left, Little Hmen.  There.  The cave.”
There it was, a broad, flat, gaping cave opening.  The air that came from it was dry and flat, as appealing as breathing sand.  
“Well, I’ll be filled with toucans,” marvelled Elder Lactl as they gingerly sidled into the place’s depths.  “The underworld.  It slid all the way down into the underworld.  My, boy, but you do have a good throwing arm.  And you’re going to need it in a moment, because you can’t come down here without a fight.”
Sure enough, a pair of men were standing farther down the tunnel.  Their feet were planted firmly on the ceiling, their bodies were withered bone with thin skins, and their eyes gone and empty. 
“Halt,” pointed out the one on the right. 
“And die,” submitted the one on the left.
“Can we leave now?” asked Little Hmen.  The knives those dead men were carrying were obsidian, finer than glass and sharper than his mother’s mind. 
“No leaving,” the two stated firmly.  “That’s the rule.  Come in, but don’t leave.”
“Well, we’re definitely going to have to get the sun to leave,” said Elder Lactl.  “So I’m afraid we’ll have to change that rule of yours.”
“Make us,” said the men. 
“Certainly.  I bet you each of us can defeat you once each when we return through here.  And if we do, you have to let us go.  Does that sound fine to you?”
The two dead men grinned at each other, a fine and tricky feat to perform when your jaw muscles are locked.  “It does.”  With a creaking of joints and a shedding of dust they stood aside, arms crossed and locked across their rotting barrel-chests, vicious knives sheathed carefully in their bony ribs. 
“That was too easy,” said Surmok as they walked farther down the tunnels, opening up into caves and shapes that were too weird to be real. 
“Oh, not at all,” said Elder Lactl.  “It’s easy to get down into the underworld.  Everybody does it sooner or later.  They just get shirty about you trying to leave.  Now, Condor, which way was that sun?”
“Follow me,” said Condor, and they went on and in, further into the underworld, farther from where living people should ever be.  The ground grew harsh and spiked, too cruel for warm feet to tread; the walls turned into things that weren’t; the ceiling wasn’t there and was there at the same time while not being either.  And the whole place was covered in mists and fogs that Little Hmen and Surmok were never entirely sure existed.  Maybe they were just imagining them so they wouldn’t have to see what was really there.  Then again, Elder Lactl bobbed along cheerfully on her hat, nose twitching, sorcerer’s-eyes staring at things that hurt to look at as happily as a snake in a bird’s nest. 
“It’s here,” said Condor.  The little bird was looking less than well himself.  He kept twitching at any sounds smaller than a footstep.  But he was right: there was the sun, floating in a pool of water, light flickering feebly, weighted down by the embedded bulk of Surmok’s dart. 
“Oh dear,” said Elder Lactl.  “This is very bad.  Worse than I thought.  Your arm is even stronger than I thought, love, and a good thing too.  You’ll need that when you all walk out of here.”  She cracked her knuckles and stepped off her hat, shook herself like a cat coming out of the rain, and picked it up. 
“Now,” she said, placing it most carefully on her head, “is time for the magic.  First you, Condor.  What do you want?”
“A wish for myself,” said the Condor.  “For later.”
“Saving up, eh?  Clever bird.”  Elder Lactl blew on her hand and licked her knife and put them together, then pulled away the little splash of blood that came out of this and did something that made it vanish in a little piff of light.  “There you go!  Just wish hard, and it’s yours.  A hard bargain, but a good one.”
“What about the sun?” asked Little Hmen.  “Are we going to carry it?”  He asked the last with a worried whine in his voice, and for good reason – just standing near the pool made your skin crawl with uncomfortable warmth.  Dim it might be, but cool it wasn’t. 
“Dear me no. don’t you worry your little head there at all.  We can’t carry it back into the sky; the idea is to get it rising all on its own again, under its own power.  Surmok, would you like to help it?”
Surmok edged his way to the pool cautiously, gripped his dart by its shaft, and pulled.  His knuckles smoked lightly as he yanked away the weapon, its wooden point stained radiant with the sun’s blood. 
“It tore the muscle,” he said.  “Will it fly again?”
They looked at the sun expectantly.  It managed a few weak bobs that took it to just level with Little Hmen’ chin, then gave up and splashed back into the pool. 
Elder Lactl clucked her tongue and drew her knife once more.  “Pity.  Ah well, I thought it would come to this.  The poor thing needs to lighten itself.  And since I seem to be in possession of the lightest thing among us, it’s time I parted ways with both it and all of you.”
“What?” said Condor and Surmok, largely at once.  Little Hmen was too busy looking at his brother’s newly burnished dart. 
“Be quiet for a moment,” said Elder Lactl, and she cut open her chest.  Blood poured out slowly as she yanked and tugged on her ribs, broke one, two, three, four, and pulled out her heart, which she carefully slipped loose of its bounds. 
“Here you go,” she said brightly, and dropped it into the sun.  Then she fell over dead. 
In the surprised silence that followed, Little Hmen was the first to notice and point at the sun.  It was floating, bobbing up uneasily and wobbly on thin air, light as a feather or an old witch’s heart. 
“I think we’d better leave,” said Condor. 
The trip back was easier, if only because they had but to retrace their bloody footsteps, tracking the remnants left by the rough rocks underfoot, taking it in turns to fan the floating sun forwards and upwards.  Up until the very maw of the underworld, and the dead men that guarded it. 
“A challenge,” mused the one on the right, which was now the one on the left. 
“As agreed,” chuckled the one on the left, who was on the right. 
“The child first,” they said together.  “Let us spare him seeing his brother die.”
Little Hmen thought for a moment.  “Can I face one of you?  I’m half as big as a grownup.”
The dead men shrugged.  “It can be so.”
“I pick hide-and-seek.”
“I will seek,” said the one on the left that was on the right.
“Count to ten.”
The dead man did so.  Little Hmen hid behind his brother. 
“You are not hiding very well,” said the dead man. 
Surmok looked behind him, at his little brother, and realized something. 
“You can’t see him, can you?”
“No,” admitted the dead man. 
“It doesn’t count, and I should know.  I was the best and hide-and-seek in the village, and I say if you can’t see him, you haven’t found him.”
The dead man grunted and shoved and heaved and pulled, but it couldn’t budge its feet from where they sunk into the roof of the tunnel. 
“Fine,” it said in poor grace.  “The child passes.”  Little Hmen walked between them with fear in his heart, but it was for nothing.  The knuckles of the dead men twitched on their knife-handles, but nothing more. 
“Now it is the bird’s turn,” they said.
“Easily done,” said Condor.  “I challenge you to smell what I smell.”
There was a pause, during which the dead man on the right who was on the left felt the gaping hole where his nose had been.  It was not a kindly one. 
Condor had the good grace to take his victory in silence. 
“The man then,” seethed the dead men as one. 
“I challenge you,” said Surmok, “to best my throw.  I’ll wager I can hurl a dart farther than either of you, and I’ll even forgo my atlatl, to make things fair.”
The two dead men looked at their great bony arms, then at Surmok’s (relative) slimness, and they burst into laughter, the long, hard, cold laughter of the dead that can go on forever, and sometimes does.  “Agreed,” they chuckled, and each plucked loose their spine, blackened and bone-spiked, a great javelin thicker than Surmok’s waist.
“On the count of three, as one we throw,” he said.  “One,” grip the darts, “two,” brace the hold, strike the pose, “three,” go. 
Up and out soared Surmok’s dart, no longer hidden by his hand, and as it was loosed – just a fraction’s split ahead of the two giant spears – it shone with bright line, the blood of the sun.  The dead men roared and groaned and clutched at their empty eyes that couldn’t see in agony, and their throws clattered hollowly off the walls of the underworld, aim spent and wasted. 
“I pass,” Surmok said, and ran through rather hastily, before they could change their minds. 
Last came the sun, floating up from below, and the dead men were in no mood to talk. 
“Cheat.”
“Friend of cheats.”
“Do not leave,” they said, and swung their bare fists at it as hard as they could.
There was a flash, a scream and a sizzle, and the dead men weren’t there anymore.  Unfortunately, the sun had been wedged rather tightly into the ceiling. 
“I can’t reach it,” said Little Hmen. 
“I can’t reach it,” said Surmok. 
“I can,” said Condor, and he flew up and up to the sun in its prison.  He pecked and heaved at the rock and tugged and snipped at the sun and nothing came of it but singed feathers and a sore beak, no matter how hard he tried. 
“I wish I were bigger!” he cursed.  And then lo and behold, there was a swirl and shake and he was bigger, bigger than Surmok and Little Hmen and their mother and father all put together.  His wings nearly burst the tunnel’s walls with their thunder, and with two sharp blows he smashed the rock with his wings.  A snap of his mouth plucked loose the sun, and with his hardest breath he blew it loose, up, up, up and out of the underworld, tumbling loose and wild into the sky. 
‘It’s out,” said Little Hmen, scrambling into the open air. 
“It’s not steady,” frowned Surmok, watching its ascent with worried eyes. 
Condor didn’t say anything, and on questioning couldn’t.  His throat was burned away to near-nothing, his beautiful feathers had been burnt to black almost all over his body, and his head was bald and scorched.  Despite all the thanks offered to him he was in no fit mood for company, and so set off home immediately. 
Surmok and Little Hmen took their time walking back, and so noticed a new difficulty: the sun was falling.  Instead of settling back into its comfortable spiral around the sky, it arched up, up to the very top, then began to slide back down again.  By the time they were home, that awful dark had appeared once more. 
“Well, that isn’t good,” said Father when they told him what they’d done.  “All that effort, just for one day?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” said Little Hmen. 
“There’s only so much lightness in one heart,” said Surmok.  “Maybe it ran out.”
“Well, we’d better get it some more,” said Father.  “And there’s got to be an easier way of doing it.  We can’t send someone all the way to the underworld each and every time we want some sunlight.”
“Yes we can,” said Surmok, who’d just had an idea pop into his head.  “It’s easy to get into the underworld.  Everybody does it.  We just need to send someone down with their heart in hand.  A good light heart.  That’s the important bit; it has to be light.”
There was a very long conversation after that, and that’s where most of the rules were laid out. 

