《Shatterstar and Other Cataclysms (Short Stories)》


 Shatterstar

    With the giant meteor fast approaching, the world was finished¡ªtotally doomed¡ªwhich was fine with Sochl, a black-shelled tortoise, hard, unbreakable, and thoroughly energized by the prospect of having the Earth to herself.


    Something told her that this was necessary. That sometimes the earth needed a cleanse. But maybe that was just the hard-shelled privilege talking, her biological preparedness for what the forest creatures dubbed The Shatterstar. The frightful animals claimed the meteor would shatter the world. It''d break all life. And Sochl, secure in her shell, couldn''t imagine anything cooler. "Yeees!" she''d say at night to the meteor, "Shell yeah! Break it!"


    And because the meteor was massive, it''d darken the planet, shaving away half of the daylight hours and handing it over to night. A nocturnal world signaled the end times, oblivion in its truest form, though to Sochl it was a welcome change. A better world was beginning. And also, the color black was her symbol, her soul color.


    Black tortoise, black world. It was just a thing.


    So Sochl was ready for the post-life world¡ªas were the other tortoises, the armadillos, the oysters and crabs and river clams, and especially the snails who now slung themselves about in curvy S patterns with so much swagger, so much non-fear, for their shells were apparently mighty. But if you didn''t have a shell, tough luck.


    The meteor showers of the past two months were all business¡ªno luminous comet trails scarring the night sky¡ªbut instead black pebbles pelting the trees, the lakes, the roofs of campsite RVs. The shards presumably broke from the Shatterstar itself as small, hurtful warnings to the creatures below. Occasionally a sparrow was shot from the sky.


    "Wow," Sochl said.


    "Of course!" A nearby snail said. "Grow a shell, dummy!"


    She wanted to flip him over like she''d done to many a tortoise, but you couldn''t go around flipping snails, not with that pittance of armor. Was she apathetic about its well-being? Of course. But was she a murderer? She hadn''t been pushed to it, and she didn''t yet see that in her. So she chose a reasonable response to the ignorance until the Shatterstar properly erased him. "Like you''d do any better."


    "Please. You know what they call me?"


    "I could live without the knowledge-"


    "Diamond!"


    "Forgetting, forgetting-."


    "Because you can''t break me baby! Say it with me. Diamond!"


    "I''m going to vomit on you."


    "And you can step on me too! But it won''t change a thing! Diamond is unbreakable baby!"


    Where did he come from? Why did the earth create him? Sochl had no answers to the foolishness of the modern day. Though perhaps the interaction explained why for a slow, non-migratory being like herself, she''d experienced more out-of-season temperatures, more natural disasters than the most well-traveled of creatures. Cleansing. It had to be a cleanse. What else could it be?


    She walked away, chanting, "Cleanse, cleanse, cleanse..."


    Diamond was confused, but moreso full of self-pride, so he left in the opposite direction with his newfound, confident S strut.


    The calamities, the certain dooms, the cataclysms, were normal in this world, occurrences that Sochl had grown to love. Twenty-five years of life and Sochl witnessed the choicest moments of planetary destruction. She''d marveled at Earth rebelling against life with heatwaves, forest fires, the volcanic eruption of a long-dormant volcano, a three-year Ice Age, flesh-eating fungi, new species of corrosive vegetation, daily earthquakes, the gradual disappearance of knowledgeable, boundary-respecting park rangers, and seasons of quicksand and rock-slides and menacing sinkholes. The earth had a mouth, she was amazed to learn, and the terror it spread was riveting. From the moment of Sochl''s birth, everything that followed was a curious occurrence, wild plot-twists that her tortoise biology couldn''t outrun but properly withstood. And the earth, like Sochl, withstood its own violence as well.


    After each calamity, earth simply bounced back. Trees, grass, bodies of water in their proper, convenient places. And the present moment was one of those unbothered but fleeting times. The world had a way of reconstructing, of coming back for more. The planet was unbelievably, non-sensibly resilient. So Sochl connected to the planet on a deep, personal level. The earth''s chaos, without a doubt, was her element.


    But the chaos of her neighbors, the atmosphere they spread around her during the earth''s most wild, grandiose moments, was the real enemy.


    Though Sochl lived through the blunt impacts and heat and toxins and ice sheets, she was trapped within the madness of the forest. Migration, travel¡ªthose simply weren''t tortoise-y options.


    So she bore witness to sparrows confident enough to fly during meteor rains, snails that now considered themselves the master race, and even the campsite humans¡ªthe supposedly smart ones¡ªbreaking their necks toward the pretty meteor rain, staring raptly, allowing Shatterstar fragments to pelt their faces.


    But an overwhelming majority of the animals were usually alright, bafflingly so, though Sochl had long suspected that luck had tons to do with that. There was no justice or sense in luck functioning against her, in Diamond¡ªand other such mineral-named creatures¡ªbeing unbreakable.


    Here is the only sense she knew to be true: the world had a habit of dying, and she was fortunate for her hard shell, which apparently was death resistant in all respects. Nature loved her, but it also loved everyone else. Somehow the flimsy, the arrogant and annoying, always found a way to survive through the impossible calamities. While Sochl was excited for the world''s upcoming transformation, its thousandth agonizing, beautiful death, the other animals would definitely enter her space, howling and peeing and doom-saying in the most vexing ways.


    Her thoughts turned to the snails, their ridiculous survival. How? You''re literal slime. She had a bad feeling about them. Somehow, they''d turn out to be the worst. She''d lived through so much that her intuition had sharpened into fangs. Were they durable? No. But how sure was she that they''d be spared extinction? Very sure, tragically so¡ª


    Crack!


    A meteor rain starting up, a sudden distraction from her worries.


    The pebbles Meteorite pebbles rained down. Sochl wondered how the sky supplied the rocks in that way. So dark, so shiny...The meteorites rained down as the forest creatures fled for cover¡ªinto a cave or a hole or well-placed nest or running river. Sochl just stared at the grim, black stones, their charming deadliness.


    She wisely withdrew into her shell. A moment to be enjoyed. A moment for her to relish.


    And then, from somewhere within the distant forest, Diamond''s laugh echoed.


    *


    Step one in building comfort in the wake of the Shatterstar''s purifying crush: tunnels. Big ones, long ones, sturdy ones, dark and quiet ones. Sochl had a clear concept of how well the post-life world was going to treat her. A massive habitat. An expansive, subterranean shell. Tortoises tunneled, it''s just something they did, and while most dug themselves a few holes in which to sleep, Sochl wanted more.


    Forty tunnels, that''s what she created throughout her lifetime, slowly, steadily, the entrance of which was a beaver cave that emptied out during an earthquake. And, conveniently enough, the river ran along the side of the cave, allowing Sochl to quench her thirst in luxury. She''d even decorated the dirt walls with turtle-shell patterns and etchings of her favorite forest flowers, mostly poisonous ones. D¨¦cor aside, her tunnels all led to rooms that functioned in the ways that humans described their own homes. A master bedroom, some nap rooms, other lay spaces¡ªSochl was a master in the art of leisure. There were bathrooms linked to other deeply dug tunnels that functioned as plumbing. She even had a kitchen positioned right where the roots and clover mostly grew. No need to forage, the foraging did itself as Sochl effortlessly collected her meals.


    When the Shatterstar touched down with its inspiring blackness, Sochl would emerge into a new world, the hum of annoyance leveled out into a brain-soothing silence. And those black stones¡ªThose gorgeous, gorgeous rocks(!)¡ªwould be laid out for her to gather, an apocalyptic hobby all planned out.


    So she spent the short days, the long nights, digging.


    One night while lazing in the master bedroom, a rumble.


    Is it time? Sochl''s synapses crackled through her whole being, her body easing upward, slowly, slowly¡ªbut excitement was excitement and she was compelled to surface. She rushed from tunnel to tunnel as the rumbling continued, and eventually, a whole twenty minutes later, she surfaced.


    Finally, she could enjoy the show.


    Meteor rain, more severe than she''d ever seen. Black rocks larger than hail¡ªand coming down fast. She surveyed the forest and watched the precautions that everyone else had made. Sparrows were flying low under the cover of tree branches and cliffsides. The bears cowered near the entrances of their caves. Several unfortunate foxes were in open fields, dodging the rocks as best they could¡ªwhich honestly wasn''t well at all. They were pelted and let out high-pitched whines. The humans, in their parked RVs, watched from the windows and held up their phones, their expressions ranging from amazed to concerned. Drive! Sochl''s mind screamed, What are you doing?


    And lastly, there were the snails. Diamond and his crew were all in one spot on the edge of a rocky overhang, challenging the star shards to do their worst. Sochl imagined them as round, squishy targets of idiocy. No shade or cover, just bravery and snail shell. They were aiming for their own extinction, quite obviously, but unlike the foxes, not a single meteor landed near them. She sensed their smiles, the pride vibrating from their antennae. And their words pickled her soul.


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    "These guys need to get like us."


    "Look at that fox! What kind of shell-less dance is that?"


    "Ha! Another bird down!"


    And the meteors kept falling and falling, missing every snail. Maybe the cleanse isn''t working right, Sochl thought, Get one at least.


    Right then a small meteor, a star-bit if you will, landed near the snail circle, skipped a couple times, nicking the side of Diamond''s shell.


    Everyone paused. They stared at the shell, its absolute intactness. From Sochl''s vantage point, another smidgen to the right and that was it, poor Diamond deservedly dusted¡ªthough he''d be too dead to recognize his wrong. There was no death, though. Just obnoxious life. They were living the moment of their non-apocalypse, flexing their adamantine bodies. The snails gleamed, then joyously erupted.


    "Did you see that?" Diamond shouted.


    "We saw, we saw!"


    "Dumb meteor tried it!" Diamond declared.


    "Sure did. Big old brainless rock!"


    "We''re unbreakable!" Diamond shouted at the sky. "Give it up, you stupid star! What can you do? You''re already dead! D-E-D!"


    A sharp gasp surged from Sochl''s innards. The disrespect of the sluggy cretins knew no bounds. "Disgusting," Sochl said.


    Diamond turned toward her in the distance. He couldn''t hear her, not amid the shattering rocks and howling animals and lack of ears¡ªbut the vibrations of her displeasure struck his nerves in the most satisfying way. Blank face. Hardly a mouth. But his expression was shit-eating anyway. And Sochl, her intuition on fire, had the misfortune of knowing it.


    An hour later, the shower ended and Sochl returned to her lair, at least satisfied that her shell and her tunnels held up-


    And then a voice. "Save us!"


    And another, "Please, help!"


    And at least a dozen other voices chiming in, which, when Sochl accepted the sight before her, she reluctantly acknowledged the presence of mole-rats, rabbits, a fox, a grizzly bear, and even a Labrador retriever from a human family, all within the cave entrance of her home.


    "We don''t wanna die," a mole-rat said.


    The fox whimpered.


    The bear whimpered¡ªin a much lower pitch.


    The Labrador whimpered as well, then lifted its leg and peed its fear.


    "Right," Sochl said. "Dying would be the worst."


    *


    One week was all it took for the lair, the treasured lay spaces, to be taken over. And the Shatterstar was fast approaching, too. Unquestionably the worst time for squatters. But the very animal idea of territory went out the window with the looming threat of astral annihilation. There was no certain timeline as to when final impact was coming. Calamities simply came and went¡ªquite often at that. Assuming the worst was to assume the truth, and Sochl''s tunnels presented itself to the forest creatures as an opportune refuge, a formidable, rock-blocking shelter.


    But in the refuge, they panicked, they cried, they wrecked the order of Sochl''s home.


    Despite the 40 tunnels and dozens of rooms, the bad energy had nowhere to go. Always a whimper, a sigh, the scratching sounds of tongues licking new wounds and scars. The wolves (when did they get here?) howling at nothing, unable to see the moon.


    Sochl often found herself in the kitchen where she munched on roots, stress-ate clover. And for a while, the only detectable sound was her own chewing¡ªuntil the scratching.


    Crumble! Thud!


    Mole-rats breaking through, puncturing a hole through the kitchen wall.


    "Dude, again!" Sochl said.


    "Sorry!" One of the mole-rats said, "Please don''t hurt us!" And the other mole-rats shook their heads nervously in their own shaky apology.


    "Couldn''t you guys tell it was hollow?"


    They squinted at the damage. Mole-rats were essentially blind. They lived in the dark and dug wherever they felt the softest dirt. Sochl had her answer already. This was the third time in the past week.


    The mole-rats were replacing the dirt, padding the broken wall in a patchy, artless way. But Sochl appreciated the repentance.


    "Here," she said, nudging some roots toward them. "You''re foraging, right?"


    "You sure about this?" said Monty. Suddenly, without fear, the mole-rats looked to her as a mom.


    "Yeah, there''s plenty. But please, don''t tell anybody."


    "Thank you! Sorry about the wall!"


    The mole-rat colony took the roots away¡ªdigging downward this time. New damage to the kitchen, yes, but at least they were thoughtful. Sochl headed toward her room, one of them at least. Well-earned sleep, that''s what she needed.


    When she arrived to the master bedroom, the entrance was blocked. A bear was half-outside, half-inside, growling in its sleep, drooling like a cub. The back end of the bear consumed Sochl''s turtle pit, a shell-shaped dirt groove in which she slept. The dark thought bloomed in her that once the Shatterstar hit, the future was exactly this, the animals reaping the benefits of her self-made shell. Her preparation, her comfort, turned against her. She needed to figure something out¡ªbut first, sleep.


    She turned back and headed toward another room. For once in her life, she resented her heavy stride, the natural sluggishness that stopped her body from keeping pace with her anxious, scurrying mind.


    Sochl progressed, achieving a modicum of speed, when an audible rumbling occurred in the tunnel. She peered upward. Meteor rain? Another? So soon?


    Dirt clumps fell from above, the tunnel roof collapsing and caving in right before her, obstructing her path again. The Labrador panted atop the debris pile.


    "Really Fido? Were you digging?"


    A guilty look.


    "Ugh."


    He got up, lifted its leg.


    "Don''t! You''re not allowed!"


    Whimpering. Wet widening eyes. That poor doggy routine.


    "Please don''t punish me any further. Put that leg down."


    He did.


    "Good, now let''s go. Up, up, up, let''s go."


    Fido¡ªthough who knew what its name was¡ªobediently took Sochl on its back and rode her to the surface, past the mole-rats frantically eating roots in a corner, and the foxes (Multiple? Since when?) who whined in their sleep, and the sparrows caressing their injured wings with their beaks, along with dozens of other beaten animals that Sochl didn''t remember entering the shell. Fido arrived at the entrance, a miraculous 20 seconds since taking off, and Sochl climbed off and lumbered outside. Her lair was consumed but the surface was blessedly clear.


    Night sky, comfortable darkness. Many stars gleamed in their deceptive whites¡ªwhites which darkened by the second into Shatterstar blacks. Calmness coursed through her, her energy renewing, her limbs loosening. Fido knew his duty was done and retreated into the cave. She heaved out a sigh, prepared to recharge in the quiet, animal-deprived darkness. Alone...shell ye¡ª


    "Nice commune!"


    Oh no.


    "You guys make such a happy family!"


    Diamond. And a hundred other snails. They oozed about the rocks, the logs, the leaves, the stems of beautiful flowers that the meteors, somehow, also missed. The surface was theirs apparently, and Sochl, having taken forever to surface, eased down in defiance.


    "Say something oh great shelled one. Tell me about your buddies. Have they recovered? Is the shell treating them nice?" Diamond said.


    "Next time, it''ll rain salt."


    "Ha! Salt! Hear that everyone? She thinks we''ll die from salt."


    Everyone laughed. Everyone relaxed in their glory. It was a new day for snail-kind. The world, as of now, was theirs, and they knew it.


    Space, where would she find it?


    Not inside, and certainly not here.


    She took a step forward, then another step, and trudging onwards into the night. Her slowness, her inability for swift departure from the snails, was painful. But the snails were done with jeering at Sochl, and instead directed their taunts upwards.


    "Come on Shatterstar. Hurry up and break so we can get some sunlight already!"


    *


    Sochl walked for a long, long time.


    She walked until her legs got tired.


    She walked until hunger made her stop to eat.


    She walked until the Shatterstar closed in and finally, after concealing all else, eclipsed guidance of the white stars.


    After a much-prolonged stroll, she realized that she should''ve seen daylight by now. A brief glimmer of dusk(?). A strip of sunset purple(?). But the Shatterstar had blotted out the sun too. No more days. No measure of time. Only one continuous night leading to the final impact.


    Sochl''s confusion quickly faded as her enjoyment of the perma-night poured through her. She watched the shadows overtake the entire forest. Evergreen turned to forest turned to espresso and steel and twilight and finally black. In the darkness, she shuffled the pads of her feet against the corpses of star fragments. The meteorites littering the ground were as numerous as the snails that clung to practically every surface. The logs, the tree trunks, stray boulders. The snails were everywhere. She couldn''t see them but could hear their slopping slug-struts staining every surface. They were relaxing, prepared for the cataclysmic show. A tacky wetness clung to her feet but she tortoise-shuffled through the horrifying slug trail, feeling their muted snickers. In the blinded world, the lessons were clear as the local sipping pond¡ªthat the slimy are long-lived. That the stupid sometimes happen to be the chosen.


    Up to a point, she hoped. The stupid can''t win forever¡ªthey can''t, right(?).


    Within the thickening pitch, her wishful musings sustained her. Sochl saw the snails as a shriveled pre-butterfly cocoon of a blacker, greater fate, and that in the post-Shattering the world would deliver justice, serenity. Too hopeful? Possibly...But Sochl forced herself to believe that a change, a flattering one, was destined for her beloved, perpetually reincarnating earth.


    She couldn''t die¡ªshe mustn''t¡ªand the infinite futures stretched before her empowered her heart.


