jamieproctor.ca

The machine people noticed it first; the satellite people, the radar people. They saw it coming from miles of miles away with their pings and ms and humidity percentages and fractional chances of precipitations. And from them word spread on down to the personnel – flight staff, ground crew; maintenance; cleaners; that guy in a kiosk selling you discount toblerones at ruinous rates – and then at last the word came down into the terminal from on high in soothing tones over crackly speaker.

“All flights will be delayed presently; please see the boards for estimated times of departure. The sky isn’t right.”

And that was all.

***

The sky not being right was a clear issue. Its cause was somewhat less discernable. Processes of elimination had to be followed; hypotheses had to be tested.

First the airport phoned more machine people and sent them emails, in hopes that maybe theirs were fibbing or somehow silly. Maybe the sky was actually right after all and this was just a big misunderstanding that they could all look back on and laugh.

But they received nothing but polite confirmations and condolences. The sky was indeed not right. The easiest way out of the problem had been shot down.

Second came the obvious solution: they went down into the big metal shed next to the control tower and opened sixteen different locks of increasingly angry sizes until they found The Plug, which was twelve feet tall and weighed six tons. It was eased out of its socket on the strainer backs of dozens of baggage handlers, held awkwardly, then reinserted.

But despite being unplugged and replugged, the sky still wasn’t right.

The third solution was even simpler in its elegance. A little truck went a little ways out onto the tarmac, carrying a little lad of little people wearing little safety vests and holding little glowing paddles. They were unloaded and began making waving their tools in the air, staring upwards with contorted brows and half-bared teeth.

“There, there!” they shouted over their mouthpieces and into their headsets. “Move, move! There, there! Farther, farther! Keep going, keep going!”

But no matter how hard they shouted and waved and directed the problem did not correct itself, and so the idea that the sky wasn’t right because it was too far left was discarded.

For the fourth solution they went up the chain of command. A great complimentary gift of duty-free alcohol and twenty-dollar hamburgers was piled high in the center of the lobby and burned with the fuel from dozens of novelty souvenir lighters. Polite complaints to the sky were uttered in every tongue available at hand to every entity that might have dwelt within it or controlled it or fought it or slept with it.

But the sky neither affirmed nor denied nor made any comment in the slightest, and so there was nothing left to do but call for the janitors and custodians and mopfolk – who had, of course, expected this and were already standing on hand with extremely careful and sober expressions.

At the fifth, serious material resources were being tapped. The security checkpoints were packed up and wheeled outside; the sky’s shoes were removed and its pockets emptied; its backpack and purse were placed in little plastic tubs and the whole lot were examined with every kind of radiation and the other ones too; its documentation was ruthlessly scrutinized and it was taken aside for a polite, professional and detached conversation on the nature of its business (being above the seas and the earth) and its planned destination (the same).

But the sky refused to say anything without a lawyer and none qualified to practice in its field could be found. The entire process became entangled in red tape and so ensconced, proceeded to return to the warmth of the inner terminal, where it slipped into a dreamy hibernation.

By the sixth, unorthodox solutions were being entertained. Every ladder across all four terminals was found, wrangled, and fastened together to permit the ascension of a single staff member – chosen by lot – to the sky, who could adjust it manually until it was no longer right and instead was correct.

But the winning lottery ticket went to Jess, who had a bad leg; and the runner-up went to Paul, who didn’t want to; and the runner-up-runner-up went missing, and finally the runner-up-runner-up-runner-up was Doreen, who refused to climb any ladder she hadn’t given a good kick to, and it transpired that Doreen’s kick was more good than the ladder.

By the seventh ultradisunorthodox solutions were on the deck, which was why the combining of every available 787 on the airfield into a single ‘man-plane’ to destroy the sky and thereby render its nonrightfulness moot got as far as the blueprinting phase before the individual responsible was exposed, chased down, and fished out of the air vents with a long-armed squeegee pole before being imprisoned in the baggage carousel.

The eighth solution was to shout angrily at the sky. It did not help.

The ninth solution was under proposal and involved the key placement of four refreshment carts, three especially athletic and ruthless flight attendants, and a strategically overfilled water bottle, but it was interrupted immediately before its execution by the tenth solution, which occurred when an anonymous traveler tried to hit the lights in the washroom, flicked a likely-looking switch, and turned the sky back on, immediately rendering it right.

“Someone must’ve hit it with their shoulder by mistake,” was the verdict. And so, with admirable speed and precision, the schedules were adjusted one last time and service resumed with nothing but the greatest of caution, care, and professional courtesy.

***

Everyone involved was gifted a voucher.

Except the sky. It had been very unhelpful.

Jim picks the cans.

He walks the roads and the sidewalks with his plastic barrow, one wheel grinding a little, and he picks the cans from the ground, and he picks the cans from the bins, and he puts them in the barrow. He picks the cans rain or shine; the rain doesn’t bother him; he knocked a little hole in the bottom of the barrow to let the water out. He picks the cans every day of the year, on every holiday; no denomination or cause forestalls him. He picks the cans all over town.

He picks the cans from the downtown, from the bins by the restaurants and the clothing shops and the apartment blocks. Some of the places lock their bins; some don’t. Jim makes do.

He picks the cans from the baskets in the parks and by the beach. In the summer he gets a lot; on summer holidays he gets a LOT; in winter he’s lucky to get anything.

He picks the cans from the side of town where the windows are covered up and missing. He walks a little quicker down his old street, so he doesn’t have to make conversation. Jim’s busy, and awkwardness takes time.

He picks the cans from the side streets with the two-story homes built fifty years ago and last renovated twenty years ago. Some of those houses are going missing one by one, torn down and replaced with something worthy of the million-dollar-land they’re sitting on. Jim can get some good cans when that happens; housewarming parties have that manic enthusiasm around them.

He picks the cans from the side of town where the driveways are long and the waterfront is in everyone’s backyard, and that one’s tough because if Jim goes in daytime he gets the cops called on him for vagrancy and if he goes at night he gets the cops called on him for prowling. He goes anyways, but he walks faster here than he does in the rest of town, and once he had to hide the barrow in a hedge and his body in a culvert. It wasn’t a good time.

He even picks the cans from the godawful suburban sprawl out by the ridgeline on the verge of town, which means he has to walk down roads with no sidewalks for hours just to get there while traffic zips by him at sixty kilometers an hour. Jim accepts that, even if he doesn’t enjoy it. That’s how it is.

That’s how it all is, really.

Jim picks the cans all week, and then he picks through them one more time and separates them in half. Then he takes the barrow and he redeems the deposit on one half of it, the lesser half of it, a dime a can. It gives him food and a new shirt now and then and a little bit put towards whatever else he needs, according to priorities. And it gets him one new, full can.

The other half Jim picked he keeps with him in the barrow, and then Jim and the barrow and the new can take one more walk, all the way down to the park by the water, to a bench where the city lawnmowers don’t attend properly because it’s practically in the lake when the waves get too big and the waterweeds are trying to eat it alive from the legs up.

Jim sits on the bench. His barrow sits next to the bench. The full can sits in his pocket. And he waits.

Some weeks he waits a long time. Some weeks it’s fast. This is a long week, and it’s a long wait, and that’s a little mercy. He watches the sunset bloom and fade and the clouds blend into ink along with the sky before it starts, which is enough time for a rest and to take off his shoes and rub his feet and listen to the birds singing good-night, good-night, see-you-tomorrow. It’s the longest he’s been off his feet without sleeping all week.

It comes after the birds stop singing, and it goes for the throat. Right there, WHAM, a lump like your stomach’s sprinted up your esophagus and gone bungee-jumping on your uvula. By the time you’ve registered it your heart’s already pitter-patting like you’ve been on a run, your limbs feel like you’ve been doused in ice water, and your hair’s prickled from the tug and flinch of your skin as it tries to shrink back from the world in general.

It’s in the water. The same thing that makes people scared of sharks and crocodiles is awake, and it’s loud, and it’s telling anyone nearby to pay attention and freak out properly and productively because This Is How It Happens. There’s nothing visible, no fin, no eyeball-laden dead log, nothing at all, until there is, and it’s the worst kind of thing to see because it’s been there all along. It looks like a muddy spot on the bottom, dark with weeds.

Those aren’t weeds. They never were. And the thing they’re swirling in isn’t a current.

And then, something breaks. And it doesn’t stop.

It breaks free of the bottom, comes boiling up like the contents of a burst kettle. It breaks into the ultraviolet, turns into something just out of the reach of sunlight’s illumination for a poor trichromatic primate. It breaks the surface, and just as the whorl begins to pile up on itself and reach for something above the waterline is when Jim picks a can and hucks it.

The can nails it dead amidships – the aluminum fizzling out into vapor on impact – and the noise that comes out is indescribable because it isn’t noise, it’s that sort of sound elephants make to talk to each other from very far away that the human ear can’t register, except using a medium that isn’t vibrations. Jim ignores it, and picks another can. And hucks it.

He picks a can from the street he used to live on.

He picks a can from the park by the high school where the kids hang out and make trouble.

He picks a can from the recycling bin next to the longest driveway in town, next to a sign that said TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED ACCORDING TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.

He picks a tire-flattened can he pulled out of a ditch by the highway, and nearly cuts his fingers on its jagged edge

He picks a can, and picks a can, and picks a can, and with every can Jim throws it’s beaten lower, lower, deeper into the water, and when all that’s left is that seething, anxious fear in the air and the water’s calm Jim pulls out the new, still-unopened can and hucks that too. It unwinds into nothing but a spray of sour booze and with that last blow the whole thing falls apart, dread by dread, until there’s nothing left in the air but mosquitos.