The above myth is considered to be the only known rationale given for a rather peculiar quirk of Xlalec religion.  Although their sun cult emphasized – as did many others – the necessity of sacrifice to maintain the sun’s presence, it is the only known example that demanded that its priests be skilled comedians. 

“Sunshine” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor. 

Three people sat on a hill, legs dangling, the back-and-forth swing of their calves showing bone idleness and deep, deep boredom in a contemplative mingling.  Two of them were gods. 
“This is dull,” said one, at length. 
They examined the rolling-out spread of the world around and above and beneath them. 
“Very,” agreed the other, eventually. 
“Let’s fix that,” said the first.  “Perhaps we should make something.”
“That sounds pretty good,” said the second.  “Who should we make?”
“How about some humans?  Let’s make some humans.”
“You did that already,” said the third person, who was a human. 
“Hmm,” said the first god, stretching lazily.  “That’s right.  I forgot that part.  Let’s make someone else this time.  There’s no sense doing what you’ve already done.”
So they got up, all three of them, and they walked over to earth from heaven.  It’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. 
“Well, I’m bushed,” said the human. 
“But we just started,” said the first god. 
“Maybe you’ve just started but I’m just about through,” said the human.  “That’s a long walk, from all the way over there to all the way over here.  I’m going to take a bit of a nap, if you don’t mind too much.  I’ll catch up when I’m done with my rest.”  The human curled up under a tree, to keep the sun away, and wouldn’t move, argue as the other two might. 
“I’m sleeping,” said the human.  “Go away.  Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
“But we have to worry about you,” said the first god.  “If we don’t, who will?”
“And besides,” added the second, “you’re going to miss out.   We’re going to make all sorts of good things.”
“I’ll see it when I’m done my nap,” said the human, and fell asleep. 
The gods gave up.  There was just no arguing with humans when they decided like that. 
“So, what shall we make?” asked the first god, as they wandered through the trees.  Those were some good trees, and they felt pretty fine, knowing they’d made those on their last trip. 
“Let’s make some things for the humans,” said the second god.  “If they like it, it’s good.  If they don’t like it, it’ll teach them to not laze about while we’re trying to help them, and that’s good too.  There’s no bad about it.”
“That’s smart,” said the first god.  “Let’s give them a way to build homes.”
“They’re a bit naked with all that skin,” agreed the second god.  “And they’re too big to fit in most burrows.  Not that they’re any hands at digging.  That’s a good idea.”
“It is,” said the first god.  “What should they make them out of?”
“How about bits of trees?” said the second.  “There’s lots of trees.  I’ll bet we could just take some bits off them and mash them together in a new shape.”
“Let’s do that,” said the first god.  So they took a whole lot of the bits of the trees and mashed them up, but they couldn’t get them to stick. 
“This isn’t working,” said the second god.  “Your idea isn’t that good.”
“You wanted trees,” said the first god.  “We need something to hold this together.  Maybe something sticky.”  The first god’s eye alit on a bug buzzing through the shrubs, something they’d made at the end of the last trip.  “Hey, wasp, you want to help here?”
“Sure,” said the wasp.  “What do you need?”
“Something sticky,” said the second god.
“I’ve got that,” said the wasp, and it spewed its spit all over the tree bits and spread them real thin and tidy, all chewed up and gummed into paste.  They stuck together like anything, and the wasp turned that gunk into a good little hut. 
“That’s good,” said the first god.  “Really good.”
“That’s small,” pointed out the second god.  “Really small.”
“It’s just right,” said the wasp.  “Look, see how well it fits!”
“Fits you, maybe,” said the first god.  “But not a human.”
“If you wanted a human house, you should’ve asked for one,” said the wasp.  “This one’s for me.”
The second god shrugged.  “I guess so.  Thanks anyways, wasp.  Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
So the gods left the wasp and its little house, and walked down to the river to splash their feet and think on new things. 
“That wasn’t too good,” said the first god.  “Let’s try again.  What else do humans need?”
“Some weapons,” said the second god.  “Their teeth and claws are awfully small.  Let’s give them some strong teeth and jaws, at least.”
“I think that’s a fine plan,” said the first god.  So they made themselves some nice strong teeth, big and smooth and sharp as anything, and some fine jaw muscles to go with them. 
“How do we put them in?” asked the first god. 
“I thought you’d know,” said the second. 
They argued for a while. 
“Look, let’s get someone to try them on,” said the second, at length. 
“Fine,” said the first.  “Hey, beaver, try these teeth on, will you?”
The beaver eyed the teeth with wary caution.  “They look awfully big.  You sure this is a good idea?”
“It’ll be fine,” said the first god, with confidence.  “Here, take them.”
“All right,” said the beaver.  So it put the teeth in and champed them around a bit, to get the feel of them.  “What do I test them on?”
“Try this rock,” suggested the second god.
The beaver bit the rock, and chipped a tooth.  “Well, that wasn’t very smart,” it said. 
“I guess not,” admitted the second god.  “How about that tree?”
The beaver bit the tree, then gnawed the tree, then chewed the tree, and it fell over right into the water, ker-splosh. 
“That worked a lot better,” said the beaver.  “Can I try that again?”
“Sure,” said the first god. 
So the beaver bit and gnashed and chewed ten fine young trees, one after another, each falling ker-splosh into the water. 
“These are good teeth,” said the beaver.  “I like these teeth.”
“That’s great,” said the second god.  “Mind if we take them back now.”
“I guess not,” said the beaver.  “I’ll miss them.”
So the gods grabbed ahold of one tooth each, but yank and tug as they might, not a single incisor would budge.  
“Oops,” said the second god.
“That isn’t good,” said the first god. 
“I don’t mind keeping them,” said the beaver hopefully. 
“I guess you’d better,” said the second god.  “We’d have to pull out most of your head to get them out too.  And you’ll need that.  Well, thanks anyways, beaver.”
“Thank you,” said the beaver.  It had an idea of what it wanted to do with those trees.  Muddy burrows in the riverbed were all well and good, but all that loose lumber was giving it plans. 
The gods walked away from the beaver and its river, thoughts working hard.  Their wandering feet roved them up into the rocky highlands, up against a big cliff.  They climbed up to its very tip and sat down, legs swinging again. 
“So, no homes,” said the first god. 
“Seems not,” said the second. 
“And no weapons,” continued the first. 
“Not this way, no,” agreed the second. 
“We should at least make sure they have something nice.  Something no one else can do.”
“How about talking?” said the second. 
“Birds call.  Wolves howl.  Whales sing.  Crickets chirrup.  Cats purr –”
“All right, not like that then,” said the second.  “How about a way to talk without talking?”
“Everybody does that,” said the first.  “Shrugging.  Flapping.  Strutting.  Posturing. ”
“Then what about a way to talk without being there at all?”
“That’s crazy,” said the first. 
“I’ll show you.”  So the second god broke off a sharp piece of flint from the cliff and scratched and scraped some little markings on the dirt. 
“All right.  See that little picture of a bear I drew?”
“Yes.”
“That means a bear.  See?  All we have to do is leave a picture like this, and anyone who looks at it knows what we meant.  Humans can do it too.  That takes some good brains, and they’ve got pretty good brains.”
“That’s a good idea,” said the first god.  “And they can even do it on other rocks?”
“Probably,” said the second god, and gave it a shot.  The flint drawing tool snapped on the cliff face, spilling splinters onto the dirt beneath. 
“Maybe not,” admitted the second god. 
“Oops,” said the first god.  “Well, I’m just about out of ideas.  This is harder than I thought.”
“Let’s take a break,” proposed the second god.  So they walked back to heaven and fell asleep. 