    Sochl peered upward, certain that the Shatterstar would deliver her favorite earth yet. When the earth dies, you can only offer vibes¡ªso Sochl came to believe.


    Black. The sky was so black. The blackness absorbed everything¡ªthe clouds, the moon, the sun, and by this stage in the Shatterstar''s progression even the treetops were ruinously cloaked. The darkness had sunken low, skimming the surface. The Shatterstar was coming. Everyone knew. You couldn''t not know. The feel of the darkness penetrated everything living, and everything soon to cease.


    Sochl took a step, kicked a star-bit, and heard it drop into the water after a too-long pause. She was at the edge of a cliff, or that was her best guess anyway. She paused, tried to turn herself around-carefully, carefully¡ªbut then the waters below kept splashing. She figured it was more rocks she''d knocked off the cliff, but the splashes were louder, faster, and then reaching high enough for her to feel a mist.


    These weren''t her rocks, not a chance.


    The roar of rocks was mighty and frightening. The force couldn''t be assigned to a creature or known phenomena.


    Sochl knew¡ªeveryone knew¡ªwhat was to come on the heels of the stony rain.


    "Shell yeah!" A sudden outburst, pure joy. She''d tunneled, she''d journeyed, she''d meditated. After all she''d endured, the excitement within her was enough to make her combust. What''s next, World? How will you break? How will you disperse your gleaming blacks?


    The snails were fully alert now-a buzz radiated from them within the world-consuming pitch of the Shatterstar.


    "Ha! Where are the animals for this one?" one snail said.


    "Hiding in caves, pretending to have shells."


    "Idiots! Don''t they know that caves cave in."


    And for Sochl, who withdrew into her own shell, a glimpse of fear gripped her for the first time. The home she left behind was a masterpiece, of this she was certain, but calamities were calamities and she hoped her neighbors, her sudden tunnel-mates, were untouched this time: the foxes without a wound to lick, the sparrows gliding within the underground without getting shot down, Fido surviving only to re-surface and pee outside for once. And the mole-rats¡ªwell, good luck to them. They were hopeless, helpless, but they were good creatures. Friends¡ªin a way. Friends to the...Not ''end''. Please don''t let them end.


    "Oh wow, it''s landing!" Another snail said.


    "It''s breaking, it''s breaking!"


    "This is what the other creatures hid for? Hahaha!"


    And lastly, Diamond, whose shock could be heard from miles away, "Nooooooooooo-"


    Other snails chimed in with their Noooo! exclamations as well.


    Sochl knew what that meant. As the cliffs shattered, the trees felled, the natural damage of a cataclysm accumulating as everyone should rightly expect, the snails¡ªwhile dumbly durable¡ªclung to surfaces that weren''t as durable, weren''t as wondrously lucky as their bodies. Sochl wouldn''t flip a snail but the Shatterstar, its startling finesse, managed the impossible. The snails, lovingly, were turned onto their backs.


    Sochl enjoyed that vindicating moment, a brief giggle, and then¡ª


    The Shatterstar¡ªits impact was suddenly upon her, and as its savage gravity grinded into her shell, she knew she wouldn''t break, she simply couldn''t, especially on the cusp of a perfectly black world. The darkness touched her, pressing heavily against her, and she knew that she was made for exactly this moment. Up close, under the crush of the star''s oppression, she knew that she''d never seen anything more beautiful. It was the greatest possible gift. Black soul touching black soul. She knew, without a doubt, that the universe loved her most. And though the calamity would come to its unfortunate end, Sochl, reveling in the colors of the shattered comet, would gleefully collect the pieces.

 The Depths

    Bloo was a scared whale, a tired whale, a whale at the end of his miles and miles of wits and sanity. The alertness, the anxiety, gnawed at him like a vicious piranha school. He, like the other whales, dove down deep and slept with one eye open, continuously drifting toward the surface for an occasional, drowsy breath¡ªbut Bloo, his opened bloodshot eye, his overly alert brain, remained scanning and inspecting and worrying.


    And even with his size, his natural durability, Bloo couldn''t shake the feeling that he was too exposed, devastatingly immobile. As a creature large as krakens, large as the plethora of sunken ships on the ocean floor, he concluded that there was more of him to eat, way too much body to maneuver around the poisonous and spiky and predatory elements of the sea. Bloo was massive, prominent, cursed. Why, he wondered. Why this affliction? Why am I so tragically susceptible to death?


    Other whales didn''t share his paranoia by any means. They drifted along the currents with the confidence of moving fortresses. Bloo couldn''t relate to their dangerous composure. To Bloo, their confidence was lunacy, and lunacy was one of the surest ways to perish. His friends were doomed¡ªof this he was certain.


    He watched as the others opened their mouths to inhale their abundant feed, plankton and shrimp and fish and squid of all sorts. Bloo gazed in terror as the whales ingested quills and debris and fishy toxins and worst of all, jellyfish stings. He couldn''t handle watching his brethren risk themselves like this. But tremendous meals were integral to whale living, so unfortunately Bloo''s immense innards squeezed and churned from hunger. Food, he needed food, and there was only one way to get it.


    He closed his eyes, shutting them tightly, and proceeded with an open-mouthed swim toward a school of fish, plankton¡ªand for all he knew quill-fishes and sting-rays and electrifying eels. Bloo''s pulse quickened, his heart thumping and thumping. And there it was, the fishes entering him, hundreds of tails slapping against the roof of his mouth, his inner jaw, his throat. The rhythm of imminent death knocked against him with each painful heartbeat. Ba-boom! Ba-boom! Ba-boom! The end could happen at any moment. Now¡ªor now. Maybe now. Now.


    His blowhole tightened¡ªand closed.


    Naturally, airless and doom-struck, Bloo passed out. For the very first time, his alertness absolutely ceased. He then began to sink, the waters easing him toward the depths, drawing his carcass to the terrifying abyss below.


    *


    At first Bloo was horrified to awake to the sight of his own dead body, the shell of himself slowly sinking into the depths. The bloodshot eyes, the pupils wide and empty, mouth paralyzed in a gasping state. The corpse''s anxiety unmistakable belonged to him and him alone. He immediately knew that the whale corpse was his and that he himself was a ghost. Bloo thought of his reckless¡ªbut required¡ªeating, how his insides were likely singed by hundreds of jellyfish stings.


    But he knew the real truth: a heart attack. Bloo had been scared to death.


    And now as a soul, he watched his former vessel drift away. He focused on the eyes in particular, and recognized his milky reflection within those glazed, glassy pupils. He peered downward and noticed a new addition attached to the tail of his newly expelled soul, a thin white trail of smoky matter leading into his empty body''s mouth, growing longer, and longer still, stretching continuously as Bloo''s body descended.


    A tether, that''s what it was, a spiritual cord connecting Bloo to his discarded vessel.


    He briefly considered retrieving his body. I could go back. I could be "alive" again.


    And then his next thought: But why would I?


    After the shock of having died, his freedom became apparent. He couldn''t feel a thing, not even the steady pull of the ocean current. No pain, no danger, no tangibility to speak of. The worst was over and now he could get to the good stuff, the harmless stuff, a life¡ªan afterlife¡ªwithout fear.


    He swam round and round and round. It surprised him when no whirlpool appeared¡ªhis physical influence decidedly undisturbed by the nature around him. He couldn''t touch the world and the world couldn''t touch-harm-bother or otherwise unnerve him.


    He peered once more at his plunging body, his ever-extending tether.


    "So long," he said to his body, "You took good care of me! Bon voyage!"


    His watched until his body drifted out of sight, claimed by darkness. Bloo lingered within the bubbles of his last breath¡ªwhich persisted for quite a while for his body was large. When the last bubble popped, Bloo swam off, relishing in the first relaxation he''d ever, ever known.


    *


    He returned to the whales. He hadn''t been gone long, just a couple hours, and they figured he took forever to eat as usual.


    "Hey guys," he said, cheerily.


    "Hey Bloo," they said. They turned their heads to the side, something was off. His skin tone, his physical integrity¡ªkind of see-through, kind of not(?)¡ªbut they didn''t say anything. Whales were welcoming and polite and they''d never make you feel weird a trifle like texture, and for this Bloo was thankful.


    And so typical life resumed amongst the colony with Bloo''s full participation.


    During feeding time Bloo confidently opened his mouth to the creatures. He placidly watched the krill and schooling fishes swim into him, through him, somehow exiting past his tail fin. All the surrounding life¡ªsea-stars rock-clinging, anemones lounging, clams peering from their shells, and the swallowed fishes themselves¡ªwere confused, eyes wide, profoundly bothered.


    When the whales slipped into their vertical slumbers, gradually floating upwards for air, Bloo remained in place, the buoyant ocean neglecting to lift his ghostly form. He no longer swam or floated or drifted with the current. Flying was more like it¡ªso he matched his flight speed to the sleeping whales and ascended, together, as family.


    The whales sung, too, vibrating the waters with their own frequencies, and Bloo sang as well-in a far different key. Bloo''s words were clear¡ªtoo clear¡ªtraveling without the disturbance of water. Naturally, the other whales were disturbed.


    "Hiiiiii!" Bloo sang.


    "What is that?" they said, horrified.


    "A greeting~, a greeting~, my song is a greetiiing~!"


    Bloo''s appearance, eating habits, and voice were all perplexities that were rude to broach. "That greeting is...unique. That note''s a bit hard to harmonize with but we''ll get it."


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    "Thank you~!" Bloo sang, "How are youuu~?"


    "Uh, we''re fine. How about you?"


    "Never better~!"


    Choir time had ended, off key, off harmony, off anything recognizable and comfortable to the colony.


    But despite the initial unease of Bloo''s family, he became a normal part of their lives again¡ªand more pleasant, too, as it turned out. He became less annoying than the mortal Bloo, the obnoxiously fear-stricken and negative Bloo. There was less screaming, less crying and yelling and telling them that their way of life was a recipe for certain, imminent demise. The whales quickly acclimated to the new Bloo, and so their group routines continued undisturbed.


    Months, years, decades¡ªthe same habits, pleasantries, and rhythm of life. Dozens of whales plus one ghost. It wasn''t a secret¡ªthe cloudy tail tether was there for all to see¡ªbut acceptance was their way. And so for the next 70, 80, 90 years, the colony thrived. They remained without predators or disease, no sudden famine or injuries, no interpersonal beef, no type of oceanic chaos that the smaller creatures were subjected to. Whales, generally, were without suffering. There was but one affliction: time.


    Everyone had simply begun to age, their skins becoming brownish gray, their speed tapering off into a measured, non-athletic steadiness as Bloo sped around and around them, never aging, never changing. Everything proceeded exactly the way Bloo imagined a good life should be.


    And then one day, it happened. The first departure¡ªthough certainly not the last.


    "Goodbye," one friend said.


    "Where are you going?"


    "Come on, Bloo. The depths, obviously."


    Bloo jerked to attention. "But my friend, there''s nothing for you there. Stay, please."


    The whale let out a wise, compassionate sigh. Its whole demeanor transformed from friend-like to a grandparent. "Bloo, Bloo, Bloo," he said, "That''s not how this works."


    Bloo knew then that he meant death, his friend''s soul finally shedding that hindrance of a body. "Just become like me. See? We''re meant to be free spirits."


    "Free? I suppose that''s true. I suppose that also means that tether isn''t tugging you too hard yet, huh?"


    The tether. Bloo tried not to worry about it. He gave a nonchalant wave of his massive fin. "It''s nothing at all. This is just how I''m made."


    A head-nod from side to side, gentle laughter, and a final smile. "Oh Bloo, you''re a good whale, the best of friends. In that case may forever be good to you. I mean it, truly. So long!" His eyelids shut and he sank into the depths, drifting downwards into the dark with grace and dignity, taking a parallel route along Bloo''s smoky tether.


    *


    As the next few years progressed, Bloo''s other friends departed. Old, tired, fulfilled¡ªeverybody sank. And Bloo stayed behind. This was one part of the journey Bloo couldn''t mimic. The thought of sinking down toward his physical body, long since shed, filled him with a forgotten feeling, his lifetime of dread.


    Signs of aging bothered him the most. When the whales swam off balance. When they slowed. When they had minor complaints about the cold temperature, the intensifying currents, the nautical changes that they never complained about in their younger, more resilient days. Every grievance panicked him. A cough. A shudder. Anything minor ratcheted up Bloo''s anxiety¡ªuntil that anxiety became fulfilled, a beloved friend passing on. Time swam onwards, casually depositing whale corpses into the shadowy, enigmatic depths.


    Bloo watched his brethren go, one by one by one, quickly processing his grief and sorrow, figuring that they''d come around and decide to return as ghosts, that they''d soon lay claim to their foggy forever bodies.


    But for now, Bloo was the last of his generation to remain, and he continued his days in the colony waters, living amongst his brethren''s offspring. The days came and went, the months, the years. And not one ghost returned.


    Only him. Bloo and his mysterious tether. A discomfort hummed through him as it had in the old days, the physical ones. The pain came straight from the depths, corkscrewing his soul. The pain told him to stop. The pain told him it was time to go. Bloo often envisioned what the depths wanted: for him to finally lay amongst anchors, shipwrecks, bottom-feeders, friends. Friends... Whenever he thought of the departed he couldn''t stop. Their friendly faces, their swimming styles, their beautiful songs¡ªeverything gone became everything present. In the midst of his memories and loss, Bloo was helpless.


    But while the generation he knew had passed on, their kids and kids'' kids remained. It was a new family now, one that''d never known life without the presence of Bloo''s ghost. They didn''t know why Bloo was undead but they were never compelled to question it. They knew him. They loved him. And they even loved his odd singing, his clear above-water voice was stunning and revered. Bloo, in part, was the colony''s spine, its elder.


    And then, one day, they decided to leave.


    "Bloo, we''re going."


    "Wait, why?"


    "The waters are changing, you know."


    "They''re the same to me."


    "Well, yeah."


    "Okay, fair."


    "Uncle Bloo, there are ice chips."


    Bloo carefully studied the surroundings. The sunlight reflected off the ice shards in the waters. The ice shined like blue crystals. Bloo had never seen their home more beautiful.


    "But this is home."


    "There''s lots of places to make a home. The ocean is huge, Uncle¡ª"


    "¡ªAnd dangerous!"


    "Come with us. Swimming, singing. We can do that anywhere."


    And Bloo wanted to go, to follow his freezing kin to warmer waters. He figured he was game for another cycle of life. His being was impervious, endlessly adaptable. He swam a couple nervous circles, preparing his answer. It was easy¡ªJust go, what is there to think about? And then he caught sight of the tether, the depths, the incessant and powerful calling he suffered.


    "So long," Bloo said to his younger kin, "Find home. Make it beautiful, yeah?"


    "We love you Uncle."


    "I love you all too."


    And so the colony gathered for goodbyes. There were tears and embraces (swimming through him, around him, playing in his smoke). The final departure was marked by a tributary song with Bloo belting out his clearest, most impassioned note. And then the colony left, journeying towards warmer, more tropical waters.


    Finally, after a lifetime as an undead, Bloo was ready to see discover the secrets down below. He took a deep breath¡ªa leftover cope from his anatomical body¡ªand at last plunged into the depths.


    *


    Bloo came to quickly discover that the darkness was full of doubt, uncertainty, even despair. He traveled alone, following his intuition, locking in on a trail of fear that plagued sea creatures that''d wandered off course. In those midnight waters, Bloo flowed through to save anyone lost and lonely, to guide them, whoever they happened to be. During his first encounter with a lost fish, he led them back into the light. He swallowed them, smothering their devastation with his other-worldly body. They swam inside of Bloo as he ascended from the depths. Blinded by the murk, fishes now had a guide, a translucent chaperone, and on their ascent Bloo spoke words of affirmation and reassurance:


    Don''t worry, keep going.


    I''m here for you.


    Everybody sinks. But now isn''t your time.


    Up, up, up. Up is the way.


    Bloo was familiar with fear and knew even better how to speak away its power. His massive non-body at last had a material effect. He touched others without touching them. When his hitchhikers emerged from the depths, the fish said its thank-you''s and swam away.


    And in this way, he served for another decade.


    Occasionally, the depths spoke to him: Are you ready yet?


    But he stubbornly held on, continuing to save all manner of animals: scaled ones, shelled ones, coral-clinging critters.


    Then one day he saved a whale child. When it escaped the depths it sang out as loudly as it could, calling out to its clan. Bloo watched the sound waves vibrate through the waters, casting tiny bubbles in its wake, but he left before the reunion. Bloo didn''t want to know if the whale belonged to his colony, and he knew his heart would''ve dragged him back to the upper seas. Those days were done. He''d found a new place to be, the d¡ª. He stopped himself. Ah, yes...He knew then that it was time.


    Bloo flexed his tail, tugging at the white tether, and his descent began.


    As he sunk he stared up at the surface. "Goodbye," he said¡ªto the creatures he''d helped, to migrating nieces and nephews, to the friendly and comforting currents of his home¡ªand, for the first time in years, a stream of bubbles, the waters vibrating from his words, his speech blessedly distorted. His old voice had returned, just in an aged, cracked frequency.


    He suddenly found himself back in his own body. It''d been so long. He couldn''t move it, and was honestly shocked that it''d survived all this time, a dead-ship of bones, preserved and hollow. Down he continued, slowly, slowly, the darkness passing before the remains of his eyes. And then suddenly¡ªthud! He''d contacted the bottom, knocking a final breath out of his gargantuan body.


    In the years that followed, the waters were known by the local sea creatures for its reassuring energy. A radiating, caretaking spirit persisted in the area, one which they jokingly named the fishing net. The force was described as something that swallowed and hugged you at the same time. It carried you when you were lost. It swam you home. The currents had an usher, a guide. The origins were unknown and creatures casually accepted it as one of the ocean''s many blessings.