Jim sits there for a little while yet, despite the mosquitos, since he wants to make sure. Then he sighs, and he stretches, and he tucks himself under his jacket for a blanket and twists his arm for a pillow and goes to bed.

It’s been a busy week, and the next one starts tomorrow.

The sign was – used to be – bright yellow, with black print. It read DO NOT FEED THE DINOSAURS, beneath a slashed circle containing an abstract piece of candy and a triceratops skull.

Terry got in trouble again last week because of it. They brought her into my office, oven-hot with the dead air conditioner clotting my window, and they told me “she’s doing it again,” and she hunched her tiny head towards her all-ribs chest and glowered so fiercely that I understood why two big, strong summer workers didn’t want to be in the same room as her, let alone be the ones to do the job of reprimanding her. Leave it to the contract manager: she’s only going to be around long enough to fix things up; we might have to look Terry in the eye next summer.

“Terry,” I told her (again), “the sign refers to the animatronics.”
“That’s stupid,” she told me.

“They’re just pigeons, Terry. It’s okay if people feed the pigeons, as long as it’s nothing bad for them. It’s not like they’re seagulls.”

“The sign says ‘do not feed the dinosaurs.’ They’re feeding the dinosaurs.”
My back was sweating against the worn fabric of my chair, not from exertion, but its anticipation. “Most people don’t think of birds when they think of dinosaurs, Terry.”
“Well they should because they are.”
“Right, but they don’t quite look-”

“Whales don’t quite look like most mammals, does that make them something else?”
“Terry,” I said, trying to bring it out of natural facts and into practical execution, “can you just enforce the sign as it is meant rather than as it is written?”
“Why not change it to ‘do not feed the animatronics?’ Then I could do both.”
“It’s meant to be whimsical. Light-hearted.”
“Feeding robots is whimsical and light-hearted.”
“Yes, but it acknowledges that they aren’t real. People want to pretend, Terry.”
My shirt was stuck to everything, but I saw the sadness in her eyes that meant I was coming towards the closest I’d get to victory. “Fine. I get it. Can I go now?”

“You’ll stop telling people not to feed the pigeons?”

“As long as they don’t feed the pigeons.”
“Please stop telling people not to feed the pigeons.”

“I’ll try,” she said, and the words sounded as hollow as anything but that was the best I was going to get.

“Thank you, Terry. You can return to your duties.”

And she did, and I watched her go and gazed past my air conditioner down at the ridiculous sauropod fountain in front of the office – long-necked, long-tailed, long-suffering – and thought that if there were one other person in the country who cleaned bird poop and gum from the surface of animatronic dinosaurs with one-half her dedication she would’ve been fired ten years ago. Niche protection wasn’t just for ecologists.

Oh no. I’d thought about ecology, which meant I’d thought about food webs, which meant I thought about plants, which meant I’d remembered that the gardener was late this week again, which meant I had to try and find their contact information, which was somewhere inside a hard drive, or a filing cabinet, or someone’s head.

The afternoon turned bleak and thick in my mind, like syrup from a fly. I sighed, and I swore, and I descended once more into the depths.

***

Morty was baking.

He sat in his lifeguard’s chair, limbs dangling, eyes shut, leathery hide hardening in the pitiless sun, and he simmered under the cloudless sky. I’d never seen him use suntan lotion. I’d never seen him put on glasses or use a hat.

“Or at least a visor?” I pled. “So you don’t need to shut your eyes.” The pool was a mirror of the afternoon sky: every patch of water that wasn’t currently being chopped, splashed, or slopped by milling bodies had been turned into a molten lens that left spots on your eyelids just glancing at it. Cartoon fish and ammonites and plesiosaurs speckled the bottom; figures worn thin and choppy by actual time and artificial tide.

“S’fine,” he grunted. “No worries.”
“You’re the lifeguard. How will you tell if someone’s in trouble?”
“Oh, I can always tell that,” he said, and he smiled at that – oh, his teeth, the one thing not suncooked on his body, big and beautiful. “I’ve got lots of practice, y’know.”
“Right,” I said. “Right. Listen, are you SURE that kid’s okay? Look, he’s waving and-”

“He’s faking it,” said Morty placidly. “His friend’s going to try to pull him out of the water and he’ll yank her in and dunk her.”
I watched. The kid’s friend tried to pull him out of the water and he yanked her in and dunked her.

“I told you,” said Morty. “Lots of practice.”
“Great, you’re paying attention, I get it. But if you don’t at least LOOK like you’re paying attention, the parents get nervous. And nobody’s twitchier and more dangerous than a nervous parent.”

He burst out laughing, or as close as he could come without moving – heh heh heh heh heh, bubbling up from the ribs outward. “True! But they’re just like the kids, you know? If you look upset, they think they should be upset. If you look relaxed, they don’t make a fuss. If I don’t worry about this, they don’t worry about this, and that means you don’t worry about this. Trust me. Lots. Of. Practice.”

Oh. That was something else. “You’re senior staff, yes. Can you help me with something? I’m looking for our gardener; they still haven’t shown up on time this week and the contact information is shot. Nothing in the computers, nothing in the filing cabinets. Gone. Any chance you remember them?”

“Huh,” said Morty. Not words, an expulsion of air; a breath turned thick. “Huh. Which one?”
“The name’s missing too. But they’ve been under contract here for ages. Practically since the park opened.”

“Huh. Hmm. Big one, weren’t they?”

“It wasn’t a firm, it was just one contractor.” Which was itself cause for surprise: this place wasn’t the biggest attraction on the planet, but it had a lot of plants.

“Yeah, one big contractor. Nice kid, I think. Yeah, I think I remember them. Huh. Not the name though, sorry. Nice, but distant. Always busy. And me, I stick to my pool. Nope, sorry, can’t remember anything more.”
“Are you-?”

Morty hoisted himself out of the chair and vanished into the pool like a bullet. “Bloody nose!” he called. “Out of the pool! C’mon, tilt your head up, that’s it-” and so my question went unanswered.

Fine. I still had half a water bottle. I still had a few hours left in the day. I still had one last stop to make. And I still had one avenue of inquiry.

***

It took almost till shutdown to find him. He had no cell phone. His walkie talkie was out of batteries. He was nearly stone deaf.

But in the end I caught up to his trail near the bathrooms, where he’d been cleaning up an overturned garbage can that had spread wrappers and paper bags and empty pop cans all over the base of one of the gingkoes. He was hunched even lower and more crablike than usual; nose only an inch above the trash as he slipped it back into the half-deflated bag it had slid loose from.

“Herman,” I said to him, “we need to talk for a minute.”
“The leaves aren’t ready yet,” he said. “They won’t come down ‘till it’s colder, and then they’ll come down all at once. Gingkoes are like that. Very convenient, you know. I saw some of the other trees, those…maples” – he said it may-pull, sourly – “…they just dribbled them out over weeks. Sloppy, sloppy. No end of a chore.”
“It’s not about the leaves, Herman-”

“I’m nearly done here. Just got to tip this up. I can do that, you know. I’m not an invalid. Watch. See how I hold the broom? See? See?”
“I see, I see.”
“And see how I put it under the can? See? See?”

“I see, I see, but-”

The thin arms bent, the bent back braced, the bin was in place.

“You didn’t see,” said Herman reproachfully.

“I was looking right at-”

“Oh, that’s not at all what I’m talking about! Now, what have you got to ask me?”

“Herman, don’t you think it’s about time you retired?”
“Bite your tongue!”
“It’s mandatory, not a suggestion. You’ve been here since day one, and you’re not a little tired? You’re not a little worried about labour laws?”
“I don’t not know about what you’re telling me,” said Herman with all the warmth and flexibility of a day-old pizza crust.

I threw up my arms. “Double negatives are not cunning misdirection! Come ON Herman, can’t you be reasonable? Can ANYONE here be reasonable? There’s no traffic and there’s no budget and there’s no plan and there’s no records and the employees are either ignoring the guests or picking fights with them and one of them is outright MISSING!”

“Nonsense, nobody’s missing,” said Herman, and maybe it was just me being paranoid but I felt like I’d said a lot more for him to argue with than just that.

“The gardener,” I said. “Don’t you remember them? They haven’t been in this week at all.”

“Oh, them. No, that’s normal. Nothing to be worried about. It’s very normal for that to happen. They’re good, but they’re a little slow. Hard-working young thing like that, bit prone to sleeping in on a nice summer day. But when they’re on the job, woof, things get moved. See? See?” The broom jabbed up at the gingko. “Look at that, see, see? They did that. Planted it and nurtured it from sapling on up, I saw. Not bad at all. Don’t worry about it, they’ll be by soon enough. Now go away. I have to visit the children’s center.” And no matter what I said then he treated me as if I weren’t there and set off, cart clattering with dustpans and brooms askew and ajar at every angle like distended limbs.

***

I went back to my office. I checked the filing cabinets. I checked the computer. I checked the inside of my head. Overstuffed, undercategorized, overcooked. Ugh, ugh, and ugh.

The air conditioner, sensing that the sun was about to go down, turned itself on for one second and died with a short, sharp grunt. I put my head in my hands and stared from the desk to the ceiling and then worked my way back down again, and on the sixth or seventh go-round of this my hindbrain grabbed my attention by the nose and slammed it into the wall.