Down below in the forest, the human woke up and took a good stretch, refreshed right as rain.  A wasp buzzed by, and then another. 
“What’re you up to?” asked the human. 
“Building!” said the wasp.  “Busy, busy, busy building!  So much to work on!  I made just one little home, and now all my friends and relations want one.  We’re building a home for all of us!”
“That sounds pretty impressive,” said the human.  “Mind if I look?”
“Sure,” said the wasp.  So the human came and looked.  The wasp nest was a nice big papery ball wedged in the fork of a big old oak.  The older, smaller nest hung from a branch under it.
“Hmm,” said the human.  “It looks a bit dirty.”
“They forgot to wipe their feet,” complained the wasp.  “They always forget to wipe their feet.  They left footprints all over my nice clean home, all the while complaining it was too small, and now they want me to make a big one for us all.  If they weren’t my friends and relations I’d say they were my worst enemies.”
“Hmm,” said the human.  “Can I have the old home?”
“I don’t see why not,” said the wasp.  So the human took the old home, and looked at all the tiny dark marks on the thin, papery shell. 
“What’d you make this from?” asked the human. 
“Bits of tree.  And spit.  Quite a lot of spit.”
“I don’t think I’ll try spit,” said the human.  But an idea was stewing in there.  So the human took a big bit of tree, and made marks on it.  Lots of little ones, all like wasp feet.  Some of them were drawings, some of them were drawings of drawings, and some of them were drawings of drawings of drawings that didn’t look like drawings at all any more, but symbols. 
“This could be interesting,” said the human.  “I’d better remember it.”  So the human did, and packed up that bit of tree for later study.  And the wasp nest. 
“I’m thirsty,” said the human.  “Know a good spot?”
“There’s a river a few thousand wingbeats thataways,” said the wasp.  “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, and thanks.”
The human walked down to the river and took a long, cool drink, all the while wondering what was that big pile of branches and tree trunks sitting in the middle of the stream.  The water was starting to act funny near it.  A beaver waddled by, towing a fallen sapling. 
“What are you doing?” asked the human. 
“I’m taking trees and building a home,” said the beaver, between its teeth and a little over its tongue.  “Could you move a little to one side?”
The human moved politely, and watched the beaver tow the trunk into place.  And it thought a little. 
“Could I borrow some of those trees?” asked the human. 
“The ones that are too big for me,” said the beaver.  “I chewed down some of them by mistake.”
“Thank you,” said the human, and started work immediately.  Before long all the trees were dragged into a pile in a little clearing, where they were shoved into a sort of frame.  The human covered the gaps with branches, and felt like that was pretty good.  It’d keep out rain, at the very least. 
“Now where,” asked the human aloud, “did those gods go?  I’d better go someplace high and look for them.”
Up and up the trail led, up to the mountain, and on to the cliff.  There the god-tracks ended, in a little splash and spray of shattered flint. 
The human picked up a piece, and cut a finger. 
“Hmm,” said the human, and picked up the piece again, this time more carefully, and drew it across lunch, a big dried tuber.  It cut it through cleanly. 
“Hmmmmmmmmm,” said the human, the sound of a thought wrestling for room against the inside of a skull.  “I will remember this.  I will remember this very, very carefully.”  The human walked away full of thought, and looked for the gods all night, calling their names in the forest.  Finally the human gave up, and went home to its friends and relations. 
“I think I lost the gods,” the human said, “but I’ve found some interesting things.  Now, let me tell you about them for a little while.”

The gods woke up late, even for gods.  Their backs were stiff and their heads were sore, from sleeping all out of sorts. 
“How long was that?” asked the first. 
“I’m not too sure,” replied the second.  “But we’d better go check on that human.”
So they went back to earth.  It’s not a long walk, for a god. 
“What,” said the first god, “are all those things in the forest?”
“Why,” asked the second god, “are all those trees stumps?”
“Where,” puzzled the first god, “did all the rocks up on that cliff go?”
“And what are those humans doing?” asked the second god. 
“The things in the forest are huts,” said the human.  “We made them out of those trees.  And we took the rocks to make these spears.  Which we’re using to hunt that deer, which you just chased away with your talking.”
“Sorry,” said the first god. 
“It’s all right,” said the human.  “You left us all these things anyways, while my ancestor on my mother’s side was sleeping.”
“Sure we did,” said the second god.
“Sure,” agreed the first god.  “You’re welcome.”
“How did you know about us?” asked the second god, who’d only just realized that this human probably wasn’t the same one they’d left. 
“We wrote it down,” said the human, who pulled a big scroll of flat stomped papery stuff out of a backpack.  The gods looked at it again, and there it was, all written down.  They were mightily impressed.   
“Want anything more?” asked the second god.  “You could come back to heaven, give us some ideas.  Three heads are better than two.”
The human looked around.  “No, I think this is pretty good.  We’ll manage.  Thanks.”
“Good luck,” said the gods. 
“Good luck,” said the human.  They all went home. 
“Should we make something else?” asked the first god.  “It looks like that turned out real nice.”
The second god stretched out.  “No, I don’t think so.  They can have a turn at doing that sort of thing for a while.  I feel like another rest.”
“Sounds fine to me,” said the first god.  “Let’s get comfortable.”
So the gods tucked themselves in and took a nap.  But they got a little too comfy, and when they woke up next, things had changed a bit more. 
But that’s not this story. 