    Nobody thought twice about the previous settlement of whales that''d migrated to the tropics. The local history of the whales was exactly that¡ªjust history. But when creatures lost their way¡ªfishes schooling in the wrong direction, sea-stars settling in the wrong batch of coral, a whale child crying out for their missing tribe¡ªin came a current, giant and sweeping, the frequency of Bloo''s love forever fish-boning throughout the depths.

 The Handicraft of Plague

    Within the darkness of the toy shop''s attic, its wooden walls, its forgotten community of long-abandoned plushies, lived Jiana, a plague nurse, long-beaked bird mask, white smock, and a glow-in-the-dark lantern velcro''d to her wrist. The Attic is where the out-of-season toys were kept: the Valentines'' bears, the Easter Bunnies, the leprechauns, jack-O-lanterns, turkeys, and Santas¡ªboth in the original and in his darker-skinned tones. Jiana found herself in The Attic after Halloween. The plague nurse thing was very specific, a novelty of a novelty, and the skeleton-pumpkin-ghosty masses didn''t find much use for her cute-but-not-quite-spooky appearance. So one night she slunk off the shelf and traveled to the far back corner of the store and stepped beyond the cracked-open door labeled: INVENTORY. She closed the door behind her, sealing herself into the pitch, and ascended the stairs. After the final step, she''d arrived to her new life¡ªofficially.


    "Hey fam!" she''d yelled into the dark, announcing herself.


    No response.


    "Hello? Anyone home?" She held up her lantern, its glow eating the shadows.


    And from a nearby toybox, decorated in tinsel and candy canes, emerged several gingerbread plushies with torn limbs, a few Christmas elves without their trademark pointed ears, and a Rudolph¡ªfully intact except for its missing red nose. They approached Jiana slowly, cautiously, a run-down Christmas parade dragging themselves through dust.


    "Is that...a lantern?" the No-Nose Rudolph asked.


    "Yes! Isn''t it cute?"


    "Very cute!" No-Nose perked up immediately. "And The Attic let you keep it."


    "Of course, it did. It''s mine. Does The Attic take things?"


    "All the time. It took my nose. Took their limbs, poor guys." The gingerbreads stood alongside No-Nose, waving their frayed, detached nubs. The elves just shook their heads, grayed cotton fuzzing around their lost ears like makeshift earmuffs. Even the original, brown, and black Santas were different shades of bum with their torn coats and frayed beards.


    "Oh no, are you guys okay?"


    "We''re fine, we''re fine! This is normal life," No-Nose cheerily declared.


    "Even if it is, you still need need fixing."


    "That''s how it goes," No-Nose shrugged. "The more you''re in the dark, the more of yourself you lose."


    "We''ve got to leave then!"


    "Where else is there? Besides, there''s room for us all here. Ourselves and the other Holidays."


    "You mean, like Halloween?"


    "Halloween, Thanksgiving, Lunar New Year¡ªeven Groundhog Day! We stick together! Come." No-Nose nudged her with his face, his phantom glow-nose; and Jiana patted it gently. "You''ve brought light, after all. And that''s the most useful thing there is."


    The gingerbread folk cautiously approached. One of them hopped on their left leg¡ªholding their detached right leg in their arms. While the other broken breads held an assortment of thread and fabric patches. The elves held out needles. The Santas removed their tattered coats. Everyone''s cottony faces said it all: "You fix?"


    "I fix!" Jiana confidently declared.


    Jiana set the lantern atop Rudolph''s nose and proceeded with the sewing. Once made whole, the plushies led her to the toybox. Everyone climbed inside, showed her around. There were books, fabrics, needles, Christmassy accents like candy canes and ornaments. There were lights, too, dead but pretty nonetheless. Jiana had a bed¡ªbasically a cushion inside of a sleigh. Within the span of half-a-day, she experienced more warmth in a remote Attic toybox than downstairs in the shop.


    During her brief time in the public shop, she hadn''t seen breakage, just perfectly healthy toys comfy in their boxes or positioned in flattering displays. Damage was a foreign concept. And light¡ªthere was light everywhere. The sun, the moon, the electronic display signs, the flashing toys filled with battery life, and when the shop closed and shut down each night, a galaxy of glow-stars shone in silvers and pastel greens on the far wall of the shop. But there was no interaction or movement. The plushies stayed in place, posing for sale. Everyone was distanced and silenced. A store full of smiles but not a hint of heart.


    The Attic had its own issues, decay and murkiness and dust¡ªso much dust¡ªbut here she belonged. After everyone left the toybox¡ªher toybox now¡ªshe curled up in the sleigh, set the lantern beside her, and eased into the comfort of her first and only home.


    *


    The Plague of Disrepair is what they called the phenomenon, the sudden tearing, the rapid wear of the threads, the unexplainable loss of limbs and accessories, the way they watched themselves fall apart¡ªstuffing, fabric, buttons. Gingerbreads strolled about only for a leg to snap off, the stitched hearts in teddy bear hands unraveled to the ground, lipstick''d dollies underwent Barbie-patterned baldness. In The Attic, exposed stuffing and random maiming were a way of life. And in all that darkness, what you lost was difficult to locate.


    Jiana had a flurry of questions. Where were the bulbs, the lanterns, the light-switches? What about The Attic sapped their seam-strength so?


    "It was all stolen. A vicious theft to be quite honest." No-Nose said.


    "By what?" Jiana asked.


    But the reindeer shook his head. None of the other plushies spoke on this either as Jiana grilled them during sewing sessions. Everyone was too afraid to name the menace. She constantly pressed No-Nose the most as she reinforced his antlers. But he remained silent. He stared off into his trauma, as if watching himself lose his nose again.


    But she continually pressed. Who? What? Who? What? As their caretaker she demanded to know. She looked out for them but for herself as well. She wanted to avoid the dangers, the triggers, the parts of the darkness that hurt the most.


    "The shadow giants," No-Nose said.


    "Whaaa?"


    "Yes, exactly. Giants. In the shadows."


    "Bigger than the humans?"


    "Yeah, that''s what makes them giant."


    No-Nose went on to explain the architects of Disrepair, that The Attic was encased in a crown of giants, winged, fearsome. Jiana looked out into the distance during the explanation and spotted them immediately. These evil figures rose above the closed windows, impossibly tall. From the floor to the windowsill, their bodies seemed to forever grow.


    "Do they move?" Jiana asked.


    "Not that we''ve seen. But the Plague is theirs. We can feel our threads pulled towards them." In the lantern light, Jiana watched the cotton contracting around her friend''s phantom nose.


    She later spent that night flinching in the sleigh. She laid anxiously, waiting to feel the pulling.


    From moment to moment, the giants spared her. Their eyes devoured her in the blackness¡ªred ones, Jiana decided. Their mouths were obscured as well but¡ªJiana being Jiana¡ªsaw herself being eaten. There were no hands visible, no arms of any sort, but that was the scary part. She imagined them unraveling her through word and will alone.


    In the days and weeks that followed, Jiana suffered daily deaths, menaced by the shadows and their presumed destructive habits. As Jiana traversed one section of attic to the next, her thoughts fixated on the danger, the sizable and sinister thread-snatchers. She hugged her lantern out of comfort and paranoia. Protect it at all costs. Without it, how could she nurse? She focused on her mission: to nurse, to care-take, the exact things a plague nurse like her was made for.


    Her route was certain, her role clear. She triple-stitched broken Valentines hearts, re-seamed the ears of each Mr. Easter Bunny, refilled the oblong and misshapen Jack-O-lanterns, reattached buckles onto pilgrim shoes. As she nursed the day-to-day Disrepair, shades of despair nipped at her heels, stubbornly hovering beyond the threshold of the lantern''s glow. As the holder of the lantern, Jiana fretted over frayed threads and yarn snags ("OMG fam what happened?") and mended them, brightening their day, providing them their fifteen minutes of a tiny, mobile sun.


    As seasons passed and new toys from finished holidays flooded in, Jiana''s mind throbbed with uncertainties. They helped others out of their packaging, guided them to their respective Holiday neighborhoods.


    What if she was gone? What if the Disrepair savaged her own snitching? She imagined waking without hands. She imagined her Velcro too weakened to hold the lantern. Jiana couldn''t restore a thread without thoughts of her own death. She feared her active consciousness being trapped within dead threads. Every soul in The Attic buzzed with that fear. And the colossal shadows buzzed around them, their palpable greed caressing their seams.


    "All good fam," Jiana would say, tearing off excess thread. And then she excused herself, heading off into the darkness, a litany of Thank You''s chasing after her.


    At home she relaxed. Jiana was a Halloween plush but lived in a Christmas toybox. As a plague nurse, a healing type plush, the gifts of the toybox suited her: the sewing guides, the fashion catalogs¡ªand especially the leather-bound Bible. Being The Attic''s only light-source, she could read, and the Bible was full of stories to fill her. The miracles. The unwavering radiance. And the presence of God no matter the despair.


    How could she leave the Christmas neighborhood? How could she leave the holiness?


    Her home''s closeness to God restored her every night. The Plague stole limbs and reduced livelihoods, and God countered the damage. He fought the battles that she couldn''t. Jiana knew this as fact. The proof was her survival.


    Jiana curled up in a blanket and slept, a welcome rest for The Attic''s little light-bearer, her soul re-energizing for the next long day ahead.


    *


    Within her toybox¡ªunder God-watch and all¡ªJiana guarded a secret. It couldn''t be helped with the way Plague worked her mind with the way despair, despite the holiness she''d found, lingered about. Her paranoia always had a way of catching her off-guard, like a draft whispering through a loose thread, or an unexpected flicker of a shadow. Suddenly black thoughts appeared, and she delved into her seam-making library for distraction. Endlessly she read. Endlessly she sewed. Jiana made quilts. She made scarves, mittens. She practiced fine details and patterns. She learned the anatomy of plushies, studying every creature and decoration. She fulfilled her destiny one stitch at a time, assisting plushies in need, making them whole again. And then she went one step further: she made her friends from scratch.


    Jiana envisioned her friends as their mint condition selves, bathed in storefront neon. Practice¡ªthat''s how she rationalized it. To work on her friends'' bodies, she had to know them better. The stitching, the clothing, the pattern and button placement. She studied everything. She knew them perfectly. She made them perfectly. She''d given them everything but eyes, leaving heavily-stitched X''s instead. She couldn''t give them life like that¡ªno, eyes would be too much. She learned their bodies only, no soul attached.


    Day after day, she stitched Attic Fam up.


    Night after night, she re-created them as dolls, golems, mannequins.


    And The Attic thrived. With Jiana''s skillful sewing she single-handedly curtailed the Plague. Times were glum but comfortable. Tenuously bound but fixable. All with the bonus of Jiana as a wandering sun. Together, The Attic fostered hope. For the first time in months, perhaps years, their stitched smiles were real in soul.


    But the cost(?)¡ªshouldering everything on her own.


    Jiana gave the village her all. Her studies, skills, and time. She attended to them, focused only on them. And any thought to herself was quickly dismissed into oblivion. A loose thread on her sleeve. A rusted sewing needle. And a tear on her bird mask. The despair gathered in her with each injury, proof of Disrepair¡ªthough these were dismissed as snags against furniture or self-injury through her own clumsy needling. And besides, there was plenty of hope amongst the villagers to tamp down the simultaneously building dread. Jiana collected hope¡ªand buried despair.


    The despair remained, though, tenaciously accumulating, building and bubbling, pressurizing Jiana.


    One night, she created herself. A plague nurse in miniature. Mini masks, mini smocks, mini right-armed Velcro. Her clothing was stitched to perfection. The doll was her and she was the doll. And this scared her. A chill frosted her shaken soul, and this doll too she''d given X''d eyes. She didn''t want to admit that God could one day give the doll life. But she prayed for its life as well¡ªbecause if the Disrepair harmed her, then The Attic had a replacement.


    And so she made herself again.


    And again.


    And again.


    She did this on the daily, Jiana dolls galore.


    You''re not alive. You''re not alive. You''re not alive. She consoled herself with this thought. Each night she settled into her cushioned sleigh, easing into a long fought for rest, but she couldn''t suppress the sudden explosion within her mind of two prayerful words: Please live.


    *


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    She awoke in perfect darkness, no glow of the lantern in sight. Sheer panic filled her. She tried with all her might to hold the image of the light, but it soon disappeared. The blackness fell upon her like an expansive, smothering curtain. She wondered how the lantern came to be gone. Her jittery self struggled against the thought of the giants reaching into her home and taking it. The casual dominance, the unrestrained power. Nowhere in The Attic was safe and that tortured Jiana. Her soul craved breath yet the pitch of The Attic simply said: No.


    The runs had to happen, though. Attic Fam needed her.


    She hit the path, unlit but familiar. The Valentine hearts were first. One that she''d just serviced waited outside their chocolate box, a torn seam straight through its middle. Already the heart sensed something amiss: it''d heard Jiana''s shuffling feet but without its accompanying light.


    "Where is the glow?"


    "It''s lost, fam."


    "We''ve gotta find it."


    "I checked my whole toybox!"


    "Want help?"


    "No-no-no, it''s fine! Well, not fine but we''ll manage." She pictured the X''d eyes hexing her visitors. She couldn''t risk spooking her friends, becoming forever shunned. "Anyway, come here. Let''s see that tear."


    "Broken as usual," the heart laughed. But the laugh rang hollow in the pitch. The lantern supported all The Attic''s joy. Without it, everyone''s uncertainties crammed into the space between them.


    Jiana opened her sewing kit and set to work. Her fingers traced the heart''s history of familiar wounds and more familiar repairs. The anatomy of hurt was second-nature to Jiana, and so she completed the blind restoration with relative ease. She closed the crooked seam¡ªimperfectly, though¡ªthe dim obstructing her typically flawless work.


    As Jiana pressed onward with the day, her encounters with the Attic folk were similar¡ªshock at the lost lantern, the thick nervousness between them, and questionable sewing. Something just felt off about her technique. She''d nursed as best she could but the uneasiness remained.


    No-Nose visited her that night¡ªthe missing lantern was the news of The Attic, after all¡ªand Jiana met him outside the door.


    "Jiana, how are you?"


    "I''m okay, I guess."


    "Can you work without light?"


    "I can work, not as well, but we''ll be good fam."


    "Guess things are how they used to be. Nothing we haven''t done before!"


    "Mhm, that''s right." But Jiana wanted to do it never. She was determined to keep The Attic whole no matter what.


    "Are you sure you''re okay? You''ve had a rough go, it''s okay to admit it."


    "I''m good! I''ll let you know if I''m not. I promise!"


    "Okay then," And No-Nose, refusing to be pushy, took his leave.


    Jiana nervously rushed inside, slammed the toybox shut, then stumbled¡ª


    Honk!


    She reached out and grabbed at the object she crashed into¡ªthe No-Nose clone she was working on. It had X''d eyes of course but a beautiful red clown nose.


    Days passed. Weeks passed. And the daily nursing continued. The unease. The blindness. All The Attic and Jiana could do was move forward, picking up their dropped pieces, reattaching them in unpredictable ways.


    Everyone was patched, more or less, either moderately or significantly deformed. The plushies maintained their stuffing but abandoned their form. Folks gradually transitioned into a sad state. Within the darkness, the Disrepair stuck. Felled buttons stayed felled, and exposed stuffing collected the dust like long-abandoned books. Emotions filled Jiana''s little body, a water-balloon overflowing. First, the despair. Secondly, the grief. Without her light, dread consumed her. Yet she worked everyday. The folks needed her even if she knew the parts were getting sewn back on crookedly, haphazardly even. During the night, she couldn''t read her Bible¡ªthe darkness being the darkness and all¡ªbut she''d hug it to her chest and pray.


    It''d also become routine for everyone to pursue the lantern. The search was constant but yielded nothing. The Easter Bunnies checked the eggs, the baskets. The skeletons and ghosts reached into Trick-Or-Treat pails, and dug into the mouths of their pumpkin friends. Pilgrims leaped into straw bundle, wooden chests, centerpiece cornucopia. The gingerfolk and elves searched gift boxes and wrapping paper and piles of Styrofoam snow. But no lantern¡ªnot for months.


    And in those months, the despair swelled. Despair in blackness. Despair in each heart and mind. Despair in the Plague gradually undoing their threads. Despair in the ?''s Jiana secretly hoarded. The dolls were just dolls. Simple inanimate objects, but Jiana''s mind projected those eyes with judgment. How could you? What would they think? But lately¡ªBe our friend. We''re lonely. Come. Touch us¡ªwe''re memory foam! Memory foooooam!


    One night she stepped toward the clone corner, removed the blankets covering them, reached for their faces. It was like sticking her hand into a jar of midnight. She swirled her hand about, feeling around, touching nothing¡ªno cloth, no memory foam. Only the devastation of black air. The plague dolls were gone. Where did they go? When?


    Her feelings were a coin-flip of dread and joy. She didn''t know what the proper feeling was: fear over the dolls'' discovery or joy over God giving them life?


    Jiana prayed¡ªfor the safety of the dolls, protection from the giants, and composure.


    Once calmed, she stepped outside her toybox and stared into the shady expanse. "Search party!" she called out, "Search party!" Jiana wasn''t ready¡ªbut she was ready¡ªto face the music. Darkness(?), clone-friends(?), clone-enemies(?), shadow giants(?)¡ªoh Lord, the shadow giants. But God urged her on, so that was that.


    *


    A simple search party for the lantern¡ªthat''s all this was¡ªbut Jiana treated it as a pilgrimage. There was much to confront in her search for light: the Disrepair, the blindness, the clones of her friends, the clones of herself¡ªher children(?). The Attic-folk, Jiana included, were jailed in a bubble of fear, their futures uncertain and dreadful. They''d stayed in their neighborhoods, housed within the familiar decay. Anything was better than getting snatched by their oppressors. But they were done with that now. Jiana had shown them their potential with one small lantern. And they weren''t going back. Never. No-Nose led the way. He''d become Rudolph again¡ªeven if his threads unraveled as a result, his essence helplessly floating.