Old, worn paint, and a small placard beneath a modest photograph. Paleo-Park, founding staff May 1984. And a list of names, helpfully left to right for back, middle, and front rows. All of  them, lined up in front of that  stupid sauropod fountain outside, stretching  from its long neck to  its long tail.

There was Herman, looking almost as old as he did a few hours ago. There was Morty, still leathery even at the start of a sunny season. There was someone who looked a lot like Terri, if taller and not quite as thin and with a ferociously toothy smile that I’d never once seen her show, to me or anyone or anything else.

And sitting in the center of them all, possibly the largest person I’d ever seen in my life. Height, width, breadth, the picture of grace at a scale unreasonable in all dimensions. She was smiling, a little, and she was named Louise. No last name given.

She had been pasted into the photo.

***

I locked the office behind me. It stuck. I kicked it.

“A little much,” said Herman. I nearly jumped, then remembered I wasn’t the one who had anything to be ashamed of.

“So what? It’s not like it’s going to matter in a week. This place is going under.”
“Going where, when?” demanded Terri. When had she shown up? I should’ve seen that, should’ve seen her sitting there on the bench. Had she been waiting for me, hoping to argue about the signage again? “Why?”
Honesty was one thing. Full disclosure was another. “Because it’s run-down and doesn’t make any money and some of the employees have never existed without anyone ever telling anyone differently.” And apparently my bad mood was quite another.

“Never existed?” said Morty, and oh I DID jump that time, a full on half-hop, half-start to a run. He was leaning on the edge of the half-drizzling little fountain, right in front of me in plain sight; how had I missed him that completely? Maybe it was because he was wearing a shirt. God, he could barely wear a shirt at all; the tank-top hung from him like a scrap of cloth dangling from a tree branch, stretched and thin. His teeth were brilliant. “What makes you say that?”
“I found Louise.”

Oh, they went. All of them, at the same time, wordlessly. A flinch, a squint, a twitch. Oh.

“And then I looked her up. She never worked here. Not in ’84, not after. She’s never been late. She’s never even existed – you stole the name from the damned STATUE! Right there! In the fountain! Apatosaurus louisae! And you know, when I started pulling on threads after that, a lot of other things didn’t add up either – Herman, Morty, did you know your birthdates have changed every year for the last three decades? I don’t know exactly what kind of scam was going on here, but now it’s out of my hands and in someone else’s.” So please don’t look at me like that, because there’s three of you and shutting me up wouldn’t do anything and why am I thinking like that right now?

“Louise was real,” said Morty. “She never worked here, but she was real. Call it a, oh I don’t know, a dedication in her name. Most of the place was, really.” His teeth were still showing: not a grimace, not a smile. He looked tired; maybe shutting his mouth would take too much effort. “Just a place for some old fossils to remember those who went before us. You already made the call?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. I guess that’s it then.” He looked at me – really looked at me, with his eyes wide open in the evening dim. They glowed a little, slit-pupiled in the dark. “You know, I’ll miss this dump. It wasn’t my idea, but it was nice while it lasted.” The grin again, bigger than ever, and far, far sharper. “Well, I’ll see you all later. I’m not going anywhere.”

And with that he slipped into the murk of the fountain, rugged-backed and rippleless, and became indistinguishable from the floating sticks.

I don’t know what I said. I must have said something, because Herman told me “be quiet!” very sternly, and at such force that I had no choice but to actually listen to him.

“There,” he said. “See, see, don’t make such a fuss. You went and pushed it over, you have no right to whine about the mess it made. She was a nice girl, Louise – so young, such a tragedy – and you know, she really did plant gingkoes back in the day. I’ll miss the ones here. But ah, it was only a little while anyways. See, see.” He scuffed at the drainage grate in the path, levered it up with his broom – stiffly, carefully – and slid inside with a short scrape of carapace-on-stone, long sharp dagger-tail the last to sink out of sight. Up from the long rough pipe I briefly heard the echo of his many legs, then it was drowned by the distant surf: sea, sea.

I looked at Terri.

Terri looked at me. She seemed very thin. She did not blink.

“She was a friend of my grandmother,” she told me. Her voice were flat, her eyes were flat, but her hackles were raised – her feathers all on end. “I never knew her. But she told me about her, and so did they. And now you’ve ruined it.” Her head jerked, one sharp bob. “But that’s nothing new. What else have you and yours ever done since we left you everything? Well, you can do it by yourself now.”

She flitted around the fountain three times in as many seconds, a quick, colourful little blur, then flew away into the darkening sky.

And it was just me.

Once again, it was just me.

“Bring in the first one,” said the tall, polite policeman with the boring voice.

The first one was brought in. He too was tall, if not so much. He too was polite, if somewhat nervous. But his voice when he spoke ruined all resemblance, because it was too obnoxiously erratic and pitchy to be boring, and what he said was “I’m, well, I’m not in trouble am I?”
“Oh you’re in trouble, alright,” said the other member of the police. She had the attitude of brass knuckles and steel-toed shoes. “Neck-deep and sinking fast. How long can you hold your breath, creep?”
“Constable Leslie, please shush,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Sir, this is a complex matter, and your testimony would be of great assistance in resolving it. May I ask what you did last night?”

“Well, I, you know, I went home. From work, yes, I did that. I went home from work. I took the long way along the shore because you know, well, that there’s the construction, and it’s taking so much time, and I, I can’t believe how difficult it can be to pour asphalt, what’s the, what’s the deal with that, and well…”
“Continue, please.”
“Well, I thought I saw something. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

The tall, polite policeman folded his hands in the attitude of a conciliatory praying mantis. “Sir, if you wouldn’t mind elaborating on that, we would greatly appreciate it. No judgment will be made. No word will be spread. Your testimony is anonymous, safe, and profoundly welcome.”
“Right, well, it’s just, you know, sort of, a bit, well, kind of, a tad, uh, you see, somewhat, I know it’s, well, oh dear, really, it’s that-”

“Unshush,” sighed the tall, polite policeman.

“Pardon?”
“LISTEN UP, YOU PREENING PRINCESS PUNK!” howled Constable Leslie, surging forward like a wave through a borehole. “If you don’t START TALKING I’m going to START TWISTING! Fingers! Nipples! EYES! EVERYTHING! WHAT DID YOU SEE!? WHAT DID YOU SEE!? WHAT DID YOU SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!??”

“A beast!” gasped the first one. “A great and terrifying beast, like a a a gigantic tadpole or somewhat like! It slithered ‘cross the road! I only saw its tail as it crossed before my car, but it stretched from curb to curb and more! Please don’t touch me!”
“Please don’t STOP TALKING! “ sneered the constable, jaws gnashing at an invisible, infuriating bit. “You’ve seen more, you little slime-balled snotwedge! SPILL YOUR GUTS OR I’LL SEW THEM UP SIDEWAYS AND LET THE STITCHES ROT IN YOUR SPLEEN!”

“It descended to the water, left nary a ripple! And then as I watched, transfixed, it breached the surface! ‘pon my word, I saw its gigantic skull – whale-like, monstrous! It reared its head back and swallowed a deer it had clutched in its mouth, antlers, hooves, and all! Then it sank below, and it was all as if it had never been!”
“Your cooperation has been of great use and your conduct impeccable,” said the tall, polite policeman, both hands now white-knuckle gripped at the collar of Constable Leslie as she strained towards the far side of the table, eyes wide and pupils narrowed. “Please, take the coffee-coloured seat in the next room and we’ll be with you shortly.”

***

“Bring in the second one.”

The second one was brought in. He had the sort of eyes that didn’t look at anything in particular because they were watching everything through the filter of his own head.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” said the tall, polite policeman.

“Shut up and talk!” screamed Constable Leslie. “Talk – TALK or I’ll have your nails, b’god! – The pliers! The needles! The blades! – I’ll have them!”

“Jeez.”

“Constable Leslie, please shush,” repeated the tall, polite policeman in a somewhat strained (if still boring) voice, tendons throbbing wires against his forearms as they pulled desperately at her shoulders.

Constable Leslie receded in reluctant inches, her nails leaving visible scratches in the surface of the table. Her eyes, by contrast, grew to roaring infernos.

“Sir,” said the tall, polite policeman. “There are certain events of the last twenty-four hours that we would like your total and full cooperation in uncovering, as we believe you may have been witness to them.”
“Oh yeah, absolutely. I saw the angel.”

“Pardon?”
“The angel,” said the second one. His voice was neither boring nor obnoxious, merely forthright. “It was in the water. Long, long neck, head like a horse. It reared up out of the water and looked me in the eye and it sang to me.”

“Sang?”

“Without words. Full of meaning, though. Everything made so much sense when it sang. It told me that I was not alone, and that I was not unloved, and that the same was true for all of us that lived on this little dot in the stars. It told me that it would return three times before its people came to greet us as equals, and then it dove into the air and vanished.”

“Dove into the air? Could you please describe that?”
“It dove up – out of the water – and into the air – as if it were water – and then it vanished – as if it had gone underwater. But in the air.”

Constable Leslie had begun at some point during this to make a very slight – almost inaudible – song of her own, which sounded a bit like a tea kettle and a bit like someone mumbling ‘blood’ very very fast over and over. Her arms were flexing; her palms were leaving damp spots on her sleeves.

“Did the angel’s song tell you anything of its people?”
“They were made of light, but wore bodies to try and see us. We’re too dark for them to see without bodies. They visited this world long before, when the dinosaurs were around, before the floods and meteor and the garden and the K-Pg boundary. They left their bones in the stones and we called them plesiosaurs. They fought demons too, and those we called pterosaurs.” He shrugged at this. “It was a lot to take in, you know? One moment I was standing by the beach, the next I was being sung to by an angel.”