“Oops,” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.

The inn on the High Road was packed full to the rafters with rowdy guests, busy and cheerful, all stuffing their mouths with food and packing in whatever spaces remained with beer.  Loud talk and laughter bounced from wall to wall, crescendoing into a din that would’ve made a bear whimper.  All were of good cheer, raucously celebrating the approach of further celebration, of holiday festival, of three full days of feasts and family and arguing.
All except one.  The man sitting in the corner, staring at his plate as though it was all he had left in the world.  This intrigued Jack, over at the bar, so he walked over and asked him what was what.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the man, as the weight of the something pressed down on his shoulders further still.
“A big nothing, then,” said Jack, who stole the man’s leftovers from unresisting hands.  His steel tooth flashed as he tore through the potatoes.  “Tell me about it.”
The man rubbed his face.  “It’s my family.  You see, the wife and I – she is upstairs, asleep, you see – we live far apart from our kin, so when we married two years ago we agreed to take it in turns to visit our families each holiday.  Last year we visited my father and mother, brothers and sisters, all in the city…”
“Ah.  In-law troubles await you this year then?”
“Yes.  They are ogres.”
Jack stopped chewing midmouthful to think this over.  “So, do you mean this as a figure of speech, or more of…”
“More of a matter of fact, yes.  They are ogres.  Tall as a troll each and twice as ugly, with muscles that can shatter boulders, breath that can blacken mirrors, and squinting, glowering eyes that can barely make out a barn wall five feet away in broad daylight.  They don’t like me.”
“My sympathies,” said Jack, resuming the busywork of his knife and fork.  Few things had ever put him off a meal for more than a moment.  “I take it your wife doesn’t take after her family?”
“No, no.  Julie is the sweetest, prettiest thing I’ve ever met.  She’s gentler than a nightingale, won’t eat meat for harm of the animals, and she winces when she swats an insect.  How she grew up in that house I’ll never know.”
“Adopted, maybe?”
“Definitely not.  She has an extra joint on each of her thumbs, a nose that can smell the difference between the sunset and the sunrise, and her back teeth can crack bone.  She’s an ogre all right.”
“Hmm.  Why does her family not approve of your union?”
“I’m not nearly ogrish enough for their tastes.  I’m far too small, much too weak, and I’m scarcely brutal.  I’m afraid that an honest cloth merchant is just not good enough for their little girl, and that this holiday visit will end in nothing but misery.”
Jack nodded in sympathy.
“And they might eat me.”
Jack slammed down his flagon.  “Right!” he shouted.  “That’s certainly enough of that nonsense!  Hear me all,” he called to the inn around them, which watched in surprised, “I’m Jack the traveller and I’ll be damned if I’ll let any passing acquaintance of mine whose meal I’ve taken be eaten by his in-laws!  Sir,” he said to the distraught cloth merchant, “I’ve got a plan, and I advise you hearken to it.  First, let me borrow your clothes.”
So they went upstairs to the cloth merchant’s room and he gave Jack his second-best suit, as he was wearing the best.  Jack admired the seams, then spoke again: “Second, give me whatever soap or perfumes you might use on your person.”
This the cloth merchant did, and Jack applied them liberally, stopping to sniff now and then with the utmost care.  At last he was satisfied, and turned again to the merchant.  “Third, let me go to your in-laws in your place.  I believe I can fool their noses in this manner.  You’ll be apart from your wife for a few days, but I believe you two can bear the sweet sorrow of a few days away from each other’s arms in exchange for your still having arms to clasp her in, when once again you meet.”
“I concede this,” said the cloth merchant, “and shall alert Julie posthaste.”  He nudged the sleeping woman in the bed awake.
“Why,” she asked, “is that man wearing your clothes?”
“It’s a deception, sweet-pea,” he said to her, “to stop your family from eating me.”
“Oh all right,” she yawned.  And then she fell back asleep without so much as a murmur.
“It was a long ride today,” explained the merchant, carefully moving the pillows so that she wouldn’t fall off the bed.
“Then she can take her rest now, and you yours while you wait,” said Jack.  He slept on the roof outside for the view of the stars – as was his custom – and he and Julie left in the morning, he on the merchant’s fat nag, she on a slim mare with cross-shaped hooves.
“My mother gave it to me,” she explained as Jack eyed the horse dubiously, stroking its muzzle.  It was as white as cream, with luminous and unpleasant eyes.
“Marvellous,” he said, and snatched his hand away a mere nails-width from snapping teeth.  “And cheeky.”
“She’s like that with men,” she apologized.  “Unless you have a sugar cube.  She’ll do anything for a sugar cube.”
Jack chose to stay at arm’s length, and whiled away the trip entertaining Julie with an endless stream of ventriloquism applied to knock-knock jokes.