    Onwards into the pitch, the sightlessness, but the route was known and well-traveled. They first visited the hearts, a settlement of chocolate boxes. Jiana couldn''t see well but still managed to make out the disfigured hearts. A cloudy feeling surfaced among the search party as the misshapen forms hobbled in their direction. The heaviness of their fright slowed them. No-Nose kept the same pace¡ªand Jiana too, because scared as she was she didn''t want him to be alone.


    "Heart Fam!" she said, "Come with!"


    "Where?"


    "Back to the lantern!" No-Nose said.


    "Where''s that?"


    "Dunno," Jiana said. "But it glows. So that''s a start."


    And the feeling of Heart Fam''s smiles penetrated the dark. The hearts, wearing their damage, joined the party. She heard their audible skip-hop, skip-hops, bouncing heartbeats eager to find their precious lantern.


    Within her peripheral she watched the half-eaten hearts, feeling hopeful, but for a moment she could''ve sworn she saw a perfect heart, store-ready and undamaged, one that she''d made herself, a clone. But she shook the thought, dismissing it as the darkness and its tricks.


    Next were the Easter Bunnies, the silhouettes of their offset ears upsetting Jiana, but she choked down the guilt and invited them along. After a thorough, failed search of the straw baskets and oversized eggshells, the now-invigorated Ear Fam joined them.


    St. Patrick''s came along, their flame of orange hair barely visible. They searched the pillowed clover, rainbow cutouts, black pots of gold¡ªbut no lantern, only plastic doubloons the leprechauns had come to treasure.


    Halloween was searched, every candy bucket, every ghost-cut bedsheet¡ªno luck, though.


    Cornucopias of the Thanksgiving town, harvest-colored blankets, piles of stitched leaves, tee-pees. Nothing. So the party moved on.


    And between the Holiday visits Jiana caught glimpses of familiar silhouettes, Halloween pumpkins, Thanksgiving Turkeys¡ªdisturbingly whole. But upon a closer look the figures were gone. She tried to tell herself it was her imagination. She focused on the united search party. The hope remained strong. Togetherness was just fun. And the Disrepair and darkness couldn''t take that away.


    Suddenly, a glowing orb levitating. The lantern¡ªit had to be it¡ªradiating warmth to the crew.


    "Gasp," Jiana said.


    "Gasp is right," No-Nose said.


    Everyone stared at the lantern, basking in relief, their shared search uniting them. One thing then became clear to the whole of Attic Fam: when you look for light, you find each other. And they did, the brightness soothing each and every one of them.


    But for Jiana, the camaraderie was also paired with the sinking feeling of neglect, an extrasensory discomfort that detected extra footsteps, unfamiliar shuffling. She didn''t fear the lost dolls, but she missed them. God gave them life and in this moment she''d wished for the dolls to experience the best of it. She closed her eyes and prayed to find them.


    And, as if summoned, audible footfalls dominated the air. Everyone looked around, clung to each other, and cowered in fright. They expected the shadow giants and for their the Plague of Disrepair to fully un-do them. The steps became closer, louder, and clouds of Attic dust began to rise from the apparent stampede that''d come for them.


    Abruptly, the footfalls ceased. But then resumed¡ªthis time heading away from the search party, slowly, calmly, the thuds decreasing in volume, becoming distant. And with the gradually dissipating sound, the lantern began to float away. Everyone knew that the lantern was being carried but their terror stayed them.


    "Maybe we should stop," a gingerbread said.


    "The lantern is there, though," No-Nose insisted.


    "But the giants!" Cried the Easter Bunny.


    No-Nose stared off at the fleeing lantern, trembling. He wanted to go, he wanted his body to match his words, but he remained in place with everyone else.


    "It''s okay," Jiana lied¡ªbecause it wasn''t okay, this was just her bedside manner talking. Anxiety twisted around her every seam but she hid it, and instead decided to collect everyone''s courage. The last thing she wanted to do was lead her patients into thread-worn doom. But supporting No-Nose was the good-person move. He was full of courage¡ªhe just needed a half-a-spark more, he needed to believe that sustained illumination was a real possibility, a true and just outcome. So Jiana declared, "It''s okay, let''s get the lantern!"


    "Okay how?" the gingerbread protested in its impassioned one-legged hobble, "How can this work out? We''re good without light!" And the other plushies murmured in consideration, deciding amongst themselves.


    "But we can''t quit," Jiana said, "It''s scary but if we don''t face it the Disrepair comes anyway. And that''s why this is okay. This has to work. We have to make it work. We will make it work. Come, let''s do this my guy." She grabbed the gingerbread''s round hand and they took the first step forward.


    No-Nose stepped forth too.


    And so too did the others, together and afraid. But together nonetheless.


    They began to catch up to the lantern which bobbed about in the grasp of the unknown figure. Their souls rumbled with more violence the closer they got. But they quickened their pace, letting their courage drive them. Their aversion to ruin wouldn''t stop them any longer. Regrets are for later, Jiana decided, Faith is the moment. "Hurry!" she said¡ªwith the last of her bravado. "If we die, we die!"


    "Come back!" Everyone else called after the lantern. They called and called but the lantern sped off faster. Under the gleaming orb, the village noticed running legs in a white smock¡ªsimilar to Jiana''s. The lantern was carried off by a mysterious plush, an enigmatic clone of their friend. Then began the game of catch as one copy tossed it to the next, and the next copy tossed it to another. During the mad dash, the lantern was passed from one set of hands to the next. And the final thing the village noticed: visible X''s flickering with each section of their progression.


    "It''s you!" The gingerbreads yelled to Jiana.


    "Yes, kind of..."


    "And you again!"


    "I can explain..."


    "What are those creepy eyes?"


    "Ah, they''re not eyes."


    Some of the crew let out gasps but they kept their pace.


    Meanwhile the lantern continued to fly. The dolls tossed it amongst themselves. Hot potato. Catch. Whatever their game was they enjoyed playing it. The village had a mix of reactions. Fright, confusion, distress over losing the light. Jiana had these feelings too¡ªbut with the strange additions of joy and pride. She''d made them, after all, and the dolls were living it up. She begun to think that maybe she''d done some good¡ª


    "The wall!" the search party screamed.


    The dolls quickly arrived to the wall, to the shadow giants¡ªbefore disappearing behind their massive, devilish feet. The originals'' pace tapered off, some dragging their feet, some completely stopped in their tracks. They thought they''d lost the lantern forever. But Jiana kept going, never stopping yet fully despairing.


    "We have to go get it!" Jiana cried.


    "Are you sure?" said Noseless Rudolph.


    "Yes fam¡ªeven if death is upon us."


    "Sigh, death is upon us indeed."


    Jiana rushed into the threatening murk, No-Nose following closely behind. With each step she expected collapse. Visions of an arm falling off, an eye popping out, devastated her brain space. But a few moments passed and she remained intact. No damage, no sudden and irreparable devastation. Was she okay?¡ªno. But she was alive (thank God!). And the lantern continued to wave, urging her onwards.


    "Other Jianas!" she called, "Where are you?"


    "Jiana?" the doll turned toward her, a mirrored image of herself, except the non-eyes. "We''re Jiana?"


    "Yea. You and me. Well, mostly me. It''s complicated."


    A pause. "Okay." And then the copies shuffled away with the lantern.


    "Wait!"


    "Okay."


    "Can you see properly?"


    The X''d eyes looked through Jiana.


    "I guess not..." she said, guiltily.


    "We can. Kind of. There''s slivers in the seams...ish. The light helps."


    "Then watch for the giants! They''re dangerous!"


    "What danger? We''re fine. Want to play catch with us?"


    "Please listen. The giants will hurt you."


    "What''s a giant? What is hurt? We''re just playing with light."


    And a sudden illumination poured into the room, bathing the plushies, a long-lost treasure paid back thirty-fold. Jiana gazed at the shadow giant¡ªwhich now shined, glittering along its edges, revealing its white smock, its beaming halo, its golden belt, its several many-feathered wings. An angel. Straight from the Heaven she''d read so much about. Her face of terror transformed into one of salvation.


    In that moment she wondered about the demons they feared, the giants turned angels¡ªhow did they come to be canceled? What happened to the Plague? She figured that maybe life was just like that. Decay happens. Disrepair happens. But apparently miracles happen too¡ªshe watched the dolls running about the feet of the other angels, dragging power cords from beneath their wings and plugging them into the wall outlets. More angels, more godliness for Jiana to enjoy.


    And in the newfound illumination, she surveyed the many Biblical figures within the cover of the angel, an entire neighborhood similar to what the other Holidays possessed. She gazed in amazement at the nativity scenes, the prayerful angels, the three Wise Men. There were many iterations of Jesus¡ªas a baby in a wicker basket, as an adult in his beautiful white robes, as a sacrificial bearer of the cross. There were entire groupings of Virgin Mary busts and candles, all of which were beautifully painted. And the Disrepair had simply passed over these figures¡ªtheir clothing, their detailing were all intact. More than mint, the figures were divine, and Jiana felt that protection spread over her and out towards the rest of The Attic.


    And as she experienced the divinity, her life coin-flipped as it tended to do¡ª


    Within the light, the plushies began noticing the damage the Disrepair had inflicted.


    Jiana faced her handywork, a community of grotesque repairs. Off-centered ears, eyes in the middle of foreheads, left arms stitched to the right shoulder, legs stitched on backwards. Her soul quaked in horror. She cared for them but couldn''t find anything loving in how she''d stitched them. But nobody reacted to the damage they saw in each other. In The Attic, this had always been life and they were used to this, and they''d always expressed gratitude towards Jiana doing her sightless best. Jiana first detected the shock in them when she followed their gazes to the dolls¡ªnot the Jiana''s, but the copies of themselves, box-ready, unimaginably perfect.


    "Who are they, Jiana?" No-Nose asked, breathless, confused.


    She resisted the reflex to call them practice. Excuses weren''t the way. "They''re you," she said.


    No-Nose stepped off toward the X dolls. He paced slowly among them, perusing the details, taking in what Jiana saw in them. And in no time he came face to face with himself. A reindeer with prominent antlers, the same brown polyester felt, the red collar with its bell¡ªand the nose, a red massive ball. He stared himself in the X''d eyes, pressed his non-nose to his copy''s nose-nose¡ªHonk!


    "Ha, this is amazing!" He honked his copy again, and again. And the copy honked back. Everyone started to laugh, and they set out into the crowd of dolls to find each other. The broken Valentine hearts bounced with the whole ones like basketballs. The Easter Bunnies compared ear-placement. The old pilgrims convened with the new pilgrims and shared their cornucopia goods, a plushie Thanksgiving in the works.


    "Nobody''s mad?" Jiana said.


    "Who can be mad right now? It''s so bright!" No-Nose said.


    "True, true. We can find you a nose!"


    "No way, I''d rather play with my deer cousin."


    "Sure, I guess you guys are related."


    "Certainly! Now go play with your cousins¡ªthey''re waiting!"


    Cousins? Perhaps...


    She gazed at her nurse army, the two dozen versions of herself. There were no tears, no real damage, nothing superficial to confront. Jiana stared into their faces, their apparent emptiness, their deadness¡ªand found the opposite in them. Life poured from their X''d seams. The vibrancy was undeniable. They were truly alive and she''d treat them as such. Since entering The Attic, she''d focused only on repairs, on correcting imperfections, on seeing her patients as flawed. But the dolls weren''t flawed¡ªthey just required a unique touch. Now, in their brightened world, Jiana''s spirit began to unlock the nature of that touch. Fix, fix, fix¡ªthat was her old way of nursing, done and dusted. But healing became the new way, the now and forever way. And in this moment she resolved to start by making things right.


    "Line up, fam!"


    And the Jiana''s did as they were told, swiftly falling into order.


    "Come," Jiana said, waving the first one up.


    The doll stepped forward. They stared into each other, eyes to X''s, X''s to eyes.


    "Here fam, they''re yours."


    Jiana reached into her smock and produced a pocketful of eyes.

 Grand Gesture

    We''ve been perched on the telephone wires all day, bearing gifts. There are many of us, more than you can count. Each beak holds a special something. One of us holds a Simply Lemonade bottle-cap because that''s Girlfriend''s favorite drink. A couple of others hold discarded Wendy''s wrappers from Asiago Chicken Sandwiches, because Girlfriend loves them; she swears they''re cooked with crack. Many others hold fortunes from those Chinese cookies, or assorted clips, pins, and other shiny things. I, myself, hold a live salamander. It''s squirming and I feel sorry for it. The other pigeons think I''m strange and stubborn, that the salamander suffers for no good reason, but I am the leader and that means respect. The others don''t fight me on the things I consider important. This reptile will be the vessel for my feelings, I told them this morning. Trust me, I know these things. More pigeons land on wires all around me, and they do trust me; that''s something I appreciate. So we''ve remained perched all day in the August swelter, thrusting our breasts forward as if we were robins and not pigeons, silent and imperial. Girlfriend''s out, but she''ll be back soon. We watch and wait.


    A red Mustang flies into the neighborhood, disregarding the STOP sign, and brakes on a dime. We know who the car belongs to and we''re immediately compelled to crap on the windshield. I catch one of us hunching forward, prepping for flight. Wait, says my gesture, a single raised wing, Let''s just see what he does.


    Boyfriend remains stopped in front of Girlfriend''s house, right in the middle of the street. He doesn''t even bother flashing the hazards, he just puts it in park, sits there daring the traffic with his Do-Something-Nigga expression. Cars whip around him violently, grazing the front bumper of the Nissan heading the opposing traffic.


    A black man hops out of the Nissan, angry, but exposed, and cars blow by him. Now, instead of an accident victim, he''s just someone else in the way. "Move, nigga!" a driver yells, and leads several cars in speeding past the man, nearly clipping him. Drivers proceed carelessly as if the black man were nothing. Even the children playing basketball in narrow driveways, or double-dutch on the cracked walk, have to pause and step further away from the curb. The black man hops back in his Nissan, slams the door, and drives off.


    The children resume play: business as usual.


    In that moment the black Nissan driver was one of us, caught in the whirl of a rough city. Drivers speed up when they see us in the road; passersby fling unfinished food at us; ketchup and mustard and saliva spray our dark feathers.


    Girlfriend leaves us alone. We often leave our telephone wire perches to peck crumbs out of the road. Girlfriend slows when she sees us. Come on birds! she says, drumming the wheel, Ya''ll got wings, now go! But she''s patient in her own way, watching us finish our meager meal. Girlfriend doesn''t fault us. She just lurches forward in her Honda Accord. She wants us to move. If she accelerates, she knows we''ll take flight and scatter instantly. She waits instead, annoyed. But I feel her protection, her bleeding heart that refuses to risk hurting us. In those moments, we appreciate the gesture, the kindness¡ª


    Honk! Honk!


    Everyone jams angry palms into their horns, honking at Boyfriend''s red Mustang. Boyfriend also honks, because even though he''s the problem¡ªthe red Mustang blocking the middle of the road¡ªhe wants the hood (as he''s announced many times before) to see his big fruitful nuts and manly warrior chest. Now he wears the fierce scowl we''re used to seeing, the expression fired toward anyone who dares challenge him on his stomping grounds, in his hood, and right in front of his girl''s house too, his girl''s house.


    We wait for someone to tell Boyfriend to move his car, but that''s not going to happen. Boyfriend is the-nigga-you-don''t-mess-with as the locals often say. He''s tall and muscled and even if he were a bird it''d take many of us to stop him. He''s the one that empowers dark skin in the night. In these parts, dark people grow powerful, cloaked by the urban pitch. People around here say it, so we believe them. But we never get to see for ourselves; the streets are mostly empty at night. The people are afraid of each other.


    Boyfriend steps out of the car, clenching his fists. He glares at the stopped cars and the air suddenly changes.


    No more honking. Everything goes quiet.


    Cars slowly make their way around Boyfriend as if apologizing. I imagine the cars standing on their rear wheels, tip-toeing¡ªtip-wheeling¡ªaround a really big man. Truth is, he should move, but he doesn''t¡ªhe won''t. He doesn''t have to. Fear is his superpower.


    But Girlfriend won''t have any of it, and Boyfriend knows that. That''s why he''s here, even though she told him not to come back. Nigga you on Time Out, she''d said, Time Out. I better not see you for three months, or ever.


    Time Out isn''t over, it''s been two days, but Boyfriend is here anyway. With some planned brilliance I suppose.


    Boyfriend closes his eyes and breathes deep, doing a couple ins-and-outs, something we''ve never seen him do before. He reaches a hand into his right pocket, lets the hand linger there for a couple seconds, and takes it out. "Control," I hear him say to himself, "Impulse control, like momma told me. I got this. Impulse. Control." Like the impulse to not do the things we''re used to Boyfriend doing. The things that made all the cars apologize to him and his red Mustang, which is still parked in the middle of the road. The things that drew us to Girlfriend''s house in the first place¡ªother than Girlfriend herself¡ªin case Boyfriend got out of line, or out of control, again.


    Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    Boyfriend eyes Girlfriend''s door like a target and steps onto the curb. He advances up the cement path toward her front step. His gait is measured and steady, his back straight and tall, and his face has softened from a scowl to something neutral, a calm expression. He''s not slouching or stomping or furrowing his brow like we''re used to. His peaceful fa?ade makes us nervous. The quiet before the storm, people say, and that''s true. Our senses are keen and we''re gone long before the first drops hit, before the sky grays with the storm to come.


    We cinch our gifts hard in our talons and beaks, anxious for Boyfriend''s next move.