“I see,” said the tall, polite policeman. “And what were you doing down at the beach that night?”
“A whole lot of acid.”

“Your forthrightness and candour are appreciated greatly, citizen,” said the tall policeman. He gently elbowed Constable Leslie, whose fingers were beginning to crawl forwards across the desk again. “Please, take the liver-coloured seat in the next room and we’ll be with you shortly.”

***

“Bring in the third one.”

The third one was tired. He looked like he needed a coffee and he needed to not be there.

“I need a coffee, and I need to not be here,” he groaned. “Look at you guys: you look like Abbot and Costello doing good cop/bad cop.”

“I prefer the three stooges,” said the tall, polite policeman.

“Charlie Chaplin fuckin’ BURIES all of them, you morons don’t know a damned thing,” sneered Constable Leslie.

“Well, there is at least one thing one of us knows,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Sir? Would you mind sharing it with us?”
“Sharing what?”

“The experience you claim to have had yesterday afternoon.”
He looked blank. “I had lunch?”
“Something a little more unusual.”
“I skipped breakfast? The room service was lousy.”
“If you were staying at the Lord’s Arms, that’s very usual.”
“I saw a deer in the woods?”
“The WATER, you perfidious, procrastinating clown,” snarled Constable Leslie. “Tell us about what you saw in the WATER, or I’ll -” and here the tall, polite policeman slid his hand over her mouth so smoothly and neatly that it did not appear to be hostile at all, but merely the comforting shoulder-pat of one colleague to another.

“What about the water?” asked the third one, rubbing his eyes.

“What did you see in it?” replied the tall, polite policeman.

“Nothing? Nothing worth noting. A log hit my kayak.”

“A log?” inquired the tall, polite policeman. His fingers moved, almost as if someone was trying to chew her way through them.
“Yeah. A big, bumpy log. Floating just barely below the surface; not fully waterlogged yet is my guess.”
“And you’re certain this is what you saw?” said the tall, polite policeman, face twitching on the edge of agony.
“I saw the bark floating off it; I saw broken branches dangling from it; I poked it with my paddle and watched it roll over and counted the knots on its side, so yeah. I’m absolutely certain what I saw. Is that what’s unusual around here?”

“A little bit,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Oh DAMN,” he amended, and yanked his hand free from Constable Leslie’s face, who gave him a look that no amount of soap could have cleaned.

“So, are we done or what?” inquired the third one.

“Very nearly. Please, come with us into the next room.”

***

The first and second ones looked up from the terrible old magazines they’d been reading as the police walked the third one into the room with them. They were garbage, real dentist-quality stuff. Ten years at youngest.

“Citizens, you have all been of great and profound use to our investigations this day,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Your testimony has brought us to a singular and concise conclusion. Commissioner Leslie will explain.” And so saying, as always unsmiling, he reached out and grasped the third one’s neck and snapped it on the spot, catching the body like the lumpy sack of bones it had become.

“That’s right,” said Commissioner Leslie, showing every fang in her face at once. “There’s going to be another unidentified creature floating in the water tonight! And you two are going to encounter it in passing, by chance, just a little bit! And it’s going to be MYSTERIOUS, and STRANGE, and EXCITING, and you’re going to tell everyone you know about it or SO HELP ME GOD TOMORROW THERE WILL BE THREE SIGHTINGS INSTEAD OF ONE, AM I UNDERSTOOD?”

The first one nodded so hard his neck nearly snapped of its own accord. The second one, by contrast, frowned. “Is this because of the acid?”
“The what?”
“Because you asked for my total and full cooperation and I gave that. It’d be a real asshole move to go after me because I told you about the-”

“NO!” screamed Commissioner Leslie, snatching up one of the magazines and biting it into four. “NOW GO ENCOUNTER THE DEEPEST MYSTERIES THE WORLD HAS YET TO UNCOVER AND TELL THE WORLD OF WHAT STRANGE BEINGS MAY YET LIE HIDDEN WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF OUR TOWNSHIP! YRRRREEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!”
“Oh. Okay. Ohkay.”

And they left.

The tall, polite policeman coughed gently until his commissioner made eye contact and gave a grudging nod, then reached out with his free hand and helped resocket her jaw.

“Owfuck,” she grunted. “There. Reckon that did it?”
“Three witnesses would have been a sure thing,” he said.

“And two?”
“Almost a sure thing.”
“Good enough. ‘We need a tourism board’ my left tit; looks like budget’s back on the menu, constable! GOD I’m going to rub this in Jodie’s face on Friday.”

Tammy was five years old when she met the werewolf. Five exactly. Having just walked out of your birthday party before something happens really helps to put a time and a date to it.

There had been a lot of talking, and then some yelling, and then some cake (which spilled EVERYWHERE) and then mom wiping her off (ugh) and then everyone milled around and she said she wanted to play tag but Josh yelled YOU’RE IT and shoved her and ran into the bathroom and wouldn’t open the door so she went to play catch in the backyard but Ben threw like his hands were his feet and WHOOSH went the ball way off to one side and slip-slide-swish through the crack in the backyard gate.

And Tammy knew she shouldn’t wander out of the backyard, but it was okay because she wasn’t. Just her arm.

So she slipped the gate open just a little inch – ker-chack, ker-chuck – which was much easier than she’d always thought it’d be, and she reached down for the ball, and as she did that something large and furry bolted upright from the shade of the fence, where it had been napping.

She knew it wasn’t a dog. If it were a dog it would be a puppy, with those big feet and big eyes. And if it were a puppy it wouldn’t have quite as many teeth to show at her when it growled.

“Waa-AAH!” said Tammy, and she jumped back and the thing jumped forwards and it was lucky her other hand was still holding the gate because that shut it without even trying, ker-chack, and then it locked solid when something heavy and furry hit it from the other side, ker-chuck. It growled at her one last time – high-pitched and squealy – and then its ears pricked up and it ran away. It didn’t run like a dog; its legs were too long; its ankles weren’t in the right places. It ran like Ben when he was pretending to be a lion.

Tammy thought about it, then remembered she was upset and burst into tears, and that distracted her again until that evening when she was supposed to be going to bed.

“Mom?” she asked. “Can people have wolf faces?”
“Baboons are called dog-faced monkeys, bug,” said Mom. “But they aren’t people.”

“Oh,” said Tammy. And she asked to look up pictures of baboons, wolves, and dogs, which was how she decided based on the available evidence that it had been a werewolf. Or a very ugly baboon, but Mom said the zoos would say something if an animal escaped. Then she told her it could be a school project so Tammy remembered it was time for bed again.
She forgot about all of it until the next morning, when she got out up and looked out the window and saw a shadow lurking by the mailbox. It ducked when she jumped.

It was there the next day too.

***

Tammy was twelve years old when it tried to get into the house for the first time. Twelve-and-a-half, maybe? It had been winter, she was sure. A bad time of year for her werewolf; the sun went down earlier and the shadows grew so much longer and there was so much more room for a growing monster to hide in. Tammy never walked home from school without a friend; she never stayed out late; and she never snuck out. The only complaint her mother ever had was that she insisted on leaving all the lights on, especially when she was alone in the house.

Which she was sure she was, because she had definitely imagined the sounds of someone walking up the front step.

And the sounds of someone scuffling at the key.

And the deep, irritated wuff of someone without opposable thumbs.

Yes, she had imagined all of it. And she was going to make sure of that right now. So she took a deep breath and marched to the front door with her eyes shut and looked onto the deck and couldn’t see it because it was blocked by a big, hairy set of shoulders and some shockingly bright yellow eyes.

“Nine-one-one isn’t a toy, bug,” said her mother much, much later that night.

“I could call animal control instead,” said Tammy. “What’s animal control? Can I have their number?”

Her mother ruffled her hair with condescending love. “See, what am I meant to do about you, bug? I can’t even ground you; you do that to yourself. So how about this: as punishment, you’re doing my half of the snow shovelling too.”

“Not after dark.”

“The snow doesn’t wait for our convenience, my tiny horror.”
“Can I have a big shovel?”
“Sure.”
“And an axe?”
Tammy had to settle for a VERY big shovel and very fast shovelling, which was what got her into weights.

***

Tammy was twenty when it finally happened. She was in the car and she was done for the day and she had both hands on the wheel at precisely nine and three o’clock and was focusing her full attention on driving, exactly as she was meant to. It was therefore completely unfair for the werewolf to leap from a streetlight directly onto her hood and crash through the windshield, spinning the car into the ditch and flipping it what was probably once and felt like sixteen times.

Her eyes were full of fur. Her mouth was full of fur. Her nose, much to its regret, was full of fur. Also blood, judging by the fluid sliding down her throat.

“Fuck,” she said into the fur. And like magic, it moved away, turned, rolled – with a slight whimper – upright, and, with one long, gangled, mangy arm, began to feel around for her like her mother looking for her glasses at three AM.

It was much less endearing from the perspective of the glasses. The palm was thick and hairy and gigantic; it fit over her face like she was a baseball, and in accordance with ancient instincts honed by several playground fights, she licked it. Then she nearly choked on fur and reverted to older instincts and bit hard.

It shrieked. There were no other words for that; it wasn’t a howl; it wasn’t a yelp; it wasn’t even a bark. This was a noise made by a human being in distress filtered through a throat incapable of enunciating anything less threatening than a snarl, and it was at full volume. It was also – partway through – fading rapidly into the distance.

Lights probed the inside of the car.