Jack heard the ogres before he saw them, a great rough laugh booming through the forest and making the birds scatter, then the thud-thud-thud of big horny feet smacking on the dirt, unshod and heedless.  The trees bent and groaned, the ground rumbled, and a huge ogre burst through the trees and picked up Julie in a bear-hug, horse and all.
“Big sister!” he roared.  The mare seized ahold of his eyelashes and yanked them away, and he laughed.
“Hello, Othello,” squeaked Julie, happily but breathlessly.  The ogre dropped her, making the mare do a little dance to stay on her feet.  She whinnied villainously.
“Mother and Father are inside, and Grandfather, and the cousins, and Uncle Abraham and Auntie Skadi, and Great Great-Grandmother is coming soon!”  He ceased his little hops of excitement and looked forlorn at her.  “We all missed you very much,” he said plaintively, and shot an evil look at Jack as Julie adjusted her petticoat.
“Well, I’m here now, and so is Clarence,” she said with a meaningful nod to Jack.  “Let’s go inside and say hello.”
The ogre home was a sprawling heap, a hall made from ruptured earth and bent trees, a hill repurposed into a hold.  Its great iron door-knocker was in a sad state from the countless hairy knuckles that had wrapped about it over the years, beating it senseless and dented.  Othello’s fist showed it no mercy, setting up such a din that Jack’s ears twitched.
“Mother!” he bawled.  “Father!  Julie is here, and so is that man!”
The door creaked open, and Father’s fetid breath washed out over them all, making their clothing wilt.  He stood sixteen foot tall if he was an inch, with a nose that would put a halberdier’s pride and joy to utter shame and deep-set eyes that were as screwed shut as a mole’s.
“Harruumph,” he said, long and rough.  “Welcome back daughter.  Mmrrmm.”  The door swung wide as he ushered them within, horses and all.  He plucked Jack from his nag with one hand and picked it up with the other.  It nestled in his sprawling palm, too terrified to so much as twitch a muscle.
“Your mother worries, you know,” he told Julie as they walked under the dirty, tangled wreckage of the ceiling, a forboding mass that Jack could not stop eyeing.  “Hrrrooum.  She worries about her little girl out there, all alone.”
“Clarence keeps me safe,” said Julie.
“Fwwuush!  This little fellow couldn’t safeguard a baby bird, let alone you, daughter.”
“You’ll see,” said Julie.  She gave Jack a nervous glance.
“Yes indeed,” he said, with as reassuring a pat on the shoulder as he could manage.  Othello growled at him.
Heat flowed over the company, and it was in the red light of a fireplace that could boil a king’s court whole that Jack saw the next ogre.  It was half as high as Father, but twice as wide and a hundred times the hideousness, a hag beyond recall.  Her fangs hung down to her thighs and her thighs turned into her knees before they began; her feet could’ve been mistaken for live crocodiles without cause for reproach.
“A snack, love,” said Father, handing Jack’s nag to the hag.  She spread her jaws wide and swallowed the terrified animal without so much as a chew, blinking three time hugely as she did so.
“Now, where’s my little girl?” she asked.
“Mother!” cried Julie, and she rushed to the monster’s legs for a hug.
“Julie-girl,” crooned Mother, and cuddled her with one big fist-hand, fingers stroking the woman’s golden hair with all the soft delicacy of maggots in flesh.  “You’ve grown so much, precious!”
“Thank you, Mother,” said Julie.  Her face was buried in the hag’s foul dress, and so she missed the grin that Mother was directing at Jack.  It showed entirely too many teeth to fit in one mouth.
“Is the man cruel to you, sweetling?” she asked.  “Why do you fret at Mother’s hem so?  Does he strike you?  Mother can stop that, you know.  Stop it good and proper.”
“Mother!” admonished Julie, stepping back and composing herself.  “Don’t fret.  You’ll see!”
“Indeed,” said Jack.  He tried not to wince as Mother stared at him head-on.  “Indeed.”
“Soup’s near up, precious,” said the ogre hag.  “Why don’t you tell your man to make himself useful and call up the others for supper?  Can’t let all this good meat go to waste.”
“I don’t eat meat, mother,” said Julie.  “It’s inhumane.”
“Nonsense, dear, there’s not a spot or lick of human in here – more’s the pity,” she sighed.  “It has such a lovely piquant flavour to it too, like good prime pork.  But there’s lots of nourishing elk in here, so let’s get everyone here and dug in before it cools!”
Julie curtseyed, then turned to Jack.  “Mother would appreciate it if you would call the family for suppertime,” she said with her mouth.  Her eyes added: and it would be terrible, terrible, and terrible if you do it improperly.  There’s lots of room in that kettle yet.
Father reached up high over the fireplace and brought down a mighty horn in his paws, carved from the tusk of some long-dead beast that would’ve dwarfed even him.  He handed it to Jack with a grunt, and it was to his great pride that he barely allowed his knees to buckle, nor did he scream.
“Blow,” commanded Father, and he sat back with his arms crossed, judging.
Jack was no stranger to music, and there was scarce any instrument he hadn’t taken a gamble at one time or another in revelry near or far.  He pursed his lips, he placed them to the sooty, blackened bone mouthpiece, and he blew a blast that would’ve melted a brass trumpet to slag.  It sounded like a kitten burping in the bottom of a tin bathtub.
Father leaned back.  Waiting.  Othello cracked his knuckles.
Jack examined the horn, trying to appear unhurried.  “Just finding the pitch,” he explained through one of his especially favourite smiles, the one he used when he was asking for money that made his steel tooth shine so prettily.  The family watched on, unimpressed.  Julie hurriedly tried some of the soup and pretended not to be paying attention.
Jack inhaled deep enough that his ribcage started to creak, then let fly a tremendous roar of wind into the horn, a sputtering shout.  It left him dizzy and barely able to hold it, but had scarcely more effect than the first.
Jack had often had to think in many unpleasant circumstances, but under the unblinking stare of Mother was among the worst he’d known.  There had to be some trick to the horn, a rough sort of enchantment.  Ogres were scarcely sorcerers, but they were as likely as any other sort of troll to have some sort of base magical cunning wrapped up in their belongings.
Julie flicked into his vision again for a moment, brushing by him with a hand discretely pressed to her mouth from the soup.  She burped a little, and he hoped she wouldn’t be sick.
Wait.  Aha.  Clever girl.  Of course.
“Only joking that time,” he said with a laugh, and he pressed the great, stinking horn to his lips one last time and belched into it long and hard, from the belly, like an ogre.  It let out a blast of fulsome fumes and odorous echoes, leaving him coughing in the wake of its roars.
“Hrmmmm,” said Father thoughtfully.  Othello looked a little impressed, but a little more disappointed.
Your soup stays inhumane tonight, lad, thought Jack, and he tossed the horn with as much nonchalance as he could manage to Father, who caught it one-handed.
“Well, I don’t know about you,” Jack said, “but I’m hungry.”

It had been a while since Jack had been at a meal that boasted this level of volume.  The chewing alone could’ve knocked over the inn that he’d stayed at the night before, and the volume of the hoots, hollers, and rumbles that echoed over it all could’ve stricken a jay in full screech unconscious.  The cousins were a particularly noisy lot; Jack was seated right between two of them and across from Julie, who was protectively insulated from his presence by the immense bulk of her parents.  She smiled nervously at him.
“Good food!” roared the cousin on Jack’s left, mouth overflowing back onto his plate, where he scooped it back in with relish.
“Good food!’ agreed the cousin on his right, belching midswallow with enough force to rock the table.
“Good food indeed,” said Jack loudly, tearing apart a chunk of elk-gut with his hands.  “Why, it’s so good, I’ll wager I could out-eat both of you at once.”
There was a sudden silence around him, relatively.  He could actually hear himself think for the first time in twenty minutes.
“Haw!” exclaimed the cousin on his left, a great, pot-bellied fellow.
“Hah!” erupted the cousin on his right, a longer, leaner, ogre, shaped as though he’d been slapped together out of slabs of beef.
“First one to the bottom of his bowl, gentlemen.” said Jack.  “Do we have a bet?”
“A bet!” they shouted together, and as one they dove for their plates, hands shovelling giblets, mouths gnashing wildly at entrails, and noses rooting for scraps like wild boars.
Jack smiled as he ate, rapidly yet surely, reaching for cups and sauce vessels as needed.  The elk was pretty good, and he was pretty hungry, but he was under no illusions as to his ability to out-eat two ogres at once.  He would tack a different wind with this problem.
“Hrrrmph,” the right cousin heard Father say, “pass the pine-nut sauce, hrrm.”  So he reached out to grab it.
“Shove that pine-nut stuff this away, there’s a peach,” the left cousin heard Mother speak of, and so he reached out and seized it.
“Leggo!” huffed the right cousin.
“Shove off,” said the left cousin.  “Mother wants it.”
“Father asked first!”
“Push off, you just want it for yourself!”
“Maggot!”
“Hog!”
And then the right cousin slapped his brother with an elk-hock and the meal degenerated from there.  Jack ate as quietly as he could, chewing down the meaty bits and spitting out the gristly ones discretely, smiling all the while.
“Finished,” he proclaimed.
“FINISHED!” he yelled a moment later.  The cousins looked up from where they lay on the floor, fists planted in one another’s breadbaskets.
“Can’t be!” objected the right cousin, struggling to his feet and scrubbing at his freshly blooming shiner.
“It is,” observed the left cousin, peering at Jack’s bowl with a gloomy expression.  “Fair and square.”
“No it isn’t, he kept eating while we fought!”
“That’s your fault.”
“Not it isn’t, you started it!”
“No, you!”
“Arrgh!”
The fistfight resumed under the table, and Jack joined in with the rest of the family in throwing scraps of bone at them, silently thanking that he’d taken the chance to practice throwing his voice on the trail.