    The salamander in my mouth wriggles wildly. It''s thrashing in pain because I almost killed it, but it''s alive, which is what matters. It''s alive. The thing''s got fight.


    Boyfriend reaches the door and knocks.


    "Baby?"


    Boyfriend''s deep baritone nearly rattles the windows. We''re waiting for Girlfriend to get home; he thinks she''s there. She left dressed in her best, for church and then family time. That''s what she does¡ªespecially when Boyfriend isn''t acting right. He knocks again.


    "Baby? It''s me. I know I''m on Time Out and all that craziness but I just wanna tell you that I''m sorry. I apologize from the bottom of me because I know I hurt you, though ... I didn''t mean to do all that...all that stuff I did to make you raise up on me like that, I was just having a moment, a bad moment, that''s all."


    Boyfriend looks worried. He breathes in, breathes out, and knocks again. Meanwhile Girlfriend''s Honda Accord pulls up behind his Mustang. She makes an angry face at the familiar car, but remains stopped, turns her hazard flashers on. She watches Boyfriend shuffle on her doorstep, speaking from the bottom of him and all. She doesn''t say anything, just joins us in our watching, and listens.


    "Now," Boyfriend continues, "if you could just like, tell me what I did, then we''ll be straight. We''ll be cool and all that and we can get back to all the lovey stuff we be doing ''cause girl, you really bring out the soft in me, you know, that huggy feely man in me that don''t come out. Baby, you know I''m troubled. But, um. What I do, though?"


    He reaches into his right pocket, leaves his hand there, rolls it around a bit, feeling.


    "Seriously though, how you gonna put a nigga on Time Out and not tell him what he did though? How can I learn from what I did and what I''m sorry for if you don''t guide me into what''s right? I just need you there for me so I can be there for you, you dig? I did things. And you''re upset. But this, Timing Out, I don''t know babe, it''s questionable. Not quite objectionable or anything, not there yet, but it''s getting there, though."


    He waits for a response. Nothing. Girlfriend is still where she''s at, listening, losing patience because she takes Time Out seriously. She''s flustered even though she''s always so tightly in control, and you can see her thinking hard, looking pained because reflection is tough business. As birds, all we have is the sky and our thoughts. We come down for scraps and then fly back up into blinding meditation. Things down here are so complicated. These people do too much, torture themselves by how much they''re always doing¡ªeven Girlfriend sometimes. But we don''t blame her. The ground is not a blessed place.


    Boyfriend pulls his hand out of his pocket. He''s holding a condom in a black package with gold lettering: Magnum. He leaves it on her Welcome mat.


    "Anyway," he says with a deep smirk, "I learned my lesson, and I''m sorry. So yeah, just hit me up babe, when you ready for the, you know, that Make-Up Sex. You know what it is, how we get down. Just call me, I''ll finish my Time Out, and you know, we can get to being close again."


    He begins to leave and sees Girlfriend in the walkway, stomping angrily toward him.


    I look across the telephone wires at my brethren and they look back. They''re waiting for my signal. So I give it to them; I raise both wings and they go flying.


    Girlfriend continues her advance; she''s at the curb, then halfway up the cement path toward her door where Boyfriend waits, smiling widely. He opens his arms to receive her in a hug; Girlfriend cocks her fist.


    One of our brothers drops his item, the Simply Lemonade bottle-cap he''s gifting Girlfriend. It lands between Girlfriend and Boyfriend, bouncing, rattling, rolling, and after a couple of seconds, finally stopping.


    They both look up.


    We pigeon brethren circle above, casting dark moving shadows over the house. Now they''re all dropping their special something''s for Girlfriend. Pieces of Styrofoam that once contained her favorite Hawaiian Fried Rice, wrappers from Asiago Chicken Sandwiches, fortunes she''s thrown away from Chinese take-out places she frequents¡ªall of it floating down slowly, ceremonially, like small papery blessings.


    Boyfriend goes running because he feels attacked. He flies into his car and yells to Girlfriend, "Go inside! Call me later!" And then he winks, says, "I know you will," before speeding off.


    The children playing in the streets, and the neighbors walking by, follow suit. Everyone scatters, running to their houses, fleeing this stretch of sidewalk.


    Bottle-caps and clips and pins and hair-bows and other gifts we think suit Girlfriend also come flying down. They land around her and she''s scared; she''s terrified; she looks as if she''s about to cry¡ªbut that''s not something we can help. Girlfriend is afraid and she''s ready to go inside, shut us out, reject our goodwill. She steps toward her front door and quickly stops; she sees the Chinese fortunes peppering the doorway.


    Life ebbs and life flows. If you allow it, life will bring great joy.


    Winning numbers: 7, 23, 5, 38, 10, 12


    Happiness exists. It''s closer than you think.


    I descend toward Girlfriend, swiftly, with the salamander still thrashing in my grasp. I land before her, impeding her path to the doorway. We lock eyes. Her pupils shimmer with tears she refuses to release. But she''s still here, waiting, giving us the chance that nobody else would.


    My brethren circle above in the shape of a human heart, something we find on trashed red cards, trashed flowers, and on all of Boyfriend''s apologies. My brethren circle and continue to drop gifts.


    I lower my beak, reverently setting the salamander down. It''s injured, its spine crushed, but it manages to crawl toward Girlfriend, slowly, tenaciously. The salamander crawls and gets closer and hisses something that I can''t understand. Something guttural and hurt. But the salamander persists. It won''t stop. It crawls closer and closer to Girlfriend. It''s almost there, almost to the tip of her shoe. In our animal tongue it hisses Girlfriend''s name, Jacq! Jacq! She shouldn''t understand, and in fact she''s confused, but her eyes soften.


    Girlfriend bends down and cups her hands toward the salamander because she knows. She knows.

 Slayhorse

    Once upon a time Raul walked the earth, a horse with a tan complexion, golden hooves, and a hair that transformed into an array of natural palettes and themes. In fall, his hair matched the leaves. Wintertime, he froze his mane in the cool blue-whites of an ice king. Springs, he ignored because daisies and bumblebees weren''t his wave, so he more or less appeared as a normal horse¡ªbut with glossier skin. Summers, he was fire.


    But of course his mood was the true deciding factor as to how he wore his fickle locks.


    Unlike the other animals, he didn''t subscribe to the typical wiring of the rest of his species. Sure, he performed horse-like behaviors, grazing and neighing and running and such, but he refused saddles and plows and carts. He refused labor. He rejected the expectation of production. Horsepower was a dirty word, an insult, a slur. "If you have power, then do it yourself. Why do you need a horse? Manpower is a word, too, the fuck?"


    Even the stable horses near the meadowlands in which Raul freely roamed woefully spoke of his wasted potential. It was no secret that Raul possessed the speed and muscle tone of a derby winner. "Don''t waste your potential," they''d tell him, "You''re gifted and strong. You can be a better horse than us all."


    "Neigh," Raul said.


    "What''s a neigh? Do you mean neeiiighghgh?" The horses lifted their heads to the sky, strained the corded muscles in their necks while producing their tribal cry.


    "Neigh means neigh," Raul said, clearly unimpressed.


    "Do it right. Like it a proper horse."


    "What''s a proper horse?"


    "You know? Like us. Using your horsepower is a virtue. Pull a cart. Accept a rider. Do an honest day''s work for once."


    Raul turned his head to the side, surprised, baffled, affronted. It was a warm spring day but his mane appeared to smoke and smolder. You could detect the summer in his hair¡ªand in his voice. "Work? Why do I have to work?"


    "What else are you going to do?"


    "Anything but." He turned to leave and flipped his hair, ash scattering toward his brethren, purely cosmetic of course.


    So Raul left the wild, his comfortable meadow, his relative freedom. There was a better living to create for himself anyway. Horses traded stories about the honorable and useful applications of their horsepower, and all of them had to do with manual labor, with taking direction¡ªbut Raul, his golden hooves and naturally blessed hair, possessed a broader vision for his life. As he migrated away from familiar lands, he peered into the adjacent stream and saw in his reflection an artist. What would a cart, a saddle, do for the revolution he knew himself to be?


    Within a day, Raul migrated from his native meadowlands past a mountain sign that declared in white block letters, HOLLYWOOD. Raul kept off the road and observed the city from afar. He''d only been around rural folks but had seen enough TV through their windows to know where he was. The coffee shops, the unusual clothing, the golden jewelry that people wore on their wrists and necks and ears that Raul, himself, had been born with on his very feet. Civilization. Style. Raul couldn''t help but sneer at the thought that he should choose work when this mecca of flamboyance existed.


    He toured himself around the town, sticking to the mountains, walking along a street called Sepulveda until arriving to the ocean. Venice Beach, read the signs. He marveled at the people, the diversity of one species, all the ways a person could be. Some humans were muscled like thoroughbreds. Others were slender and shapely as show-ponies. Others wore visors and fannypacks and black sunglasses. They wore suits and dresses and a host of unfamiliar, non-denim fabrics. There were tattooed images on their skin. And the colors¡ªso many colors in their hair. Upon first sight Raul knew he wasn''t going home, not today, not ever to be honest. Horses could be more! He thought, he lamented, he prayed. I will show them! I will pave the way!


    And immediately, his unattended presence began to generate a buzz amongst the beachgoers. Whose horse is that? Do we call the police? Animal Control? Raul did his best to ignore the uncomfortable murmurings. But the buzz chased Raul like gnats in the heat. He swished his tail from side to side, beating aside the annoyance that came with the attention. He wanted to shine, to achieve notice and stardom, but all of these folks saw¡ªfor all their diversity of shapes and colors and fashion sense¡ªwas a horse without a rider.


    Immediately, though, he calmed.


    His attention was taken by one man in particular, a tattooed fire-eater.


    And, thankfully, the fire-eater paid Raul no mind. He simply inhaled the flames, shot them out. Over and over as the surrounding crowd gasped in awe. His face was sweaty and sooty. His chestnut skin appeared tanned by the flames. But there were no signs of pain or discomfort, nothing to break his focus from the combustion.


    Raul found the concentration to be beautiful.


    He approached the fire-breather who danced about, twirling his flaming baton. The man soon stopped, unable to ignore the horse inches from his face. The flame was held upright and Raul opened his mouth, swallowed it. The crowd gasped. The fire-eater gasped, too. Silence. People held their phones up. Others were dialing numbers. And when Raul opened his mouth, a black trail of smoke escaped his throat in steady O''s. And then it happened¡ªWHOOSH!¡ªa tremendous flaring of fire igniting from his mane. His hair had become flame.


    The crowd erupted.


    Clapping, shutter clicks, little kids calling him Rapidash¡ªwhoever that was.


    Raul relished in his moment, quite comfortable in the knowledge that as his mane were steadily aflame, no one would dare to ride him.


    *


    His first commercial was on a cruise ship.


    The second on a snowy mountain named Polar Bear''s Peak.


    The third happened back home, within the wild meadows which he''d recently left.


    Ever since that first public display of fiery hair, the phone videos turned him into a widely known sensation. He wore the hair most fitting for the shoots¡ªocean-colored and seafoam for the yacht, ice crystals in the snow, the earthen orange-yellows of fall back home.


    These shoots were for Gilton Luxury Pastures. The Gilton family were eccentric billionaires that dominated the hospitality business, as they called it. Raul didn''t know what "hospitality" meant exactly, but it sounded luxurious, so he agreed to the shoots.


    Turns out, they meant hotels. Glorious, natural ones, where the horses and other animals could roam free, get their hooves filed, and their stables tended to on a near-hourly basis.


    "Smile for the camera," the director told Raul. He smiled, yes, but that hair flip¡ªso severe. He served them enough looks to populate a generation of calendars. "Yes, yes!" Raul neighed. "I am here for this!" Shutter clicks. Flash bulbs. Bright lights and aluminum panels. A crown of cameras turning Raul into a star.


    The farm horses were nearby, grazing, side-eyeing the shoot. "You call that work?" one loudly heckled.


    Raul, prancing in the open field as an unbothered, carefree horse, recorded his response in what he knew would be a killer close-up. Dramatic pause. Neck whipped upward. Mane flowing in the most perfect caress of the wind.


    "Work? Call it living."


    Humans typically couldn''t make out what horse-kind had to say, even if horses, creatures that tended to take direction, were bilingual. People, being simple folk, only heard neighs. Raul didn''t have that communication barrier, though, not when he possessed his expressive body language, when the subtle palette revisions of his locks¡ªdarker for calm, brighter for being extra¡ªtransformed his impassioned neighs into messages that people understood.


    Raul spoke in horse, and his drama was the translation.


    So when Raul paused, neck-whipped, neighed¡ªthe folks on set went wild.


    And when the commercial released, the Twitter-verse erupted.


    "Call it living" became a sensation.


    Memes. Pins. Bumper stickers. Fanfic.


    Folks said he was fabulous, outrageous, that he absolutely slayed.


    Slay. What an odd word Raul thought, especially since he wasn''t in tune with the city-folk ways, but the word tingled from his ear canals down into his spine. Somehow, without knowing what it was, he embodied slay. When the folks said slay, Raul knew he was killing it.


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    Raul kept track of his social media following on a custom tablet his Gilton employers got for him¡ªmassive dimensions, hoof-proof screen. He scrolled his Twitter, read all the DMs full of love and fanart and random sponsorship offers. Gummi Bears, Cheetos, even Nike¡ªwhatever sense they thought that made. Overnight, Raul''s star-power soared. Raul was the old name, the non-glorious one, but @Slayhorse_Official was a star.


    Raul became larger than the No Quiero Taco Bell dog, the Twix Rabbit, Count Chocula, and even the Kiebler elves. But unlike his animal contemporaries, he switched up his style. The hair set him apart, fabulously so. He became known by a new moniker: Slayhorse.


    The best part about becoming the Slayhorse was that he took no money¡ªhe couldn''t, being a newcomer to the human metropolis. Instead, he was provided a contract, one which he stamped-signed with his glittering golden hoof. The contract''s stipulations were simple: personal assistants, accountants, stable-hands. Anyone who did business with him had to arrange service for him, their finest arrangements worthy of his deeds.


    And the service was grand to say the least, for in no time at all Raul landed a movie role. A Horse With No Name was the title. The producers said it was from a famous song. Raul didn''t much like the name but he loved the script.


    Naturally, it was about horse.


    He just traipsed into town one day. No name, no rider. Simply a strange, unclaimed horse. The horse had a name, though, but the townsfolk didn''t speak horse, and heard his introduction as rhythmic neighs. But they were decent folks and let the horse wander around. And they soon learn that the horse is a complete dear. He racing the elderly to their bingo games. He races to the outskirts of town to save a man who''d fallen into a well. When a stove fire engulfs a home, the horse races there too and drags a woman and infant out of the building. By the end of the movie, the horse has no name but he''s a good horse. He''s so fast. And so good. And also fast.


    "There''s a lot of racing in this" Raul said in the conference room. He tilted his head in perplexity, accidentally tapped the lamp right next to him.


    "Plenty!" A producer said. "Action is the wave."


    "Absolutely" seconded the director, Michel Bayless. He loved explosions¡ªbut he wanted badly to work with @Slayhorse_Official, so he made do with racing. As a creative, he thought himself flexible.


    "If you like it, I love it," Raul sighed. His mane was a smoky gray that day, like his mind-state, muted, apprehensive.


    Months of shoots, 12- to 14-hour days, labor (ugh!), but a labor of love. So Raul endured, he persevered, he acted his heart out.


    Premiere day. He wore his fiery locks to match the red carpet. His hoofprints destroyed the carpet but nobody cared. It was his night. Fans disguised as media members snipped away at squares of destroyed carpet, and later posted their framed Slayhorse hoofprints on Twitter.


    Raul even posted on one. "I destroyed the carpet because I am a horse? But what''s your excuse? Must you do so much?"


    Everyone loved the sass. Everyone, as in the 858K likes on that comment.


    He soon learned that stardom couldn''t be turned off, that you could turn the Raul into a Slayhorse but you couldn''t turn a Slayhorse back into a Raul. In his regular horse life, the size and species already earned him stares and murmurs. Now folks approached him, screamed and hyperventilated their love in his face. The double-edge of his fame became a hindrance¡ªin the pizza shop, the tofu bar, the grain dispensary, even the luxury stable in which he slept. Nobody had real faces anymore. They were always holding up their phones. Eyes, nose, mouths¡ªall replaced by a rectangular block and half eaten apple. Even in the dark at night, shutter clicks invaded his rest.


    He thought back to when he was on set and listened to other actors speak of the trials of laying low, of needing disguises in public, secret dining arrangements, of hiring security, security, security¡ªand he figured the humans were being complicated again. He assumed he''d only be a little homesick, and logistically inconvenienced as a too-big, too noticeable city horse. But he''d underestimated the cost of slay, gravely so. He missed the wild, the anonymity. He missed the other horses in spite of their disagreements. He yearned for a return to his unfettered, unbothered best, but these days he could only achieve that within the confines of a camera lens.


    I can adjust, he told himself. I''m built for this.


    Yoga, a set-mate suggested, so Raul scheduled sessions at an outdoor studio. Downward dog gave a good stretch but the eyes of the women and even the instructor were too noticeable. When standing poses occurred, Warrior and the like, he almost hoofed a woman''s head clear off.


    He tried meditation as well. He closed his eyes, stood in an expansive room with a rock garden, a waterfall, a couple exotic butterflies, a monk with dark orange robes and matching Nike slides. Breath control. Clearing of the mind. Perfect, immaculate silence. But in the deepest reaches of Raul''s mind, the shutter clicks invaded intermittently. Click. Click. Even in a cleared brain-state, the iPhone sound effects were ever-present and oppressive.