“That makes sense,” Tammy told the friendly man telling her something about ambulances. “It only comes after me when nobody else is around.”

Hair was still stuck on her tongue. She passed out hoping she wouldn’t choke on it; that’d be embarrassing.

***

Tammy was thirty-seven when she made it happen. It had taken no small amount of effort.

Spending a decade looking over her shoulder? Hard. Mastering half a dozen forms of self-defence and buying an arsenal of technically-legal cutting-edge animal control weaponry? Also hard. Admitting it wasn’t following her anymore? Harder. Figuring out what she wanted to do about that? Harder still. Spending nearly ANOTHER decade looking for clues as to where the thing had gone? Hardest.

After all that had been said and done, setting up the kill zone had been easy. Except for her glasses. Even under her scarf her breath was steaming them off her face; how the hell had mom survived with these things for so long?

“Anything to say?” she asked the werewolf.

It gurgled at her, two-meter legs and arms thrashing. The electricity pumping through the net turned the escape attempts into the skittering limbs of a spider-trapped fly. Its claws groped at nothing, gripped their own palms. Foam was leaking from its mouth – maybe an aftereffect of the six darts clustered in its chest. Something else was leaking out too; squeaks, whines, whimpers, something guttural. Nothing decipherable.

“Good enough,” she said, and kicked it overboard.

Great Bear Lake was nice and clear this time of year, the tail-end of the little window where the ice didn’t coat it. Tammy got to watch it sink all the way down.

It never quite stopped squirming.

Then she returned the boat, paid everyone she’d contacted in the last six months a two-hundred-percent bonus to shut up, went home, and slept the whole night through for the first time since she turned five.

***

Tammy was sixty-eight and in the hospital. Again.

It didn’t seem quite fair. She’d managed to deal with such a larger monster for so much longer. But at least this one didn’t hide outside her door, or try to grab her when she took the long way home too late on a Friday, or climb the tree outside her new room’s window until she convinced her mother it was too close to the power lines to stay standing, or make her break up with her first girlfriend because she refused to go anywhere after sundown, or shine its reflective eyes from behind every bush she swore had been empty a minute ago, or stick its nose under her bedroom door the single time her mother forgot to lock the front hall, or anything else.

The door opened for her evening medication, which she was pretty sure she remembered already taking.

Slow, slow, slow reflexes. She looked up and it should’ve already been too late.

It filled the doorway, but not as grandly as it once might have. Its back was hunched; its fur was grey – where it still existed: something had burned thin bald lines into its skin in a criss-crosshatch that covered it from gnarled head to long-nailed toe. Its eyes were a cloud yellow that didn’t shine in the gloom.

Its nose twitched, and its legs unfurled and it took three quivering, unsteady steps, half-dragging at its own distorted heels. The left arm held it upright against Tammy’s bed; the right extended, fingers quivering, and with a gradual and horribly familiar effort, grabbed her by the head as it leaned down close, muzzle dripping something warm and nauseating as its teeth parted.

“agg. yurrit.”

Then it let go, lurched to the window, and slid through it.

Tammy didn’t move. She didn’t move when the ruckus came visiting over the sound of the glass. She didn’t move when they checked her pulse, called the police, asked her if she saw anything.

She was busy thinking.

***

The gravestone was a last-minute addition to the will, on behalf of a woman whose funeral arrangements had been ‘just recycle me and don’t bother with a plot’ since she was forty. But the money was there for it, and the lawyers and family vouched for it, and so it was bequeathed.

‘YOU WIN’ wasn’t the oddest thing to have put on a tombstone anyways. That was the bimonthly graveside bouquet of venison – which was also quite clearly specified, although the graveyard management objected strenuously.

They never had a leg to stand on, anyways. It always vanished overnight, without leaving so much as a drop of fat.

There is a very small and exactly round hole in the precise center of the main street, too small to bump a wheel and too deep to be from wear and tear. This is why.

***

The construction companies made their bids. They wrangled terms. They argued. They wheedled.

Frank Thomas bid low – very low – and he kept his bid very low, and he never said a word after that, or moved after that, or did anything other than sit there and smile, smile, smile. He had a smile stuck on his face, Frank did. It made you want to carve him on a statue, or punch him, or something like that.

Tortoise Construction won the bid. On their trucks, it said: Slow and Steady Wins the Race.

***

The roadwork was meant to start in mid spring, as soon as the snows left. Frank got the trucks in a row with uncommon haste: by the end of May his crews were hard at work, measuring and cutting and digging and standing around asking where the hell the asphalt was, that truck should’ve been here last week, we’ve already dug up half the road, this is a total shitshow, I need a cigarette, and so on.

“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank when the foreman called him for the sixth time that morning asking why they had barely any gravel left with half a day remaining. And he said nothing more.

***

Come late June the holidays were creeping closer and the town was growing concerned about traffic, since Tortoise Construction had now removed the surface of every single stretch of asphalt they were meant to be working on while replacing exactly none of it with a drivable substrate, temporary or otherwise. This included the town’s largest parking lot.

“Frank,” the mayor begged him over the phone. “Frank. Frankie man. You’re killing me here, and that’s because you’re killing the fair, and that’s because there’s no way they can get the trucks down to the park because of you. My youngest grandchild is finally old enough to eat a hot dog. You are depriving my youngest grandchild of her first giant outdoor overpriced hot dog, AND her first fireworks show all at once. I’m crying, Frankie. Can you hear my tears hitting the receiver? Can you? Please, Frank. For the love of god. For the love of god, and country, and really godawful hot dogs with too much mustard.”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank, untroubled. And he stayed on the line the entire two hours, and that was all he would say.

***

The thunderstorms came in July when Frank was on site to inspect their progress; torrential sheets of water that sucked on the half-packed road like a six-year-old on a popsicle. Lightning strikes and high winds had their pick of the treeline, and some of it just happened to be over the construction – an oak was felled on Wednesday, and one of its branches took out a good-sized maple and both their efforts combined did something unspeakable to a pickup truck on the curb and its collapsing roof did something VERY speakable to its driver, who was speaking about it at the top of his voice. Oh and there were multiple live wires flailing around on the road.

“Call 911!” screamed the foreman, whose own phone had been drowned in her pocket while plucking her crew from the floods. “Call a repair crew! Call a tow truck! Call the arborists!”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank, tranquil as a calm pond on a moonlit evening. And then he took sixteen minutes to enter his password, for he had forgotten it and did not want to rush himself.

***

August had never been easy, but this one was like someone had taken a magnifying glass and nailed it to the sun. The trees withered; the grass spontaneously reverted to dirt; the ponds dried up; the elderly roamed the streets at midday cheerily greeting one another in long pants. And the very first new layer of asphalt poured by Tortoise Construction just the previous day refused to set in any manner other than goopily.

“We’ll need to remove it and start again,” said the foreman. “And quickly: it’s only getting worse the longer it sits there, and we’ve taken so much time already. We need the machines back ASAP.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank, who did not perspire and who did not give any signal as to the whereabouts of the machinery in question. His smile did not waver, his remorse was not visible.

***

The leaves came down fast that year: September’s end just barely in sight when they sighed and slipped free, withered and crinkled. They clotted the ground in their millions, they stuck to the new road, they became sodden with morning dew and formed thick fat blankets that carpeted the whole town in a slippery film that could send anything from a toddler to a full-sized construction rig skidding merrily across the road and into an adult’s leg or a senior living home.

“Frank,” begged his business partner. “Frank. This is not a good look. We need to make a statement. Please for the love of god, just apologize or look contrite or do anything, anything at all. We need to fix this. Please. PLEASE.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank. His teeth never showed, his lips never unsealed, his gums were not visible. Legal proceedings filled his inbox and simply slipped around him, like running water.

***

October came and went, and with its end came an early snap frost. The ground chilled and so did the asphalt, the last of its first layer only just now being laid down. It cracked, it crumbled, it shuddered, it broke apart under the wheels of the trucks, and in one case it broke off the wheels of one of the largest, heaviest, and most expensive trucks.

“Please,” said the foreman. “Please. Please Frank. Please get it fixed quickly. Please. For the love of everything. Please please please.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank.

The foreman was taken away by some of the older and more sympathetic members of the road crew, who chipped in to get her just drunk enough to make it through the week.

***

It was November. The first snow was forecast for next week. The first of the second layer of asphalt was to be laid down this very day. Everyone was on site and ready to go.

Everyone.

“Frank,” said the foreman, desperately using this opportunity to look him directly in the eye. “Where’s our paychecks?”

Frank’s eye contact did not waver, but he did not look back. “Slow and steady wins the race.”

The asphalt was pouring, the weather was fine, the shovels and the rollers and the rakes were all there. Everyone looked at Frank.

He gazed blissfully at the asphalt as it puddled by his feet.

“Frank. We need to get paid.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank.
“It can do by itself,” said the oldest crewman present. Then they all spat on the ground, one at a time, and walked off.

Frank watched this with unfurrowed brow and light heart, and was not moved.

This mattered, because that was why the asphalt engulfed his right leg.

Nobody was there to see what happened next, but judging by the very small and exactly round hole left in the middle of the road Frank got out at some point – not that anyone checked too hard. The rest of Tortoise Construction went to work somewhere else, and some of them came back in and finished the roads that spring. And they did it properly, which was pretty slow and steady, and the funny thing was that it didn’t take long at all.

Because slow and steady may win the race; but doing nothing’s just stuck in place.