“That was very risky,” scolded Julie as she lay down in bed.  “If they had noticed, you’d have been eaten before you could say Jack Robinson.”
“They were far too thick to notice,” said Jack lazily from the floor, where he’d made a sort of mattress out of his coat.  “And my last name isn’t Robinson, so we’re in no danger of that.”
“Yes, well, that won’t work on Uncle or Auntie,” said Julie.  “Nor Grandfather neither.  And I don’t even want to imagine what would happen if you tried to fool Great Great-Grandmother.  You’ll need my help on this if you want to impress them, like it or not.  Or have you forgotten my help with the horn so soon?”
“All right, all right, all right,” agreed Jack, rolling over in his coat.  “I’ll listen to your advice come morning.”
“Good,” said Julie.  “Now, the thing about Uncle is that –” but Jack was asleep before she finished her sentence.

The next morning found him bleary-eyed and shaky in the hands, badly in need of coffee and barely awake enough to listen to anything at all.  The floor of an ogre’s house is the bumpiest, the mouldiest, and the most lively in all the world.  He’d been woken by a rat the size of a terrier trying to eat his boots right off his feet.
“First day is gathering and feasting, second day is games and feasting, and the third is the grandest feast of them all,” reminded Uncle Abraham at breakfast –  boiled rabbits.  “I propose a game of bowls outside as soon as we are able.”
“I’ll take that game,” said Jack, noticing out of the corner of his eye that Julie was shaking her head violently.
‘Excellent,” said Uncle Abraham, with pronounced relish.  He was bearded fiercely, the only one of them besides Grandfather not to go clean-shaven, and whereas that ancient had long ago aged to grey tangles, Abraham’s beard was black as coal and fiercely sharp, jutting out down over his chest like a thicket of briars.  His moustache was serrated as only the most vicious of knives was.  “I’ll fetch the balls.”
“Why the worry?” Jack asked Julie as they followed Uncle Abraham down the front hall.  “I’m no stranger to gaming of any sort.”
“Ogre bowls is different,” Julie explained through daintily gritted teeth.
“How so?”
“You throw the balls at each other.  You score points for what part you hit, and you get the most from knocking someone down.  Or killing them.”
“Oh.”
The ogre’s lawn was half marsh, half desert, a mire of dirt and confusion and noise.  Othello and the cousins were engaged in some sort of wrestling involving tree trunks, Father and Auntie Skadi were throwing axes at a target made from a live, still-thrashing bear tied to a boulder, and Grandfather was sleeping in a bog, head tipped back carefully and teeth removed so as to allow him appropriate space to snore in.  Even Julie’s mare was out and about, pulling rabbits out of their burrows and eating them.
“Here you go,” said Uncle Abraham, handing Jack a rough-chiselled boulder that looked to have been chewed upon at one time.  He hefted his own and spun it from finger to finger, making it dance.  “We count off forty paces, turn, and toss.  If you move your feet, you forfeit.   If you die or are knocked senseless, you forfeit.  Ten points a bruised flank, brisket, or ribs, twenty for a brain-panning or a broken leg, fifty for a knockdown.  Play ‘till one hundred, deal?”
“Deal,” agreed Jack.  He tossed his rock from one hand to another, thoughtfully.  It probably weighed as much as he did, but he’d done worse.
“Right,” said Uncle Abraham.  They turned and paced – his paces much longer than Jack’s – and spun and hurled.  Jack ducked low and felt the missile breeze over the top of his head, ruffling the hair.  His own strike smacked Abraham amidships, right in the gut.  Winning seemed the thing to do here, but killing Julie’s relatives was probably not the best way to win their hearts.
“Hroff!” exclaimed the ogre.  He peeled off his shirt, rewarding Jack with the unpleasant sight of his slug-pale belly; hairy, horny, and unblemished by a bruise.  He winked unpleasantly at Jack.  “Not so much as a mark.  A poor throw for each of us.  Now, let’s try again.  Julie, mind fetching our balls?”
Julie did, hoisting them one in each hand without so much as a grunt or strain.  She gave Jack an I-told-you-so look as she reloaded them, but he was too busy eyeing his next target to notice it.  Fine, so that hadn’t worked.  Maybe the head was his goal after all.
One, two, forty paces, turn, fire.  This time Abraham’s boulder clipped his shoulder, spinning him all about until his teeth nearly shook out of his head.  His own shot slammed the ogre dead in the centre of his skull, which it bounced from as though it were made of rubber.  Abraham laughed and laughed.
“A good shot!  Ten points for me, but nought for you, I’m afraid!  Lass, our sporting equipment!”
Jack saw Julie’s lips move this time as she walked to him, and bent closer as she presented his ball.
“The chin,” she whispered.  “Uncle Abraham hides his heart under his chin.”
Jack nodded, and re-examined that bristling beard-structure that adorned the spot in question.  Its every hair looked harsher than an iron spear-tip.
“Abraham,” he called down the field.  “I fear I have you at a disadvantage, Uncle!”
“And why is that?” roared back the ogre, infinitely amused, arm cocked to throw.
“Because there is a wasp in your beard.”
At this, Abraham cursed and swore, swatted and spun, rocked and bounced and slapped at his hair, cutting himself many times over on its hard bristles.  He parted and re-parted it many times over, drawing the hair thin, and still he could not find the wasp.
“It’s gone,” called Jack.
Abraham cursed at him and threw the rock.  Jack leaned to the side, felt it caress his coattails, and threw his boulder.  It slipped nimbly through the combed and softened surface of Abraham’s beard and struck his chin dead centre, neatly folding him up in a heap.
“Forfeit,” said Jack pleasantly, and strolled off the field, trying not to feel the pain in his shoulder.

Dinner that night was quieter.  The cousins were winded from the beating Othello had handed them on the wrestling field (doubtlessly unaided by their brawling the previous evening), and Abraham’s jaw was locked from the blow he’d taken.  Jack enjoyed the silence a little, as well as the newfound willingness to chat that Father was showing to him.  Perhaps he was less than utterly fond of his brother-in-law.
“You’re making sure she eats well, hrrm?” he asked, idly scooping up a big ladleful of bear pudding.  “Needs good meat, strong flesh, harrumph.”
“I don’t eat meat, Father,” said Julie for the twentieth time that day, chewing on a veal cookie.
“Mmmmrrrmmmph,” commented Father idly, patting her back with a chuckle.  She nearly choked.  “That’s my girl, rruumm.”
Aunt Skadi beamed at them both.  She too seemed less than troubled by her husband and children’s newfound mutedness.
“Tell me,” leaked a voice to Jack’s side, just past the cousins, “do you tell, stories?”
Grandfather had never spoken in Jack’s hearing before.  He’d only just heard it, and already he was hoping he never would again.  It sounded like gas escaping from the corpse of a little dead thing, hissing as it passed through the idly flicking wings of the flies.
“A little,” said Jack.
Grandfather blinked his solitary eye, slowly and ponderously.  Everything he did was slow and ponderous; it had taken him all evening to rouse himself from his bog and drag his bulk to the table.  He was more than twice the size of father, but coiled up, all loose flaps of mossy skin and exposed, dirt-scrubbed bone.  His skin was the colour of spoiled cheese.
“I will, tell, a story,” he managed.  “Come.”  The old monster rose from the table, upending half of it, and lurched towards the dark stone staircase that led down to the cellars.
Jack shrugged, looked helplessly at Julie – she was biting her lip, he noticed – and followed, trying not to step in the ooze trail.