    Healthy eating. Tofu from Whole Foods, tofu from a farmer''s market, tofu prepared by a team of internationally renown chefs. People often suggested oats and apples (What? Do they think of me as a work horse?) and he politely explained that that was racist¡ª"othering" was the proper term but calling it racist scared people more. Unfortunately, dieting didn''t help his case either. He didn''t feel better, he didn''t feel free. Pizza it is! Pizza, Raul''s one true love. His assistant ordered 30 boxes of frozen deep dish express-delivered from a Chicago pizzeria and called it a day.


    He''d stand on the fortified balcony of his penthouse and enjoy his pizza''d evening. He ignored the distant camera flashes and shutter clicks as best he could. He munched as the onlookers¡ªand there were always onlookers¡ªshouted up hair change requests.


    "Frost! Be a frozen horse!"


    "Constellations!"


    "Be lightning, @Slayhorse_Official! Electrify us!"


    One night, he provided his answer.


    Fire.


    His red mane, Raul''s favorite color, burned with devilish embers. The neighbors stared at their beloved Slayhorse, the fiery mane glowing upon his shiny skin. Shock and awe upon all of their faces¡ªno fear or recognition that the Slayhorse was angry, frustrated. As soon as Raul leapt off the balcony, someone even released a thrilled whoop!


    Raul bounded down the highway. His tremendous strides overtook each vehicle¡ªthe Corvettes, the Bugattis, the Mustangs¡ªas he blazed a trail straight out of town and past the glimmering Horse With No Name billboard at the city limits.


    Within a short fifteen minutes he''d once again entered wild grounds¡ªtrees, brush, dewy air. Blessed silence. Raul grazed in the moonlight and gnawed at the grass. Typically, he''d just eaten but he''d run himself into a remarkable hunger. He ate quickly, voraciously, and soon stirrings were audible from behind some bushes.


    "Hey!" A wild horse appeared from the bushes, "You''re burning!"


    "Oh." Raul realized that the flaming mane was in full effect. Flames receded into his hair and the reds and oranges gradually drained until the hair became perfectly black, the color of shadow.


    The horse was impressed. "Wow, I''ve never seen hair so dark."


    "My hair just does what I feel."


    "Well I hope you feel better! Anyway, if you''re up for it you can come meet the herd. Make yourself a home as the people-folk like to say." And the horse turned around and left.


    Raul remained a smoldering shadow, the most tired night-horse in all of existence¡ªbut what a relief it was to be normal. The horse didn''t speak to him like he was dumb, or particularly exceptional either. He was spoken to like just a horse in the wild. It''d been so long since he''d gotten a normal response, nobody expressing the love or brilliance or inspiration or genius of his changing locks. Everyone spoke to Slayhorse as if giving a movie review in real-time. But tonight he was Raul. And the relief was immense.


    Raul sauntered off into a nearby clearing of tall trees and found a cool spot to lay in. He relaxed in the dark and closed his eyes. The shadows of his mane grew amorphously around him, cloaking him, concealing him, and as Raul was pleasantly surprised to discover, he couldn''t even hear himself breathe. His darkness was soundproof. Yes! Raul thought, Oh my fucking God yes!


    *


    He awoke refreshed. He felt like spring, he felt like bumblebees and daisies, but he maintained his shadow locks to accentuate his stubborn, dramatic nature. His rest was great and he rose to a new day¡ª


    And the sudden realization that many strange horses encircled him.


    Among the horses, Raul spotted the kind one from the night before.


    "Good morning," the horse said.


    "Uuh, morning?"


    "My name''s Buddy!"


    "Okay Buddy, that''s nice, but you and your other...buddies...are crowding me."


    "Sorry, we were just excited."


    "Why thank you, I appreciate it. But please be excited three steps back."


    And the herd complied¡ª1, 2, 3 steps backwards¡ªand in unison at that.


    The confusion set upon Raul once more. He''d heard about such things in human society. "Are you guys a cult?"


    "Colts? Sure, we have some young colts that need guidance," Buddy said.


    Raul had feelings about this. Befuddlement for one. But the earnest answer meant that there was no danger here, no horse scientology to fear and flee from. "Guidance is good," Raul said, "But I''m not a role model."


    "Become ours."


    "Oh no."


    "We heard about your adventure. Take us with you! Show us how to be incredible, too!


    "Wow, well, that''s a big ask¡ª"


    "¡ªPlease, Raul, be our leader." The horses began to close in¡ªthey took their 3 steps right back. They displayed their toothy smiles and shimmied in place. Horses that wanted to be more¡ªRaul respected it.


    "Goodness, okay. But on one condition."


    "Anything, Leader."


    "Two conditions. One, don''t call me that. Two, 3 steps back¡ªplease.


    They stepped back again, and Raul, the reluctant slay captain, went back to sleep.


    *


    @Slayhorse_Official deactivated his Twitter account and moved out of Hollywood. A flash in the pan as the saying goes¡ªbut he proved to be so much more. News stations covered the sudden disappearance of the celebrity horse. There were fundraising events to fuel the search efforts. There were online support groups. Widespread grief counseling. Hundreds of Twitter montages and clips of everyone''s favorite commercials and movie scenes. An outpouring of love you could never have anticipated. And that''s the thing, the fans would live with the hole. They''d continue their lives not knowing where to spend their love. With the disappearance of Slayhorse, everyone wondered where their society, their immense and supportive fandom, went wrong.


    So they''d decided to do better for horse-kind. Saddles were abolished. People asked horses for their express written permission (hoofprint stamped of course) to touch, pet, and mount them.


    Horses knew Raul was out there somewhere, living freely. The farm horses lived around Slayhorse before his rise, back when he was Raul, the colorfully maned one. And in light of the changes in their treatment, they began to see the point. The horses didn''t neglect their work¡ªbecause they loved it¡ªbut they enjoyed being considered. They weren''t Slayhorses but being a simple horse began to feel like so much more.


    Meanwhile Raul had his own favorable arrangement. As lead mare of his horse fan club, he showed them the life they asked for. He was done with Hollywood. The glitz and glam also came with people, so he reevaluated his ambitions.


    The Gilton Luxury Pastures contract remained active and tons of Slayhorse commercials needed shooting. Their facilities were being constructed and booked well in advance of their grand openings. Raul trained his herd in the ways of artistry, of exploring all the ways a horse could be. Instead of hording the spotlight, he prepared his brethren for it.


    They practiced prances and head turns. They rehearsed fantastic leaps. They refined iconic poses that''d put the Mustang emblem to shame. They simply needed the platform, the support, and Raul happily obliged them.


    When it came time to shoot, the collective energy was unmatched. The stage, as they say, was set. Gilton brought the scripts, cameras, and hair-related CGI.


    And the horses brought the slay.

 Drift

    The moons, the stars, the asteroids, and the planets knew that Jupiter and Pluto were in love. The space between them crackled with Jupes'' lightning and shimmered with Plu''s trademark red frost. You couldn''t ignore the spectacle of their vibrant love languages. Though light years apart, they remained at play, firing off waves of white static and auburn hail towards the other''s atmosphere. They were even known by a specific name: Ju-Plu. But they were tragically distanced, so their surfaces couldn''t experience the comforting pull of their beloved chosen world.


    The other problem was Jupes¡ªhis pull was too strong, his immense mass tended to crush all that came close. Jupes emitted an orb of destruction, a celestial killzone. These days¡ªall days, really¡ªJupes struggled to handle the fragile galaxy with care. He practiced with passing asteroids as they drew into his orbit, juggling them, straining to not squeeze so hard¡ªoften succeeding in minimizing the damage (a few pebbles at most), yet sometimes failing and spitting out space debris. Jupes apologized, fashioning sad faces out of its lightning, and the asteroids accepted it because change was their nature. But Jupes didn''t feel any better about it. Because if he couldn''t carefully sustain the asteroids then he couldn''t someday carry Plu, and if he couldn''t carry Plu, then maybe he didn''t love her like he thought he did.


    Pluto, herself, was troubled too, but much more profoundly. The thought of joining Jupes'' orbit teased her continuously. She craved the pull, the acceptance, the cosmic hug, and the absence of his orbit infused her with doubts. And though she fought the skepticism about his love, doubt was all she did. Plu was the smallest planet in the solar system, the farthest from the sun, closest to the eternal darkness which lay beyond their galaxy. The lack of importance, of consequence, consumed her. The iciness and emptiness went hand-in-hand with the hardening idea in her that she didn''t matter, that if she disappeared the cosmos wouldn''t feel it. The vibrancy of the galaxy had a way of shrinking her, and she felt trapped in an endless state of watching herself die. Meanwhile the looming void beyond the dark side of Pluto pulled and pulled and pulled.


    One day she began to drift away. There was no explanation for it. Suddenly she found herself untethered, and not even the will of the sun could keep her in place. So off into the expanse she went.


    Drifting, drifting...


    Few asteroids resided in the new territory. And no planets. Plu was as perfectly alone as she''d ever get. She traveled for light years. She traveled until the sun was a memory. She often glimpsed the streak of bright white bolts across the darkness, from Jupes no doubt, messages of I-love-you, Come-back, You-matter. Plu knew the colors of his language well. She missed the electricity, his loving tricks of light, but tired of watching them vanish. Once the flashes dispersed, she found no reason to stay. The emptiness depressed her. And as it were, she had no means of talking back.


    So Plu just shrank in the vastness. Her spirit coiled and tightened, actively diminishing as she so wished. The smaller she became, the less pressure she felt. Smaller. Smaller. Invisible. Be invisible. And then another thought zoomed through her soul. Disappear. But she couldn''t disappear¡ªnot on command anyhow¡ªso the steady drift persisted.


    Occasionally she passed an asteroid, which, imbued with her cinnamon-colored frost, turned to Pluto in appreciation of the novel costuming¡ªbut she didn''t notice. Her turmoil wouldn''t allow it.


    What she did notice was only what she could describe as the end of the universe. She didn''t know this with certainty but the space had a different texture. She sensed an odd pressure materializing, the boundaries of an unseen maelstrom clipping her outer edges, but she pushed aside all concern. Come what may. Just come already. By this point she was ready to vanish.


    She was dressed for it, too, her pale-gray surface topped with frozen rust. Death garb was her mode.


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    But in the distance she spied lightning, a relentless bolt storm, tremendous white veins scarring the darkness. She knew it was Jupes¡ªhe was stretching and reaching and searching for the means to grasp at Plu. Jupes had launched his gaseous self through the darkness, giving chase. He was a rolling explosion, a charged world, desperate and volatile. And in his wake were clusters of stolen worlds¡ªMercury and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune and countless asteroids. Each mass had been colonized by Jupes as moons.


    Jupes drove himself onwards, yellow-orange smoke billowing out in lawless blasts. Plu recognized his hurt, she sympathized for this, she pitied this, and she tried with all her might to just choose life¡ª


    Pressure. The squeeze of space. The viciousness of its pulling. Pluto''s surface was worked upon and warped. Suddenly the emptiness had supplied a nebulous force, a calm destruction, a black hole. Her drifting abruptly halted. Violence was now upon her, and as Plu''s surface began to crush and compress, she was assaulted with the onset of terror. Everything she stood to lose now illuminated in her¡ª


    Her memories awakened, flooding her:


    Lightning. Explosions. Globules of dancing white static. She remembered the distant chaos of Jupes'' orbit, his gravitational pull a solar system crusher. She sensed his bumbling nature, the constant apology draped over his hapless oblivion. So she sent Jupes her laughs¡ªasteroid passersby which she coated in crimson frost¡ªwhich Jupes through no fault of his own destroyed, grinding the asteroids into snowflake patterns. The sentiment of Sorry! Sorry! filled the void, and even slowed the violence of his wild draw. He was thoughtful¡ªnot thoughtless. Clumsy¡ªnot destructive.


    Plu was compelled to do one thing: she iced several more asteroids, floated them over as glacial laughs. Jupes warmed at her amusement and did his best to protect the offerings. After all, these were the first gifts he''d ever received.


    Days later, Plu spotted her laughs in his orbit, icy and undamaged. And despite their distance from one another, the two were instantly bound.


    Plu remembered sending along blizzardy trinkets every day. And she remembered Jupes hoarding them as treasure. She remembered the gratitude in his lightning. The expansion of his gases as he swallowed everything within view, his gravity forcing the neighboring planets out of their normal solar orbits¡ªand the ensuing apologetic energy as he carefully restored the planets to their rightful places.


    Plu remembered these good times and others. She saw herself: tiny, yet existing in a substantial way. She turned rocks to scarlet monuments. She gifted the galaxy her crimson glitter, coppery and cold. She recognized herself in all her moments of grace¡ªengaging in love, giving love, worthy of love. As the black hole devoured her, the feeling of her own inadequacy, the feeling that she was unnecessary, also began to disintegrate. Beneath the now atomized layers of her despondency, she''d at last located her long dormant will to live. She wanted life¡ªshe did, she did, she did.


    But it''s hard sometimes, she concluded, Sometimes it''s the hardest thing there is¡ª


    Another sudden pressure, no less forceful, no less insistent. And a strange sight, too, the influx of snowflake-shaped stars and perfectly intact frost globes, the first of Plu''s gifts to Jupes along with the most recent ones, and even all the ones in between. Jupes inched closer and closer, gradually strengthening his hold on her. Come back! Come back!


    So she did.


    Plu escaped the dreadful suction, finally free of the breakage. The debris around her began to chill and crystallize, becoming glassy and reflective. She studied her reflection in the shards, a world transformed in the black hole''s aftermath.


    The darkness promised to take everything yet she emerged rebuilt.


    She''d returned from the black hole little more than a planetary marble, a miniscule red ice. In her lost size, her gravitational pull was thoroughly erased. No moon or asteroid could be held by her any longer. But her smallness mattered less to her now. She''d survived. Small and strong. Significantly harmed but invincible too. Inside you couldn''t break her.


    And as she found herself within Jupes'' wild orbit, a mess of broken asteroids, moons, planets, stars, and as she crossed the turbulent clouds of lightning, a mixture of white and blue strikes, she discovered in him empty clouds too, pockets of perfect calm. In these zones, she found her own gifts¡ªthe glacial laughs, the love tokens of cinnamonny ice¡ªattentively housed and preserved.


    In this moment, Plu''s soul shined, the whole of her releasing a gleaming red snow.


    She''d earned a heart tempered in darkness, a soul that bloomed in shadow, and while the black depths continued to call her, forever urging her towards oblivion, she remained safely nuzzled in Jupes'' rampage of an orbit, protecting within her a single truth: the gravity of love never lets go.

 Stone Blossom

    Bloom, I told myself, willing myself into Heaven. Blossom into your new life.


    And then I died. I wasn''t a human anymore but something else. I knew because of the dark, and because I didn''t panic in said darkness. I had a pulse, strangely, but I didn''t feel it radiating from where my heart used to be. The life rhythm traveled all over, tracing the outline of my amorphous essence. I had no eyes but I could see. And no brain but I could process. And despite my utter lack of physicality and nerves, I could feel the warmth, the heat, the presence of light. The light was inside, expanding, pushing against my edges and taking them over. And in a smooth, seamless process, that light had become my vessel.


    My education was swift and easy. I''d died and suddenly possessed the knowledge of what came next. Souls just have a way of catching on.


    But I had no memories. Death had to cost you, so I assumed.


    *


    One day I began to take shape, becoming thin, long, artfully curved. After a while, I became solid again, surrounded by a shifting graininess. Pebbles? Maybe sand? I didn''t have the answers¡ªhow could I? I''d just gotten here. Or rather, I''d returned.


    I sprouted from my grave¡ªnot just me, but my neighbors too.


    Sunflowers, that''s what we were. Brilliant yellows had broken through every tomb, pushing aside the dried dead roses from past visits. And there it was: the good feeling, the light.


    The sun''s rays felt differently. It''d never felt this way against human skin, but the flowerhead and leaf life was a different game. We were comforted, supported, fed, and loved all at once. Everyone had always talked about miracles in terms of light and now I knew why. What had I done to deserve such a feeling?


    The groundskeeper noticed us first. He''d never seen so many flowers in the cemetery before. He walked between the rows and rows of graves, confused, shocked, and resigned to what he believed were ghosts. He wasn''t wrong; his apprehension made sense. But he did as we''d all done at some point: he asked for help.


    "Francois," he said.


    How may I help? The phone said, its tone sounded rich and sophisticated, as if it were history''s most elite butler.


    "How do you tend sunflowers?"


    *


    At first he was just a person, a human creature with skillful hands and a kind, gravelly voice. We learned his name, his work schedule, his family ties. Wayne tended us at sunrise, and set sprinkler times throughout the day. When he needed flower-tending guidance, he asked Fran?ois, and Fran?ois obliged him with website links, video tutorials. Pruning tips. Watering tips. Nice things to say to us. Fran?ois was a revolution unto himself and I wondered if I had my own Fran?ois during my own human life.


    Needless today, Wayne maintained us immaculately. With his groundskeeping skills and Fran?ois''s guidance, he couldn''t lose.


    After he completed his daily work list he''d fall into the habits of a typical human man. He scrolled his phone when he was tired. He took long lunches and sometimes sat in his car, playing phone games with Fran?ois. Most days he rushed the last of his gardening work and sped out of the parking lot, the WAYNE-1 license plate immediately disappearing down the road.


    Wayne deserved it, too, he really did. Whatever he had going on post-sunset, I hoped it made him happy. But when he left, my pulse quickened. The mysterious pulse, the feeling of uncertainty, the feeling that maybe I hadn''t yet reached the limit of our blossoming. I shifted in my little tomb in painstaking contemplation. What next? I told myself. What am I going to do next?


    *


    Over time, I grew large¡ªwe all did. High, high, high. The cemetery appeared as a massive bouquet, each sunflower stretching skywards, becoming as tall as Wayne himself. And with my human stature, I began feeling like a person again. In fact, traces of my human memories began to return.