Serena had been a basically okay person. She was the model of filial piety on her good days; raised two more or less functional adults whose defects were considered par for the course among their peers; helped contribute nominally to her parents’ funerals; produced a socially normative amount of waste carbon; and occasionally always had time for her friends.

No, thought Eleanor. She didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserved this. Nobody deserved to have this happen at their funeral. Nobody deserved their cousin Beatrice sitting at their funeral, sobbing slightly into a cloth, with a single, devastating whorl of clotted hairs dangling directly in the center of her back like a bloated tick on a chimpanzee’s spine. Nobody deserved to have that nightmarish snarl detach from the scalp of its host and dangle from their chair and slowly pendulum in the gentle breeze of the air conditioning at their funeral, doubtlessly drawing the eye and mind and overwhelming horror of every friend, relation, and staff member present, distracting them from the (heartfelt, touching, reassuring) eulogies being spoken at that very moment, Eleanor was sure of it, if only she could bring herself to look away from the oh my god was that dandruff or lice or just desiccated conditioner WHAT TH

For the good of cousin Beatrice, for the good of dear departed Serena, for the good of everyone present, for the good of society itself, something had to be done. Stealthily. Quickly. Carefully. The sort of thing one needed a particular set of skills to do, such as those gained by a lifetime spent producing tiny model ships inside bottles.

Since it was Eleanor that had that, it was Eleanor that did that. A swift, sure pluck. And lo, a little light and warmth was returned to the world, and the angels crept back into the room, and the eulogy concluded and was received with the care and attention that would have been denied it in a time and a place where such things were left to gallivant on the backs of chairs unseen and unheard.

“Hey.”
Eleanor was at peace. Eleanor was fine. Eleanor was thinking of ships in bottles, of tweezers manipulating threads; of hooks pulling masts upright.

“Hey.”
Eleanor was not thinking about what was curled inside the palm of her right hand like a tiny encrusted nightmare larva.

“Hey, get up. It’s almost your turn to say goodbye.”

Oh no. Eleanor had no pockets.

A gentle hand on her arm, deeply respectful of her bereavement. She shot upright, fist clenched for fight and flight, and found neither: oh god she was being sent down the aisle, oh god the coffin was in front of her, oh god she was going to be holding this travesty of a hank of a lock of keratinous waste until the service ended, oh god she could feel the oils and unguents coating and coagulating it seeping through her pores into her precious, vulnerable internal environment, oh god, oh god, oh god help her now, could any sign or symbol or power that be – good or evil or apathetic – send something at this moment to spare the life and mind of poor, poor Eleanor, so recently troubled by the death of her cousin?

And in precise response to that exact train of thought, Eleanor stood at Serena’s coffin, in which lay Serena, and a nice dress, and a small bouquet, and not much else. A well-fitted coffin, but a spacious one.

Lots and lots of room.

***

If she didn’t think about it as she did it, it was like she wasn’t doing it, right? It was just a thing that happened.

And Serena didn’t say anything at all.

There was no dinner afterwards – too many polite tears would water down the plates – but there was a small buffet, which Eleanor attended. She was careful to only eat with her left hand.

“It’ll come back to haunt us.”
“No it won’t there’s no proof,” said Eleanor reflexively. She’d just put a ship in a bottle, that was all.

“Oh but this all IS proof,” said the speaker, who she realized belatedly was not her conscience but a family friend(?) named Angus and about three glasses of red wine in excess. “She’s the first of our generation to go, you know, and in days to come, the pattern that began here will” and so on and on he went and Eleanor was once again able to re-enter the peaceful and confined space inside her head, as long as she didn’t look into the crowd and see the expanse of cousin Beatrice’s back.

Which was silly, because cousin Beatrice’s back was now fine, because someone had done something about that and everything was fine now. Finding this logic impeccable, Eleanor fastened and secured its latch with an extra glass, and then another, and then a bigger glass of something else. Then she found Angus again and got into an argument with him about municipal politics so she had a better reason to remember hating him for.

There was nothing else to remember hating him for, because nothing he said had reminded her of anything else she hadn’t not done.

***

It had rained all the following week, which Eleanor felt was unthematic (surely it should rain DURING a funeral), a stroke of good luck (even if it SHOULD rain during a funeral, few funeral attendees want to be the ones getting rained on), and a blessing.

She did her best work when it was miserable out. The low light, the tapping of raindrops, and the cool air all kept her brain comfortably filled with softly-grained static except for the parts moving her hands around, which could expand to fill her entire skull, body, and room in that order.

Tip tap tip, tick tick, tup tup on the roof. Tip tip tip tap tap tap on the worktable. Plink plank plunk plonk between them both. Wet and explosive above, dry and hard below. Perfect symmetry, perfect absence of harmony, all-encompassing and infinite and thus an excellent explanation for why she had carefully avoided noticing the other sound all morning.

It was not wet or dry or hard or explosive or anything else. It was soft and scuttling and it sounded like someone saying shhh, shh, shh-shh, shush-shuff, or maybe like an elder dog – one that looked like a mop – rustling in its bed to get comfortable. It was very difficult for Eleanor to completely ignore all of those things, especially since this was the second day in a row they’d been happening without stopping and her morning papers were probably slowly being melted into pulpy ink on her front doorstep.

She wondered if the paper delivery guy had seen anything. Then she wondered how she’d failed to avoid wondering that. Then she started wondering and didn’t stop and her hands started thinking about what they were doing and a needle-fine instrument swayed when it should’ve swung and took out a tiny little smokestack.

“Fuck,” she said. And with that – the first word spoken in days – everything snapped into focus: she was awake, and sapient, and an adult, and she was imprisoned in her own house because somehow she’d been so badly driven to anxiety by a mildly awkward moment at a funeral that she’d rather gaslight herself into reclusedom than look out her window to see what was making the funny noise outdoors, when it was almost certainly the stupid branches on the stupid tree in the stupid front yard getting waterlogged and snapping low enough to scrape at her door.

So Eleanor stood up (stumbling a bit – numb knees), and strode with (limping) purpose to her front door, where she looked out the window and saw a tangled lump of filthy hair, caked with dirt and clawing at her doorknob while trailing the (somewhat worse-for-wear) corpse of Serena, dress, withered flowers, and all.

“Fuck,” she repeated herself.

Then she went and got a glass and an extra glass and a bigger glass and thought things over until she passed out.

When she woke up, the bottle was empty and things made sense.

***

Eleanor looked at the door. Eleanor looked through the door. Eleanor stood before the door and took a deep, deep breath.

Then she opened the door – interrupting the hair mid-scratch – and held up the bottle.

“Hey. I’m sorry. Want a better place?”

***

It took a long time to brush and comb out the dirt and the grunge, strand by strand.

It took care and squinting and many lenses to rinse away the worst of the rot without washing the hairs down the drain.

It took tremendous, painstaking effort to fill the bottle without cramping or wadding, millimetre by millimetre.

It took deep and passionate focus to do this without inhaling too hard and gagging on the smell and letting your hands shake everywhere and ruin everything forever.

These were the sort of things one needed a particular set of skills to do, such as those gained by a lifetime spent producing tiny model ships inside bottles.

Since it was Eleanor that had that, it was Eleanor that did that. And it was Eleanor that held in her hands an empty and unlabelled wine bottle, one now filled to the brim with long, lustrous, full-bodied hair that looked as clean and fresh as anything a barbershop could bake.

“This will do for a long time yet,” she told it, as the cork went in. “And I’ll work out something with the will so it won’t happen twice. Okay?”

The light shone on the bottle when she turned it. She wasn’t sure if that meant anything, but her head hurt and her eyes itched and she was willing to let it be for now.

***

The funeral home helped with Serena’s return, not to mention with keeping it quiet. Nobody solicits business from people who let ships out of bottles.

In the chamber in the tower in the fortress of the cavern of the lost star toiled the wizard. Red and sweating was his face; pale and shaking were his liver-spotted hands; blackened and terrible were his thoughts. His name was Thanisember Ducc and he had cried aloud one word every minute of every hour of every day since the new moon had turned and that word was ‘DOOM’ in every tongue spoken by every creeping thing found under every footfall of soil unglimpsed by human sight.

“DOOM!” he cried aloud one more time, the last time, and with that word his hammer descended – red-hot, star-forged – and shattered at the force of the blow, shivered into cold leaden dust. On the anvil lay a blade, and in that blade now slept a soul, and in that soul awoke a desire, an echo of the creeping lust felt in the palsied grip that now scrabbled at its hilt.

“Who are thou that wouldst make me thine?” it asked in the grating and uncanny way of blades.

“I am Thanisember Ducc, sword,” said Thanisember Ducc, “and I have made you all that you are, and I have given you all that you will be, and I am thy master. Now come! Much remains.”

And much did remain, for before Thanisember Ducc and the blade descended from the chamber of the forge he had to brandish the sword in the Three-Hundred-And-Sixty-One Degrees, and curse the nine winds, and bless the three deepest hells, and give the sword his blood, and his spit, and his tears (the last were extracted by the wizard inducing himself to sneeze, as both sorrow and pain had been made alien to his heart by his own will for some grim millennia), and tidy the forge, and destroy every tool that had touched the sword before his own hand, and when all of this was said and done and done and DONE he raised the blade high and proclaimed “I name thee Clovenfang, and remind and abjure and admonish thee once more that I am thy maker and I am thy master,” and sheathed it in a scabbard of lamb-skin.

Then he descended the tower and ascended another, which was surmounted by a bed of grand and intoxicating scope, and, having placed the sword at his breast like an infant so that it might suckle upon his dreams of destiny and ambition, fell into slumber.