“This is, my home,” droned Grandfather, slipping into a wide worn hollow in the flagstones of the basement floor.  “Like, it?”
Jack looked.  He did not like it.
The mighty limestone slabs of the floor had been covered over and over long ago, layered with dirt and bone in alternating patterns, white shards and blackened decay.
That wasn’t the bad part.  The bad part was the trophy shelf, a lopsided slab of basalt hammered crudely into the wall by monstrous force.
The figures that sat atop them were entire skeletons, held together with crude blackened wire and treacle-like hardened spittle.  A knight on his horse, a hundred years old or more at the very least.  A priest, complete with tattered ritual robes and chewed spectre, and his whole retinue, all sloppily piled up in a heap around him.  A war-king of old with his broadsword, broken in half.  Dozens more, all the old meals and old wars and old foes all deposited here in a mound of dust that could’ve swallowed a lake.
“Impressive,” said Jack.  He meant it, to a point.
“Thank, you,” said Grandfather.  “Now, listen.”  He picked up the knight in one claw, bones rattling in time with arthritic strength.
“This man, was, the first,” began Grandfather, and Jack realized too late what was happening.   He nodded his head and said “mmm” and “you don’t say?” and none of it made any difference.  His brain hurt from the guttural humid vapidness of the mouldy air, and the nasal, breathy drone of Grandfather’s voice sounded inside his bones like a gale in a wind chime.  Every bone of every skeleton required an explanation, with lengthy digressions and asides and that-reminds-mes, all in that endless, wobbling voice.  His teeth felt like they were trying to crawl out of their sockets.
There was a pause, and Jack came out of his haze long enough to realize it was a snack.  Julie stood at Grandfather’s side, passing out a glass of warm milk and some toast, which were indelicately dropped into that endless maw with the very tips of his talons.
Jack took his toast warily, and was surprised to find that it did not contain meat.  It came with a honeycomb, filled with fresh, sweet honey, and it was the best thing he’d ever tasted because it took his mind out of Grandfather’s endless cobwebs of the throat.
Julie looked meaningfully at him as she left.  His hand trembled with the good-bye wave, and he wondered how much more of this droning he could take.
Then he realized what Julie had just handed him, and felt very stupid.
“But that’s, just the, first one,” said Grandfather, and Jack felt the horror overtaking him again.  He buttered and ate his toast with the speed of seven mortal men, pocketed the knife out of habit, drained the combs dry and balled them.  The little wax pellets went in his ears in a fancy motion disguised as a stretch and a kick-back-your-heels, and his mind went beautifully, blissfully blank for the first time in over three hours.  He nearly started crying in relief before he realized the odds were against him being able to pass it off as tears of joy.
From then on, time was on his side.  All he had to do was nod and mutter every five minutes as he stared glassily ahead, and try to keep his gaze focused on Grandfather’s lips without actually examining them too closely.  It was almost restful.  It was very restful.  And then it was so restful that he woke up the next morning as Julie shook him awake.
“It’s all rot, you know,” she told him, as they gazed across the basement at Grandfather’s snoring bulk.  “He never killed any of those men.  Well, not the way he said.  He just talked to them until they died, then ate them.  The poor old thing’s got very sensitive skin; a poke with a pin would make him bleed like a pig, let alone a sword slash.  And he’s allergic to iron.”
“A shame,” Jack said.  His neck was stiff, apparently he’d been sleeping on top of some unfortunate’s backbone, mangling his own slightly more than it was used to.
“Great Great-Grandmother got here last night.  You’d better come up for breakfast.  And whatever you do, don’t talk to her unless she talks to you first.  Be careful, all right?”
Breakfast was less hushed than last night’s meal – ogres healed fast.  Still, anything felt quiet after the ordeal of the evening.  Surviving Grandfather’s little talk had earned Jack even more respect, it seemed – only Othello still gave Jack that ogrish glare over his food, which, however unsettling, was a vast improvement over the whole family.  Jack wondered how on earth Clarence had ever managed to weather this mob to wed Julie in the first place.
It took him a while to notice Great Great-Grandmother, searching as idly as he was, sipping over-sugared, blood-thick tea and stealing sugar cubes the size of his fist for sheer novelty value.  First he looked for size, and that turned up nothing – Father was still the largest upstairs, a half-foot above Uncle Abraham.  Then he looked for a new face, and found none.  Then he saw Auntie Skadi very carefully pass down a bowl of pig entrails to the head of the table, and he finally saw Great Great-Grandmother.  Like himself and Julie, she could barely peek over the tabletop.  She looked like nothing more than a normal, pleasant old lady – rather quiet, yes, but some were like that, rare as they were in Jack’s experience – until she opened her mouth, revealing teeth that were just a little too long and white to belong to any human, anywhere.
That, and her eyes twinkled at him.  In three days of ogres, he hadn’t yet seen eyes like that.
The third day of the holidays, in Jack’s experience, was an open-air banquet, a meal interspersed by snacks that lasted all day long.  The ogres simply tripled the length of all meals, with a five-minute grace period between breakfast and lunch.  Jack spent most of it loosening his belt buckle, and most of lunch wishing he’d loosened it more.  At last, stomach groaning, he lurched away from the table and begged a chance to relieve himself.
“Stump out back, hrrrmmrr,” grunted Father.
The stump in question was an old, long-dead hemlock that once probably could’ve held a house in its branches.  Now it stood ten foot tall, half-hollowed, and filled with muck that you didn’t really want to look at.  Jack spent ten minutes manoeuvring himself into a position where he didn’t have to, five finding a spot where he was positioned appropriately and wouldn’t fall in, and six more after he was through just relishing the silence.
There was the thud-smush-crash of ogre footsteps.
“Occupied,” said Jack, seconds before Othello’s fist closed around his ribcage and yanked him out of his perch.
“Leave her alone,” he hissed in Jack’s face, tottering in his one-handed balance on the stump’s rim, brandishing Jack above its fetid depths.  “You’re bad for her!”
“Erk,” rebutted Jack.
“Say what?” said Othello, loosening his iron grip on Jack’s lungs for a moment.
“Surprise!” said Jack, and stabbed him between flesh and nail with last night’s pilfered silverware.
Othello clutched his hand and howled loudly, which was a bad move because it set him up for the next thing Jack did, which was to flip over his shoulder and kick him in the pants.  He landed in the bottom of the stump with a squelch you could hear halfway round the countryside.
“Are we through?” asked Jack brightly, shimmying his way down the side of the stump to solid ground.
Othello made some bubbling noises at him; apparently even ogres weren’t impervious to their own stenches, not to that degree.
“Right, we’re through.  Water under the bridge.  I’d offer to help you up, but you know how it is.”
As Jack walked back inside, he took a very small and vindictive pleasure in knowing he’d used the last of the birch-bark wiping pads that hung on the limbs of the stump.