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    The memories flared up, mostly when the cemetery had visitors. Tons of people flooded into the cemetery with their partners and kids. Our collective gravesite became more like a community garden, a sunny maze for couples to hold hands in or for the children to run through with reckless abandon. People gazed at our flower heads, ran their fingers through our petals. They caressed us like their loved ones. Some even hugged us, squeezed us, cried into us. In those moments, I''d see the face of a person I''d hugged or remember the smell of a loved ones'' soap. I didn''t know that I''d missed these feelings so much. The gift of this tenderness surpassed the sun.


    *


    One sunset, after Wayne cut the sprinklers off and rushed to his car and pulled out of the parking lot, there was an accident: the sound of rubber squeaking, metal clashing, fire crackling in the distance. Sirens. The night was tinted in blue and red strobes. When the sirens were muted and the emergency lights deactivated, the evening went on as usual. But for the first time since becoming a flower I prayed.


    Five days later, Wayne was buried in our cemetery. He had siblings, a few friends, and kids. He had a wife, an ex-girlfriend, and another ex-girlfriend. He was one of the rare types who could go from lovers to lifelong friends. Even his high school English teacher showed up. He''d lived a good life. After tears, brief words, and prayer, he was buried two rows away from me, a man returned to the roots.


    After the burial, I waited for him to sprout to the surface. There was a new groundskeeper, Alex(?), Alexei(?)¡ªI was too sad to care. And while he didn''t have a Fran?ois, he watered and trimmed us plenty. He was good at what he did and so me and the others continued to thrive. I gazed upon the damp fields, waiting for Wayne''s latent roots to absorb the life-giving moisture. His gravestone remained polished and pristine. Wayne chose rest.


    Nights, after the newbie drove off with his ALEKS-$ license plate, the what-now questions bounced within my stem. As a flower, unable to move or work off the energy build-up, my soul became the most uncomfortable it''s ever been. It was torture, being trapped in the prison of anxiety. But that''s how I knew that a change was coming. Like I said earlier, the soul knows what the soul knows¡ª


    When you gonna stop all that shaking? Wayne''s voice was the same as ever, maintaining that same coarseness despite the telepathy.


    You''re alive! Well, alive-ish.


    Yes. Yes I am. And your shaky stem is shifting around all the dirt, man.


    I can''t help that, I''m going through a thing.


    Then do it with some sturdiness, Jesus Christ.


    It''s...it''s my first time speaking to you. Thanks for all the water.


    Don''t mention it.


    And you''re a master with the sheers.


    You talk a whole lot. Just bloom already and let me be.


    I grow, I feel, and I sun magnificently. What else is there?


    You''ll see.


    See what, though? Wayne don''t leave me hanging.


    Look, it''s nap time. Nice meeting ya.


    Okay Wayne, Rest In Peace.


    And that was that. He went off into the ether, the ethereal version of speeding off in his car. By morning he hadn''t returned either. The tombstone was cracked in the middle, though, a small green sprout breaking through.


    *


    Folks began to visit the cemetery. They couldn''t see the graves¡ªthe overgrowth being so significant¡ªbut they appreciated the beauty anyway. Everyone touched our petals and took pictures and swung around our stems. They said we had a good smell. That we were a tribute to their lost ones. That we were blessed by one god or the next. Maybe all were true or none were true. But when they were here I liked the company. And when they weren''t I tried not to be depressed.


    Days passed. Weeks. Months. And I hadn''t seen my own family. I didn''t know what they looked like. But the memories began to surge within me. An energy, a restlessness, plagued me. I wanted a way out. Or better yet, a way to bring them in.


    And in the days that passed I put my all into blooming. Yes, I''d grown, but I could be brighter¡ªwith fuller petals, and the dazzling openness everyone liked to see. Life would see me once again, and I''d let its light in.


    At last I had a purpose to my newfound strength. My family, I needed to see them. Finally, they''d know that I was alright, and that even within this strange, petaled death, my love would forever reach them.


    One day, she appeared. A human woman. Her face, her hair, her clothes¡ªher entire presence triggered memories, a soul-deep reaction to her. I couldn''t remember who she was. I only sensed her importance to me. I''d waited for her. I''d craved her.


    The woman brought a kid, too, a toddler.


    And a newborn in her arms.


    And my reactions to them were just as strong.


    The pulse in me intensified. Sun, sun, sun. I absorbed all that I could. As these people walked the fields of faceless flowers, now illegible tombs, I needed them to notice me. My only option was to shine.


    "Babe?" she said.


    My soul quivered.


    "It''s beautiful here."


    My petals stretched like wings.


    She stood in the clearing, turning, searching, looking concerned.


    It was a hot day. The sun beamed behind us, drawing each flowerhead toward it¡ªexcept for me. I continued facing the woman, my petals opening. She needed to see me. It was my only hope.


    And then she turned toward me. Her brown eyes acknowledged the man I was, the flower I''d become. I couldn''t talk. I couldn''t move. I couldn''t touch her face or tease our toddler or hold our baby.


    She stepped toward me; the child skipped; the baby just squirmed. It didn''t matter that their lives went on as my soul took root in the cemetery. It didn''t matter that in the midst of these bright sunflowers my current home was a field of death before all else. What mattered was that when the woman embraced me the memories returned, years of care and love coursing through me. Bloom? Is this bloom? I had no way of knowing. And the knowing didn''t matter. All that mattered was this feeling of me, a stone blossom, finally reaching light.

 Road Blossom

    There she was, Flower Bae in her brand-new Honda Accord, swerving around me and my pothole as she always did on her way home from work. Clearly, work had worked her nerves, but that didn''t stop her from sparing me, a wilted sunflower in the middle of the road. Flower Bae whipped the car around me and the pothole I lived in, sparing her wheels but mostly myself, before speeding off. Flower Bae, that beauty whose braids were numerous as vines, was my only light.


    Many others swerved around me, too, but mostly due to the nuisance of the pothole. Nobody cared for a sunflower in a city like this, a dusty haven of bad air and pollutants. A thickening coat of gray stuck to my petals, dulling out my natural color. People often complained about roadwork and city repairs¡ªbut never without mentioning how broke, cheap, and stingy the city was. I agreed; there was no light, no grass, no rain, and not even a soul who''d stop and talk to a flower. The city held its blessings tighter than the asphalt encasing me, which was oddly to my benefit, because while the tall lip of the pothole blocked all sunshine, all nutrients, its depth was my only defense against death by motorist.


    Day in, day out, I witnessed the blue-gray sky, the thin toxic film of the city dimming the potency of the sun. It didn''t seem fair that I was down here, afforded a meager glimpse of life. But I was still here, somehow. The pothole protected me. The birds fertilized me. Gnats buzzed around my webby leaves. Ants crawled about my base in the same daily formation as they nipped at my leaves before returning to their underground nest beyond my roots. There was community down here, kind of, a way to live out of the hard, miserly pothole. Fortunes were minute but present.


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    One day Flower Bae parked at the edge of the hole. She exited the car and bent over me. Her braids danced around my crinkled petals.


    "Rough day, little guy?" she said.


    "Average enough," I wanted to say. If I had a throat, a voice, a cough would''ve scraped it raw.


    "Let''s water you."


    Water. The word shined like real UV.


    She stood, her braids bobbing upwards, out-of-reach, and I missed her. She left to her car but quickly returned. She clutched a large bottle of water in her small hands and carefully poured, aiming into the crack of the asphalt containing my soil, my hemmed-in roots. She moistened my head with a steady drip, her aquatic caress gentle against my petals. Beyond the pothole, she must''ve had flowers to tend, had learned that water and light were the root of all kindness.


    "Drink up, sprout. You''re cute, but you can do better." Her smile opened like sunned petals.


    Suddenly, I sensed the wilt fade throughout the length of my stem; new strength surged upwards through my fibrous roots, and the pothole began to appear differently, lesser somehow, and as the limp whole of my flower transformed from the newfound rigor, I knew that finally I was rising up¡ªbeyond the world of asphalt and ants, beyond the treacherous shade of my habitat, and for the first time ever I gazed beyond the lip of the pothole. The world was there for me to drink in, its bad air, its crab grass, its smog-blotted sun, but the radiance of a still-brighter world touched me.


    Flower Bae''s steady drip continued¡ªno garden hose could feel better¡ªand I drank in the blessings of flowered living. The gray film washed off me and my yellows shown through. My flower head stretched toward the light, my petals opened in pinwheel fashion, and under Flower Bae''s blessed drip, my seeds began to spill.

 Ice Blossom

    In light we blossomed; in shadows we fed.


    We absorbed illumination, opening our petals to the sun. The sun coaxed us from our roots upward into the light. Tracking the rays, feasting, growing¡ªsunflowering was simple as that. Love radiated throughout the glimmering world, the shine reaching every corner, every crevice.


    And you stole it, human kind.


    Civilization brought The Darkening upon us, shrouding the world in pitch. We didn''t know how you did it. Some of us guessed poison. Others said humans exhaled a black fog into the clouds, thick and impenetrable. And other flowers whispered of dark magic, of spirits¡ªa theory which most of flower-kind laughed off. Spirits? We live amongst graves. The spirits fed us. Lived in us. Were us.


    But no amount of answer-seeking could undo the sun''s disappearance, its possible death¡ªor worse still, its abandonment.


    The changes occurred suddenly. The days were only dusk, and nights lasted twice as long. The moment we realized the sun was truly gone, the moon disappeared too. Without sunlight, so too went the moon''s ethereal silver, its lunar visibility. With all light extinguished, there was only night.


    And with darkness came the cold, a perpetual frostbite.


    A giant dome was erected, humanity''s home. A thin white glow traced its immense form. We couldn''t access its secrets, and only knew the fact of its safety and refuge. The overbearing steel prevented the ice sheets, the constant blizzards, from harming a single human hair.


    Starved of sunlight, we stared at the glowing dome, the rejection of its white steel.


    The cold clamped to our petals, hardening us into crystals. A swift death, that''s what we expected. But it never came. The millions of us were petrified within the frost and darkness, silently observing the coming years of blizzard. We were sunflowers one day and ice blossoms the next, and though we couldn''t grasp the mechanism of our continued survival, we were grateful.


    The rest of the creatures were not so fortunate¡ªthey were frozen. We no longer felt the rustle of animal activity, or the adhesive legs of small insects. But the dead strengthened us. As their bodies fertilized our roots, their spirits howled against the crying winds. The multitudes of vanquished animals offered themselves, a tribute of nutrients and mercy.


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    One day you and a partner ventured outside the dome, our first human sighting in years. When the dome cracked open, granting you passage into our blackened, frostbitten territory, we witnessed the secret to humanity''s survival, the criminal ingenuity of your kind.


    Pure illumination. Light emitted all throughout the inside of the human shelter. It was vast and white. There was no heat, no proof of solar life, only its captured light. You''d devised your own sun, one that didn''t scorch the planet and redden your soft, fleshy rinds. A controlled, sterilized environment. A human utopia. Captured sunlight was the final frontier, the ultimate addition to the dome. You needed nothing else yet curiosity brought you out of the dome. You had an eye for ruin, a taste for it.


    You both wore special suits. There were helmets on your heads, holographic displays over your eyes. Your suits even emitted ultraviolet beams from the forehead, a visual aid to study the world you''d blinded.


    "Sure is dark out here."


    "Cold, too."


    "Thank goodness for these suits."


    "And the dome!"


    "It''s like we never needed the sun at all.


    "Poor sun! Wherever it went, I hope it makes some friends!"


    A pause.


    "Nah!" In unison.


    Laughter. Laughter.


    We were an apocalyptic punchless at best, sunless, ruined. But we were grateful, too, accepting of the ice which took us in and reinvented us in its image. We were blessed to be reinvented as crystals while the rest of the planet disintegrated. But the comment was noted. The callousness, the carelessness. You''d reappeared, intruders once more.


    The light shined on us. The sun''s rays. Our stolen savior condensed into a helmet.


    "Are they flowers?"


    "Whoa, think they''re alive?"


    "Dunno, but what a discovery!"


    "Let''s pot these suckers!"


    "Absolutely."


    They approached us, blasting us with light. Our first warmth in years. Within that shine, we tried to feel the sun. We tried and tried to regain the feelings of the old world. But no matter how hard we strained inside ourselves to return to our sunbright ways, we couldn''t synthesis an ounce of love. Darkness is fact, darkness is the whole of the world, comfortable and certain. And once your streak of light beamed the darkness away, we were reminded of a world long missed, our lost splendor of heat and gold. But a farce is a farce, and the light would leave as soon as your helmets took it away. Darkness. That was the sole truth, the sole future. And in the pitch flowers must eat, flowers must act to live.


    The helmet heads inched closer, the light intensifying, a nostalgic burn, a cruel, cruel lie.


    A hand inched forward and cupped a petal.


    The petal cracked, breaking dead crystals into your palm.


    And as it shattered, our petals froze strategically, sharpening into teeth.

 Scrap Blossoms

    In a red rocket-ship within miles and miles of Earthen scrapyard, lived Ed: a 12-year-old girl, an orphan, and the most talented scientist humanity had conceived.


    Her eyes were large, inquisitive saucers, beyond which housed an endlessly crackling world of formula and fantasy. She wore a white duster that she treated as a lab coat along with black cargo shorts that jangled from the sound of tools. Her feet were calloused and delicate as she ballet-danced across the scrapyard. She was the only human I''d known, and the most special one, too¡ªanyone thriving in this hopeless place had to be.


    Ed spent her days hacking into the abandoned spacecraft circling the Earth. The sky was glutted defunct satellites and atmospheric debris. With a holographic keyboard, Ed hacked into the abandoned satellites of Earth''s atmosphere and crash-landed them within her junkyard. She''d drive over on her repurposed hover-cycle and scavenge her catch¡ªchrome panels, food and water, medical supplies, circuit boards and memory drives and wire and tools (always tools!).


    Our world was gray, rusty, sunless. The humans had fouled up tremendously, having somehow squandered the gift of light. I gazed at the drifting metals, discarded alloy slowly rotating in clouds of rust. The anti-beauty and rot sickened me¡ªboth emotionally and physically. Since Earth was in a sad state, I, a sunflower of said Earth, was a half-dead tragedy. My stem was crinkled. And my soul(?)¡ªin shambles. I should''ve died a long time ago but I stayed around. The condition of the scrap carnival I lived within told me that I was the last of my kind. No sun, no sunflowers. I couldn''t go out like that. I had to survive. Dying as a side-effect would''ve been a pathetic way to go.


    Yet for all my willpower I still languished in front of Ed''s ship, trapped in arid, metal-poisoned dirt. I raised my flowerhead above the piles of chrome paneling and stripped bolts, unwilling to be erased by scrap. But a sunflower needs sun, all of which had been blocked out by our debris-cluster of sky. Every time Ed re-positioned a satellite, strategically clearing a sunbeam path for me, another spacecraft drifted into the newly freed space. Without fail, the metallic constellations always patched themselves.


    Ed squeezed a dish sponge over me, "Sorry, little guy. I''m doing my best."


    Ed was lovely, the greatest, my best and only friend. But I missed my father. Every flower is born knowing of Apollo, our god, but these days none of us had ever seen him. And though I strained daily to find the sun and track its energy, the polluted sky intercepted the rays, stealing Father''s light.


    One day, Ed sped back home, almost careening into her rocket. Something about her latest fishing haul had her excited. She potted me, plopped me on her desk, and injected me with a strange, sleepy-making drug¡ªthe likes of which I swore they''d only used on injured humans.


    "Ed will make you better!" she declared, right before firing up her miniature drill.


    She brought the drill close, all while sing-songing a pleasing gibberish: a bot over here, a bot over there, bots everywhere! She gave me a jolt and tinkered around as I drifted off to sleep...


    I awoke, seeing in gold, with numbers scrolling in one corner of my sight and a gear turning in another. There was a health bar at the top of my vision, indicating the plentiful vigor that righted my petaled body. I possessed data and internet and charge levels¡ªalong with scripts and programs which intuitively calculated my inner and outer welfare.


    And while my organics were purely sunflower¡ªmy petals, stem, seeds, and firmly potted roots¡ªI was mostly sunflower robot now. This sudden technological framework was shocking, completely foreign, but I''d never felt this good in my short, sunless life. Inside¡ªants. Nanos, my data called them, but they functioned as ants as they crawled through my flower veins. The ants commandeered my reconstructed body as a system of tunnels, a physical, vibrant colony.


    My pot even had wheels! I skated across the operating table¡ªjust a coffee table, truth be told¡ªpirouetting with outstretched leaves, balancing my pot upon a single wheel. I''d knocked some stray bolts onto the scratched, splintered floor¡ªbut what''s a proper flourish without a casualty or three(?).


    Ed squatted before me, leaned her head in close, and stared into my flower head at my newly installed cybernetic eye. "Do you see Ed? Ed sees you."


    "I see you, yes." My smooth voice shocked me; I expected to sound like a grainy voice-to-text program.


    "Right? Just wanted to give you something shiny. But you can turn it off. Everything inside your head is adjustable."


    My head...When I searched the data-mine within me, the activity occurred in my flowerhead¡ªlike a human. How clever!


    "Tell Ed your name." I never had a name before but as far as I knew names were human things. And with the way I felt¡ªthe mobility, the vigor¡ªI''d obviously ascended.


    "Supreme," I declared.


    "Supreme" she delightfully echoed.


    "Yes, because I have to be to survive the way I did."


    "Yay Supreme! You did the best. I know, I was there."


    "Thank you!" The gold inside flashed and flashed. Ed smiled; I flashed. Technologically speaking, this correlated to friendship.


    "Are you ready for our mission?" Ed suddenly asked.


    Mission? I wondered what we were getting into, but the details honestly didn''t matter. I inhabited my new life ready for anything. It was so exciting to have a future. The synapses in my flowerhead buzzed and crackled. The feeling had me dizzy and giddy. Was this how Ed felt? The joy of madness. The euphoria of hope. "Sure Ed," I said, "Tell me more."