For an hour, not one midge-fly dared bestir the air in that tower. And another. And another. And at the fourth hour, the sword Clovenfang gently began to shake and tremble and slowly turn in its scabbard until – inch by inch – the naked blade was brought free, then close, then closer, and until it came to just barely reach the wrinkled hide of Thanisember Ducc.

There it rested for a single instant, preparing for its victory. But that was its undoing, for the moment metal kissed skin the ire of the special gem the wizard kept knotted in the tip of his beard was aroused, and it screamed fit to wake the dead and scare the cat. Thanisember Ducc awoke in a furious start, wrested Clovenfang from his breast with a word used to swear demons to their mothers, and threw it from the window where it fell into the very darkest places of the emptiest parts of the universe entire.

“Damnation to the sky and sea!” he cried as he fell into a swoon. “Six times! Now seven! Why does this keep happening?” And the saddest thing of all was that this question was sincere.

***

The next day Thanisember Ducc woke up already furious with himself and the universe and the sixteen other wizards he wanted dead and decided that tradition be damned, he would not let there be an eighth failure, and so he garbed himself in his most potent robes and warded himself with his most puissant chants and hid himself underneath his most secret seemings and stepped – for the first time in mortal ‘membrance! – into the small world beneath him.

Then he walked into a store, purchased a handgun, transformed the clerk in unspeakable and horrific ways for their insolence in his presence, and left before the smell of air and water sickened him.

***

In the chamber in the tower in the fortress of the cavern of the lost star toiled the wizard, but not for long. Pinched and peevish was his face; clenched and crabbed were his fists; impatient and frustrated were his thoughts. Furthermore, he only bothered to cry ‘DOOM’ sixteen times in six minutes. He was not shaping this weapon from raw ore himself, and besides, he was sick of it.

“DOOM!” he cried aloud one more time, the last time, and with that word the air dimmed and the spiders died on the windowsills. On the – unused, pristine, unmarked – anvil lay the gun, and in that gun now slept a soul, and in that soul awoke a desire, an echo of the creeping lust felt in the fumbling grasp now already on its handle.

“Hey what gives?” it asked.
“I am Thanisember Ducc, gun,” said Thanisember Ducc, “and thine command of bladespeake is fit to bring me to tears.”
“So I got an accent, big deal – hands off the merchandise!”
“I am thy master,” said the wizard, “though I have not made thee all that thou are or given thee all that thou will be. Now silence! Much remains!”

The gun did not remain silent, and it complained of being carsick through its brandishing at each of the Three-Hundred-And-Sixty-One Degrees, said the curses and blessings of the nine winds and three deepest hells sound ‘like French? Is that French?’, complained of the smell and flavour of Thanisember Ducc’s sweat, blood, and tears, and loudly sang ninety-seven of ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall as the wizard tidied the forge and destroyed every tool that had touched it before his own hand, until he raised it high and shouted “I name thee NOTHING, and remind and abjure and admonish thee tenfold that I may not be thy maker, but I am thy MASTER,” and sheathed it in a small shoulder holster before retiring to bed with it pressed carefully against his bosom.

Before the hour was out the gun had twisted in its confines, pressed muzzle to mystical breastbone, and clicked down its trigger until the magazine was empty – alas for Nothing, it was in an instant! For Thanisember Ducc had stored the bullets in a small and inconvenient pouch in his closet, and so the weapon spent the night stewing in resentment and in grand and violent dreams.

Three days and three nights slept Thanisember Ducc, feeding his dreams to his weapon. And on the morning of the fourth day he awoke with weary brow but bright eyes and an iron grin: his gemmed beard had not shrieked once.

“Thou hast passed all seven of thine forebears, Nothing,” he said to the gun. “And now you shalt in turn witness mine own ascension. Let us begin with Borgonglorin the Brink.”

***

Borgonglorin the Brink was a wizard of elder and deeper skill than Thanisember Ducc, of a magnitude and more, and he was merely the least and most modest of the true masters of their shared craft – an archmagister with a single toe dipped into the pools of farthest mystery.

But he had his pride, and it was this that bestirred him when the comets of his demesne awoke him from a pleasant mid-decade nap to tell him that Thanisember Ducc, of no real repute, was besieging his under-tower with all manner of tumult and crass spellery.

“Ho!” shouted Borgonglorin the Brink out his bedchamber to the ragged figure at his draw-gate. “What keeps you to such crass hours?”
“Vindication!” shouted Thanisember Ducc, twice as loudly and three times as rudely. “Stir thine feet and take challenge or forfeit your fortress and your life!”

This took Borgonglorin’s mood from pride to wroth, and he ascended from his under-tower with all the mood of a tempest and all the figure of a giant, and in each hand he held his blade, which was named Solemnpartings, and it thought as he thought and cut as he cut and was the manifestation of his will and desire for ever more than the universe would give him. Such is the power of a wizard’s true-forged and true-loyal weapon, and he was insulted to see that Thanisember Ducc approached him without so much as a dagger but instead held a sort of odd  little metal wand.

“To the death and beyond!” called Thanisember Ducc, in a real display of rashness, for surely Borgonglorin would have settled for merely taking his life in return for waking him before his evening meal.

“To the death and beyond!” agreed Borgonglorin the Brink.

BANG, said Nothing.

***

Once the under-tower was looted of lore and mettle and rune Thanisember Ducc took his leave to the mangled rewot of Sdrawkcab, which took him three hours ago to find, located as it was between the last thing he’d done and the last thing he hadn’t.

“No draug!” Sdrawcab unsaid, their terrible drows secondthoughT already returned to its scabbard.

BANG, said Nothing.

After that – or before it? – Thanisember Ducc travelled ‘cross the bleak abyssal plains and found the space between continents and settled into the grains of sand and there in the spark of death inside a half-buried fish’s skull he found the dwelling of Sliiine the Sliiimewrought, bodiless but not bladeless, who had spent the last sixteen million years in perfect and total contemplation of the moment of life’s cessation.

“It is finished,” said Sliiine, who had no blade and needed none.

BANG, said Nothing.

And with the crooked sixpence taken from Sliiine’s war-chest the way was parted for Thanisember Ducc to walk the crooked path down the crooked mile to the crooked house, where he caught Cantilever the Sheared at dinner and didn’t even allow him the courtesy of drawing jagged Uncline in self-defence.

BANG, said Nothing.

So the sun began to fall on the greatest day of Thanisember Ducc’s long, long, long life, and he felt as spry and fresh as a new-blossom’d daisy, such so that even the feeling of night-dew prickling on his face in the living breathing world couldn’t bring him to disgust and animal appetites and cravings that he had shrugged off when fire was newly-tamed began to stir within him.

Thus, he entered the Taco Bell.

“Bring unto me ambrosia,” he commanded the clerk.

“Want a beverage with that?” replied the clerk.

Thanisember Ducc did not transform the clerk in unspeakable and horrific ways for this, for some other, greater wizard appeared to have beaten him to the punch. But he scowled most grievously and did not say another word but remained cloaked in august and imperious silence until his meal arrived, whereupon he fell upon it as if it were a fresh sacrifice with its liver yet unbruised.

“Don’t I get anything?” asked Nothing. “I been busting my ass all damned day for you, can’t I get a smear of guac at least?”
“Silence,” proclaimed Thanisember Ducc with the gravity of a dwarf sun. “The product of thine mouth hath gained me greatly this day, but do not think that this bequeaths thee free reign of it to flap and flurry as a wind-whipped gosling in the gos’mer rains of midsummer.”
“Say WHAT?”

But Thanisember Ducc did say more, but leapt to his feet and departed with haste to the washroom, and with haste and distress in his heart and elsewhere, did cast aside his robe and wand and pouch and Nothing into one stall and his self into another and began, forthwith, to cleanse himself of bodily impurities.

Thence sat Nothing, abandoned and dissolute, and not alone: for lo! A form stood at the sink, hands wringing idly under the faucet’s flow, and no soap was used, and Nothing saw a soul shadowed and small and willing to bend to its favour.

“Hey. Hey! Hey buddy, c’mere!”
“Who said that?” asked the stranger, keen of eye and swift of mind.

“Over here. Listen, buddy, you want to do me a favour?”
“Sure?” pondered the stranger solemnly.

“Listen. Bullets are in that pouch, gun’s on the toilet seat, bob’s your uncle, fanny’s your aunt, boom goes the dynamite. Just fill it up and let it do the talking.”
“Fill the toilet?”
“The GUN,” said Nothing loudly, but not too loudly. And yet in vain! For when the stranger’s hand did reach the pouch, it was detected – the bullet-pouch was sewn from Thanisember Ducc’s own cast-off skin, and at the touch of a foe the gem in the tip of his beard shrieked and wailed until the wizard, though bent-double in agony, spared a moment’s concentration to murmur a charm for wayward witches that spun the stranger out of the bathroom via the ceiling and into the lower and stranger atmospheres.

“Wretched weapon!” he cried. “Thou betrays me! But futile are your efforts, for mine is the hand that feeds your maw and none other, and that maw shalt thereby never be turned against me! Now slumber on, and speak not, lest I take stronger measures!” And thus having uttered his threat, he returned to his troubles.

For some six-and-score minutes those words seemed to hold sway, but in truth it was but a ruse: Nothing did not sleep but waited in silence for its chance, and so its chance did come: an employee with mop and bucket and broom and an empty heart, one ready to be filled with the sweetest poisoned lies. And, most importantly of all, latex gloves adorned his hands.