Othello came back to dinner late, after what looked to have been a bath in swamp water and a scrub with a brush made out of a fistful of cattails.  His mother admonished him with a clout to the head, and for the first time that week, Jack sat at the big, rough-hewn table and not a single overlarge, overstuffed face was looking at him as though he were a particularly large and tricksome sort of cockroach.  And a good night it was, not just because of that – it was the last night, the last time anyone might threaten to string him up by his kneecaps from the roof, the last eve spent sleeping on floors where the vermin had vermin, the last time he’d need to see an ogre’s face for hopefully many months.  He couldn’t recall exactly why he’d done this, but it had probably seemed like a good idea at the time.  Charity, maybe.  That always seemed sunnier that it was.
Grandfather came lumbering up his stone stairwell late in the evening, towards the end of it all.  “Ma, ma!” he rumbled, and slumped down to the end of the table, where Great Great-Grandmother hugged him and cradled that hideous, wrinkled old skull.  He sat down in his seat looking happier than he had since Jack first met him.
It was a good meal.  The meat even mostly contained bits Jack could recognize.  The dessert of boiled frogspawn jelly, however, he discretely passed on.
And there, at the very end of the night, just before the big bronze clock that was wedged into the ceiling itself could begin to chime, Great Great-Grandmother stood up and cleared her throat and began to speak.
Jack knew many languages, and had forgotten even more.  He didn’t know this one at all.  It sounded like spider legs walking on sheets of frozen glass, and it gave him the shivers.
Mother stood up and walked to her side, where she whispered back and forth.
“Granny says thank you for the lovely meal,” she beamed, happiness floating up through the grim and out between her tusks like an errant cloud.
Hooting, hollering, and clapping echoed around the table.
“And,” Mother continued, waving for silence, “she says she thoroughly approves of this nice young man Julie’s brought.  A proper fellow, she says – heroes and monsters make a nice match.”
More clapping, shouting, and at least one massive hand slapping Jack on the back hard enough that it sent him into a brief coughing fit.
“But furthermore,” continued Mother, cheer practically wafting from the air around her as thick as the stench from her putrid cooking rags, “since Granny says this young man isn’t her husband, it’s perfectly all right for us to eat him!  So thank you very much Julie for the lovely present for your great-Gran!”
Massive cheering, standing ovation, enormous hands groping for Jack from all sides.  Jack was slightly comforted to see that Julie looked as surprised as he did before he was hoisted aloft and passed down the table like a parcel, transferred from iron grip to iron grip before he could so much as begin to wriggle, and receiving a nasty sucker punch to the jaw at one point from someone who was probably Abraham or Othello.  At last he was enclosed in the slimy grasp of Grandfather, who held him aloft before Great Great-Grandmother, legs dangling.
“Mama’s, hungry,” explained Grandfather carefully, pressing his great eyeball close to Jack’s face.
Jack felt his teeth gingerly with his tongue.  One of them seemed loose, and he shoved it harder.  “So I see,” he wheezed.  “But why me?”
“Has to, be, young man,” said Grandfather.  Behind Jack somewhere he heard Julie yelling at her parents, buried under a wave of shushing and murmurs from one corner and indistinct grunts from the other.  “It’s Mama,” he said, as though that made everything make sense.
Great Great-Grandmother smiled at Jack, a friendly, genuinely warm grin that was easily the most frightening thing he’d seen here all holiday.  Those long, long teeth were even longer than they should’ve been by now.  How could they fit in her mouth?
Jack’s tooth popped out.  Great Great-Grandmother reached up to him, stubby nails on thin, brittle wrists stretching out forever.  And Jack spat his steel tooth into Grandfather’s one eye.
It wasn’t quite iron, but it did the trick.

Grandfather lurched backwards, screaming, spasming, flipping over the entire banquet table.  Bowls of meat and frogspawn went flying to smash against walls and misshapen heads, splatter over bodies, cake limbs and bruise extremities.  Jack flew from his shaken grasp, bounced off the floor, and sprang to his feet in a charge for the hall.  Father stood in his way, warding back Julie with one hand, but it went hard for him.  Fighting large people is much easier than most non-heroes think: your prime target lies right overhead.
Jack grabbed Julie’s hand as he dashed between Father’s toppling legs, dragging her along – no, wait, she was rather more dragging him along.  Easy to forget that she was an ogre, wasn’t it?
They came to a skidding stop in the field.  Footsteps pounded behind them in the hall, turning the whole mounded hall into a giant, angry drum.  Shouts and roars and grunts.
Julie whistled, fingers between her teeth.  Then again.  Then again and again.  “Come on you silly bitch!” she screamed at the trees.
Jack fought through the haze of confusion (Julie swearing?  Most unthinkable) and plucked the item he sought from his inside jacket.  “Sugar cube?” he asked.
The mare had her mouth in his palm before he quite knew she was there, almost taking his fingers off when he jumped.

Julie took the reins.  Jack would’ve insisted on it anyways – it was her horse – but as it was he had no say in much, mostly because he was half-conscious, half-concussed, and approximately five-thirds overstuffed on bits of meat that perhaps had been just a little more spoilt than he recalled them being.
“Well,” she said, after the noise of the pursuit had died down behind them (thanks to a good hour or so of the mare’s tireless hoofbeats), “I suppose that’s that for family holidays.”
“Mmm,” agreed Jack.  He was trying not to watch the road move beneath them.
“I feel so bloody stupid,” she complained.  “Of course they wouldn’t have eaten Clarence.  I know they frighten him and he’d never stop worrying, so I let him go along with this – I don’t want him to be unhappy, you know – but I should’ve guessed that you wouldn’t have been able to hide from Great Great-Grandmother.  You just aren’t stout enough to be a match for him.  And you’re a little shorter.”
“Mmmhhmm,” seconded Jack.  He had the feeling that if he were more conscious, he’d be loudly objecting to something.
“They would’ve eaten you, yes, once they found out you’re not my husband, but never my husband.  This whole thing wouldn’t have happened if he’d listened to me.  And you wouldn’t have had to nearly blind poor Grandfather if they’d listened to me.”  She drooped in the saddle slightly.  “Nobody listens to me.  They all talk about how much they love me, but they never listen to me.”  She turned and smiled at him weakly.  “Well, you do.  You learned to do that fast enough once it was that or be beaned by Uncle Abraham.”  Julie stifled a giggle.   “Poor Uncle Abraham.  He’s got his nose in a sling right now, I’m sure.  You really did a number on all of them, by the end.  Fooled the cousins into a fight, bonked Uncle Abraham right in the chin – with my help, of course – beat up Father and Grandfather and shoved poor little Othello into the outhouse.  And all with my help.”
The forest was lightening around them, noticed Jack against the background noise.  The High Road must be near again.
“It’s a relief, you know.  I haven’t felt this good since I ran away from home the first time.  Nothing but happy then, and then I met Clarence.”  Julie sighed.  “He was the first person I met who wasn’t an ogre, and he was so nice about it that I just about fell in love with him.  Just about.  I’m not sure I did anymore.  He’s nice, but not much else.  And he doesn’t listen to me.”  She turned in the saddle to look at Jack again.  “I should change that, don’t you think?  All the love in the world isn’t any good if you can’t be treated like a person.  Mother, Clarence, Father, all of them think I’m a little fragile doll.  Well, maybe I can’t change Mother and Father’s minds on that.  Maybe never.  But I can change Clarence’s.”
“Mmmmhhm?”  managed Jack.  He really needed that other sugar cube or three he had in his jacket, if only he could reach them.  Heroing takes a lot out of you.  That, and all that food.  He’d need to keep his belt loosened for a month.
“I can change Clarence’s mind,” clarified Julie sweetly, as they approached the glowing lights of the inn on the hill, “because I can hold him out the window by his ankles until he starts listening.”

“A Family Get-Together,” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.