“Hey buddy! You, with the pimples and the slouch and the stupid hat and shirt? You just won a FREE GUN!”

“Huh yeah wha?”

“Over here! Stall number two! Just grab it up and load the bullets from the pouch – second pouch, the one that looks like old man gooch. That’s it! That’s the one! Load it up and let it fire and it’s yours and-”

But as the bullet-pouch’s shape was wrought from the hide of Thanisember Ducc, so too was its cunning wrought from his mind: as the employee’s hands fumbled at its fastener, it contrived to catch at his glove, and pull it, and tangle it, and so bring his skin into contact with its own. Thereby once more did the gem in the tip of the beard of Thanisember Ducc shriek and howl, and, raising his haggard head, once more did the wizard chant his spell to defeat any witch that feared losing her way home in the morning, and thereby send a second wayward voyageur of the men’s room to chart the great Missing Sky.

“Twice you have betrayed me, Nothing!” he called. “No more! Servant thou’st been, but only as long as thy treachery remains frail and faltering! Now I shalt take measures against it firming!” and with this Thanisember Ducc raised his hand and raised his will and burst the bullet-pouch asunder as if it were a fly on the back of his arm that he had happened to swat, and as the ammunition was dashed upon the floor so too were the hopes of Nothing, for it rolled all about underneath the sinks where no man’s hand might hope to grasp it.

And it was then, as the wizard once more excused himself to his labours, that fate took charge. Fate was small, and chubby of cheek, and shy of foot, but big enough to wander a short ways on his own to a washroom unattended.

“Hey kid!” said Nothing, desperation earnestly if not greatly hidden in its voice. And lo, as the child turned his gaze to it, there was nothing to be seen in his soft brown eyes than earnest, honest, loving, well-meaning obedience and trust. A Good Child, one above duplicity, unable to be bribed or cajoled into wrongdoing, no matter the cause, the curse, or the cruelty.

“Mind lending a hand, kid? Somehow I’ve lost my marbles all over the floor, and if you could find just ONE and shove them back in that funny gadget on the toilet in stall two, that’d be swell.”

The little good Samaritan’s arms were short, but his hands were small, and if just one bullet was all that could be reached, it was still all that was needed. It slid home with a click as polite as a cricket in a church, and only then, despite the silence of the gem in his beard, did Thanisember Ducc raise his head in suspicion due to some errant twitch of the currents of the air, just as the bathroom door opened and the child’s father investigated, curious as to the whereabouts of his errant heir.

Nothing did not have time to aim. But it did not need it.

BANG, it said. And BANG went forth, and it struck the coat-hook of the stall, and whenceforth the security camera above the sink, and whenceforth the basin of the sink, and whenceforth it caromed across the walls corner-to-corner like an excited cat, and thereafter it descended unto the doorstop and shot out zipping past the father’s startled eyes like an enraged bee, and at that moment, as its deadly presence grew evident to even his mortal gaze, he shouted out a plea, a call of warning, an attempt to save any whose ears were fit to hear.

“DUCK!”

The last to so familiarly and discourteously address Thanisember Ducc had perished at his hand timeless centuries ago. He drew himself up in shock and affront, opened his mouth, and became perforated about the ears.

“Hey buddy,” said Nothing. “Your kid’s a real trooper. You got a spare couch?”

***

No word ever reached the lesser wizards of the world of what sudden sickness had claimed five of those above them. And none of the greater wizards would ever deign to comment on any doing by those beneath, or to admit the existence of those above themselves.

But for some time following that busy day that none professed to know of, the little peoples were untroubled by sorcery or ensouled sword or wicked desire, as wizards great and small scried and fretted and plotted new and grandiose spells to ward their shrivelled lives. For entirely coincidental and unrelated reasons, most assuredly.

Most assuredly.

It was hard to say when it started, because when the first person caught it on video it was subtle – and who knows when the first person just SAW it and had nobody believe them? First, second, seven millionth, it was what it was and it was undeniable: someone was taking a slow-pan of their garden when a middle-aged woman with a tired face walked up to it and put it in a box.

She put her hands under the ages and scooped it up – schoomp, like that, like a human scooping up a jellified cat by the armpits and butt – and slid it into a big cardboard box.

“Hey,” said the recorder. And that – even after a few days and a few billion gallons of digital ink – was all that there was to be said.

***

Then the same thing happened to a grove of trees by a convenience store in Georgia. The box was of normal size; a couple feet on a side. The pines were of normal height; a couple dozen meters. The two combined as smoothly and logically and cleanly as a cat scruffing her kittens, with only a few shed needles.

She reappeared ten minutes after that at a municipal park in Kyoto. It went into a box that looked like it had once held wine, from the plants to the stones to the pond.

And six seconds after that, the entirety of Algonquin Provincial Park was rolled up like a scroll and placed in a hollow tube that looked like it had once held wrapping paper. This was when someone managed to reach her and ask her a question, which was as follows:
“What the hell?”

The woman politely considered this, then reached out with a sigh, picked up the (slightly scuffed and alarmed) park ranger, folded them into a little piece of paper, then put them in her pocket.

Then she did the same with everyone else present, one at a time. She did not rush and did not lunge and it took about half a second, if half a second were ten minutes were half a second. Her movements were tired, but careful; firm, but kind. No blood was shed and no spines were snapped.

The little pieces of paper were tissue, and brightly coloured. The sort of thing you might pack a birthday surprise inside if you bought something at the last minute and left it in the bag. Every single folded scrap of paper went into the same pocket, which was on the front of her jacket, which was made of something that wasn’t leather, or was, or maybe, but was definitely old. It was not a very big pocket.

A few hours after that someone saw her piling the Great Barrier Reef into a Tupperware, rock by rock, coral by coral, fish by fish. Each delicate little half-bleached organism was placed in with her right hand, and with her left, a tiny splash of thousands of gallons of water to keep it moist. Sharks spilled in and out of her hands like minnows, and her brow furrowed just a little deeper with every deathly-white scrap of reef that left her hands.

***

After that she was everywhere, all at once, one after another.

In Central Kalimantan at midnight placing orangutans into a small cloth bag one after another, along with the trees they slept in.

In Manhattan during lunch, bottling the falcons, back slouched and legs dangling from the rims of skyscrapers.

In the Virunga Mountains that afternoon, scrubbing the forests for mountain gorillas with a loupe and a jewelry box and a long-suffering expression that no amount of squinting could hide.

In the Antarctic Peninsula amidst the endless winter twilight, piling glaciers and icebergs and penguins into an ice cube tray, and shaking an unfathomable amount of krill into a worn zip lock bag.

In Madagascar she spent over two minutes under the sunset with a pair of tweezers systemically plucking every lemur from the island into an old egg carton filled with cotton swabs.

And across the entirety of the globe, over the course of half an hour of deeply mixed feelings, she picked up every single mosquito using a petri dish and a drop of blood on a dusty shop knife. She made the cut without apparent flinching and wiped the blood off on her shirt when she was done.

New Zealand became fernless. The redwoods of California were plucked like carrots and put in potting trays. Every bed of moss was stripped and placed in a laundry basket. The mushrooms were taken out of the dark and fed into a bag of noxious smells. Every lichen was transferred to a pet rock named (by the stencil on his side) ‘Greg.’

If anyone got too close they were taken too, but too close was really very close, and she still kept vanishing so often that few had the opportunity. Much of the time when nobody had eyes on her it was assumed she was in the ocean. At least, that’s what everyone decided when a spy satellite caught her filling a portable fish tank with blue whales. The air filtration unit was wheezy and the glass was smeared and the moment she was done she sprinkled them with a little kelp from her zip lock, pulled out a second tank and her scoop, and left.

Two minutes after that was the last time anyone saw a grey whale. The tour boat was very surprised.

By the time forty-eight hours had passed, there wasn’t a single animal or plant or fungus or anything left that wasn’t a human. Astronauts looked down from space stations where someone had floated in and rudely taken their experimental crops and insects and saw no more green on the big blue marble under its white swirls. Even microorganism tests came back clean on every surface; some said they’d seen her wandering with a hand vac and changing the bag every so often, running it over anything and everything.

And still she hadn’t said a word.

***

On the third day, she started seriously working on the last remaining species.

The tissue paper came out again, and then back into her pocket, burgeoning with humanity. They were filed without sorting; packed without prejudice; tucked away for the sake of expedience and nothing more. The ones who fought and the ones who ran and the ones who asked ‘why’ and the ones who never knew anything was going on at all were placed side by side and one after another based on proximity, or something even more purely chance.

Violence did not work in any form. Someone got excited and launched a lot of it at one point; the offending missiles were removed from the sky like splinters and placed in a black heavy duty-garbage bag with red pull ties.

The very last human being on the planet to be collected was a sleeping premature baby in an incubator in a hospital in a country that – like every other one – no longer existed by any meaningful definition of the term.

She patted their head in a vague yet friendly way as she tucked them into the tissue paper. And then, seeing as her task was now complete, she gave them a triple-thick wrapping to use up the leftovers.

***

The geography and geology, she left with only a few souvenirs to remind herself of.

An old chip of rock from a river near a bay. A shell that had turned to stone. A bit of muck from a very, very deep place.

The soil she kept, and the water. They went into large clear plastic bags, for easy identification.

All of it went into her locker, but for the tissue-papered contents of her one large pocket. THAT went into a small, plain cardboard box, and that box was covered with bright wrapping paper.

Then she held it in one hand and a black marker in the other, propped it against her forearm, and wrote ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ on it in large, unseriously celebratory font.

***

She did not leave a forwarding address.