    "I want to see stars," she said.


    "There must be some mixed in with the satellites."


    "Nope," she said, pulling up her holographic keyboard. "I got the readings¡ªpure scrap."


    "Wow." That was all I could manage. Humans were truly limitless creatures.


    "And we''ll see the sun, too!" Ed declared.


    My gold sensor blinked uncontrollably as Ed ooh''d and aah''d at my luminous flowerhead.


    Then Ed ran outside like a lunatic, arms outstretched to the dilapidated sky. "Isn''t it beautiful, Supreme?" I stared above at the castaway technology that repulsed me but so inspired Ed. The gunmetal sky of day had transitioned to the matte onyx of nightfall, upon which the spacecraft beamed. The scrap-lights smiled upon us. Faraway and luminous, they were her stars.


    Me, I saw beyond. I dared to imagine the sun''s rays, I dared to fantasized about the shape of my father.


    "Yes, Ed. There''s beauty out there. Together, we''ll find it!"


    *


    A funny thing: the ship came alive. Its name was Fran?ois.


    Ed wanted to take off right away but Fran?ois refused to cough up the coordinates unless we made The Fran?ois Royale shine. The rocket hadn''t taken off in months, the last time being when Ed went to board a junker she couldn''t safely yanked out the sky. Fran?ois knew that other people¡ªand other Fran?ois AIs were out there¡ªso the demand was for us to "dress him up" as he so put it. I implore you, dear friends, to consider my dignity. And that was that.


    So I went outside the ship and rolled along the front end with a wax rag while Ed worked the rear. Ed griped about the tedium of cleaning but I was a flower, stationary by nature, and moving along the ship surface with my wax-on-wax-off technique was the most exciting thing I''d ever done. Everything was novel, everything was an adventure, especially as I was still discovering my functions. The wheels included a magnetic pulse that allowed me to grip to metals, so I glided along¡ªa bit recklessly, I admit¡ªand slipped off the surface.


    But I began to fly! Hover, really. My wheels had retracted and air boosters jutted out, buoying me. So the cleaning continued, me floating along, flipping, turning, tumbling. Every motion was a trick, a new experience, something lovely for me to show off to Father when we finally meet.


    And the ship was a thing of beauty, the most luxurious junker you ever did see. From a slow perusal you''d never know it was a salvage job from the advertising satellites of popular red-and-white themed brands. But I remembered the targets of all her fishing expeditions from the past year: Target and Netflix and Chik-Fil-A and Wendy''s; Canon and Toyota and Coca Cola; YouTube and KFC; Seafood City and Jolibee¡ªand about seven different H-marts. She''d harvested their sheet metal and letters, and fashioned a THE FRAN?OIS ROYALE sign from the multi-fonted hodgepodge. And on this day, we''d made it shine.


    "Did we do good?" Ed yelled.


    "Yes, my dear," Fran?ois said. "Thank you.''


    And so we got into the ship and we were off.


    Or, well, Fran?ois chased Ed around the ship with mechanical arms, forcing her into her spacesuit¡ªwhile he also used other wall-arms to secure me in place.


    Then we took off!


    It was fascinating, knowing that Ed was looked after like that. It made me relieved that even though she didn''t have human parents, she had a Fran?ois, someone to throw a seatbelt onto her as we entered the turbulent, many G-forced ascent.


    Once we arrived in space, Fran?ois took over completely. The AI was the real captain, the ship daddy if you will. Everywhere at all times, he adjusted the various environmental settings for our safety and comfort. During leisure, he activated the zero G settings, allowing us to unburden ourselves with weightlessness. He restored gravity during turbulence, even launching the endlessly extending seatbelts towards a stubborn, stir-crazy Ed¡ªsnatching her, straitjacketing the straps over her before clicking into place.


    It was my first voyage inside The Fran?ois Royale. And despite it being a junker cobbled from salvaged orbiters, it swam through space like a dream. My gold sensor spun erratically. The stimulation of awe was a foreign and lovely feeling.


    As Ed programmed the autopilot functions, I slipped out through the below-deck tunnel beneath the captain''s quarters which safely led to an exit hatch. And hooray¡ªthe outside, the cool caress of deep space. My metal skin frosted over but I maintained functionality¡ªI was made of the same stuff as ship. I couldn''t be iced; I couldn''t be stopped. I casually glided along the ship''s gleaming red surface, taking in the sights.


    That was my job anyway: to see.


    Upon my perch I''d seek out the heat signatures of nearby satellites¡ªof which there were many¡ªand I''d report back to Ed on the promising finds. Rather than the spacecraft fishing Ed did from Earth''s surface, we''d now board them instead, gathering the supplies needed to see the sun and stars. And with the sheer amount of vehicles floating among us, Ed could''ve survived there for lifetimes. On all sides, nothing but junkers. It should''ve been obvious to us when looking up at the scrappy sky. But flying through that space was an exceptionally jarring experience.


    Up close, the satellites appeared as towers, as endless, unscalable walls. Each one was at least 30-40 times larger than our vessel. The satellites had the flags of different countries, and sometimes the logos of aeronautic companies. Even the expanse of space sometimes emitted the unforgiving claustrophobia of a labyrinth. No feeling, no warmth, no view of the cosmos to provide even momentary relief. During these stretches of road, I went into battery-saver (and though Sleep Mode was the preference, I wanted to keep Ed company).


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    Ed herself was absolutely rapt. These weren''t the stars she was looking for but these were stars of a kind, electric ones, salvageable ones. We skimmed the immense surface of a Nike satellite, it''s distinct logo gradually passing across our sights. "SWooOoooOooooOOoSH~!" Ed said, her palms flush to the windowpane, trance-like. Soon after, she arrived to another spacecraft, an enormous mass of blacked out steel. Ed read the white lettering as if it were a magic spell: "BALENCIAAAGAaa..."


    Moments like these dragged me straight out of battery-saver¡ªI knew Ed would want to board her branded stars. She hastily threw on her spacesuit and approached me wearing her comically oversized helmet. She appeared as a tremendous, walking bubble. Her big head was sunflower-like and this made her more my leader. "Fishing time!" she said. "The Balenciaga, I need that." After a twenty minute interlude to the ad-craft, Ed had stitched the metal framing of a small Balenciaga across the chest of her spacesuit.


    And onwards we went, continuing our acts of fishing. Fran?ois had parked us next to our salvage target as me and Ed floated through the below-deck exit. This time we stopped by a red-and-white salvage grounds: Fran?ois ran the show, after all. We took the usual things, the usual organics and mechanics that preserved and improved our lives. But Ed also did one more thing: she took the plants.


    Turns out, we were in the LE FLUER AMOR flower shop¡ªthe remains of it at least.


    We first took a cactus. Then a succulent. A dried rose. A Venus fly trap. Within them were the meager kernels of life. Crumpled. Beaten. The cactus spines were thin and blunt, the succulent browned, the tulip and rose petals hung limply, and the Venus fly trap had cavities. Petrified in the forever dark of the cosmos, they''d given up hope yet stubbornly clung to their horrendous, objectively worthless lives. I knew the feeling of it¡ªthe lunacy of survival. The curse of living doom.


    But we found them. And so Ed laid them on her desk, potted their limp bodies, and activated her trusty drill. A mason jar full of nanos skittered on her desk.


    Ed will help, I telepathized.


    Is Ed another name for sun?


    In a way.


    Whatever, just save us.


    I watched the whole process, even the parts where the cactus became grotesquely littered with holes¡ªwhat gore, what horror!¡ªas Ed unleashed the nanos, the eager, life-affirming ants, into the plant.


    My eye remained glued to Ed as she tinkered within one plant after another, hmming, grunting, giggling, and finally, ah-ha-ing. And right at the ah-ha! moment my sibling was reborn. The gear flashed in deep gold on the corner of my vision; the joy hummed through me. Me and Ed were great, I liked it with just us, but the sensor blinked with hope. Siblings! The gear blinked, and the flowerhead turbine spun and spun and spun.


    Before I simply bloomed¡ªbut now I knew how it felt.


    The flowers had transformed: the cactus had metal needles and a chrome-fortified husk; the succulent''s naturally red leaves were replaced with red paneling from a floating Jolibee billboard; the dried rose remained at its potpourri best¡ªwith nanos holding together its hanging leaves; and the Venus fly trap now had new teeth, mechanical ones that spun like chainsaws. Ed, clearly, was having too much fun.


    We were a crew, a scrap bouquet, a family. Each of us were grateful to Ed¡ªand beholden to the slave-driving of the great Fran?ois (Welcome aboard crew. Let''s re-plate the hulls. These asteroid dings are adding up, if I do say so myself).


    And of course we obliged, magnetizing along the underside of the ship, patching damage, healing Fran?ois after we ourselves were healed. We were healthy, happy, and eager to see the sun.


    *


    During our downtime, the bouquet of us paraded behind Ed like in the duckling story she''d told us, a tale about a duck who didn''t want to hog all the fun but the other ducks were boring and stayed at home. Ed gave us kaleidoscopic circuits, data deftly arranged into realized dreams. And because we were gifted broader lives, sentience and mobility, we began to think more deeply about our mission. We were going to find Father, to share with Apollo the gift of our festivity.


    We wondered, too, if Ed herself had parents. But we decided not to broach the topic. She was always tinkering with the ship programs or maintaining the ship wiring or scouring the net for possible software upgrades for our ship daddy Fran?ois. She also played with us, making friends of us, the injured and scarred. She even gave us names to match the branded scrap she soldered to our flower pots: Supreme, Gucci, Vlone, Chanel, Dior.


    We were inspired by her love, her care, her electronic dedication¡ªwhich only increased the questions within us. But whose taking care of you? Where is the light that feeds you?


    We thought about it for hours, for days. The trip to Father was a long one. Once beyond the debris field of Earth''s atmosphere, space was large and black and seemingly empty. The biological footprint of man and beast and fauna and star could only fill so much. The dark dominated our traveling days so we sought to explore the extent of our mechanical functions. Our wireless data transfer. The ant-nanos that sustained us like a back-up battery. The ability to see through the camera lenses of our sibling bots¡ªwith admin permission of course. By five days'' time, we knew how living looked as the Supreme-Gucci-Vlone-Chanel-Dior bouquet.


    It didn''t matter who was who. We were one now.


    The only mind we couldn''t search through was Ed''s. The formulas, the inspiration, the pragmatic playfulness of our ship''s captain. We knew and loved her actions, but her heart¡ªher good, good heart¡ªremained in shadow.


    Every day Fran?ois required a daily break (I must rest now. Ta-ta!), so Ed switched up the ship AI to a different adult frequency. A butler, a space traveler, a scholar, a bounty hunter. We wondered if any of the voices belonged to Ed''s father. The nosiness turbo''d through our systems. But she''d quickly dispel our curiosity with laughters, with insisting upon a game for us to play. Without our noticing, our silent queries dissolved. Hide and Seek. Duck Duck Goose. Tic, Tac, and Toe. Ed played, we played; all matters were settled with fun.


    Soon we arrived to trafficked space, warmer, full of rocket emissions and space ports and humans eating eggs and toast. And we were closer to the sun as indicated by the road signs, multiple ones advertising THE TEMPLE OF THE SUN. We weren''t the only ones seeking Father''s light.


    We hacked the data of other ships, searching for answers regarding their intentions with our father, but all we found were programmed coordinates; no reason for sun travel found in the algorithm, no algebraic expression of heart and mind presenting themselves in the journey toward Apollo. Perhaps the humans just liked to sun-bathe? We couldn''t understand their insistence of seeking Father, then chasing him away, only to once more seek him out. It was maddening while also strangely affirming¡ªbecause our systems were more complex than we originally thought. I, Supreme, was greater than the humans. Who would''ve thought? The revelation was stunning.


    We soon arrived to a diner space station called The Greasy Spoon. There were also several other stations nearby serving different human needs: snacks, overnight beds, ship fuel, alcohol. Everything was less abandoned and therefore cleaner, more spacious. It''s not that humanity was any more mindful about consuming the cosmos, it''s that there was just so much of it. The human ants hadn''t yet tunneled through the star systems. They were simply at their starting point and as I stared at the exhaust valves of The Greasy Spoon, I prayed for the best.


    "Let''s stop here," Fran?ois said, pulling us into the port.


    "Why?" Ed asked. "I have tons of food."


    "You need a hot meal," Fran?ois insisted.


    "The ship food can heats up. Ed is fine!"


    "A hot meal is an way of speaking, a turn of phrase dear Ed. Yes, the meal is hot. But I''ve heard that a meal with human contact is even hotter¡ªwarmer, so to speak."


    "Oookay, fine."


    She hopped into her big-headed spacesuit and we trailed behind Ed into the diner entrance.


    The waitress nodded to us so we seated ourselves and observed the facility. People observed us too; we wondered if they had plant life where they lived, if the situation was as dire elsewhere as it was on Earth. Why the stares? Were we that different? Perhaps, our strangeness made us special. When the waitress came, Ed ordered pancakes for all of us.


    "All of you?" The waitress cocked an eyebrow.


    "Yes, ma''am!"


    "Okay," The waitress turned to us. "I''ll bring you guys some water."


    "Thank you," I said.


    When the food arrived, we stared at the pancakes, the melted butter and drizzled syrup. Until now we''d only ever seen Ed packaged food. Ed dug in with her fork, tearing through her share. The water pitchers were brought out and my gold sensor brightened. The thirst for water hadn''t triggered in me since the transformation but my sensor signaled to consume it, that the biology in me would thrive from its contribution. Our bio-ports opened from the base of our stems and a root slid out and settled into the pitchers, coffee pots and otherwise. Chanel the Venus ordered the bottomless pancakes, the chainsaw teeth buzzing like actual lawn equipment. We pushed our own food to Ed and she ravenously ate our buttermilk offerings, crumbs dotting her cheeks like stars.


    "Check please," she said.


    "You from Earth?"


    "Yes ma''am."


    "It''s on me."


    "I have a little money."


    "I''m sure you do dear," the waitress said, eyeing our bouquet. "You''re resourceful, that''s for certain."


    "So I pay?"


    "That won''t be necessary, hon. Just take care of yourself."


    "Okay then!"


    "And please," the waitress now laid her hand atop Ed''s, "Come back any time."


    Ed stared up into her eyes, absorbing these moments of care, before responding. "Thank you, ma''am. Ed knows the coordinates!"


    "Great. Safe travels, hon."


    After leaving we pressed on toward deeper space, where the diner stations were increasingly sparse, where the intergalactic billboards advertised attractions that were quiet and quaint. Mountain ranges, crystal caves, hiking trails, temples. I clung to the outside of the ship, maintaining my spotter duties while my siblings worked the insides, swiftly cleaning and repairing before the whip-cracker Fran?ois completed sleep mode. Another billboard depicted a golden sunset: SUN TEMPLE ¡ª NEXT EXIT. Audibly, we oohed¡ªand Ed aahed. Amazement wasn''t a language, it was a feeling, and traveling on the cusp of Father''s light galvanized us anew. Ed programmed the coordinates for the temple and the AI responded in a cowboy lingo: ETA 30 minutes¡ªYippeekayay! before thrusting into overdrive.


    THE FRAN?OIS ROYALE landed on a golden planet¡ªliterally so. My system''s compositional analysis detected gold mineral in the dust that rose from the ship''s initial impact. Gold specks sparkled by the windows, floating slowly, hypnotically, and we as Supreme-Gucci-Vlone-Chanel-Dior tracked its movements, our stems steadily craning with the progression of the condensed ultraviolet. Ed, though she was zero parts sunflower, harmonized with our natural obedience to ultraviolet presence: her neck craned, her eyes opened with awe, she''d calmed her combustible self to allow the light passage inside her. Finally, the dust floated beyond the ship''s windows, freeing us from its spell, restoring full autonomy over our mobile systems. Ed did the same; her pupils shrank and her consciousness suddenly renewed, and she emphatically pressed a large button on the pilot''s console which opened the exit hatch. "Doors open, space cowboys. And remember everyone, see the present with both eyes." The voice was casual. The console setting described the voice as SPIKE.


    The voice confused us but Ed seemed pleased with it, so we withheld our queries. By this point we''d learned to stop searching, scanning, or analyzing everything related to Ed. Sometimes the secrets of our loved ones will come to us. This is what we hoped with Ed. She''d shown us worlds, and so we were content to wait on her to show herself. She was open but obscure. She played and joked and complimented us, but her origins were mostly unknown.


    The five of us marched out in single file, Ed at the front per usual, and once we touched the sun-infused grain of the planet, a man stopped us. He was bald and wore a golden monk''s robe¡ªthe planet''s minerals were entrenched within the fibers.


    "Hello, young travelers," he said.


    "Hi!" Ed saluted.


    "You''ve come a long way, haven''t you?"


    "We played games so it went fast."


    The monk kindly chuckled at Ed and then peered at us, the bots, "I can''t remember the last time I''ve seen a sunflower. You''ve done well, surviving on Earth."


    "We were electronically drawn from seeds," I said.


    "Even so, it''s miraculous. Your cosmic fortunes have led you here."


    We nodded. The man''s radiant energy captured our words. But we wanted him to know us. We created a holographic slide deck of our memories via data transfer. The shared flowered memory was a sad story. One of electronic waste poisoning our minerals, of the orbiting satellites we were now composed of obscuring the much-needed ultraviolet, of the people that loved us, spoke to us, watered us, leaving, shooting away from our wilted community in rockets. It was a miracle that Ed stayed. It was even more miraculous that we made it here. We''d cry if we could but it was a dead history now.


    We''d always been drowned in history, stained by its rust, but we had to go on. We opened our petals; we accepted this moment with every mechanical eye in our possession.


    "My, my, my," the monk said. "You are all so strong and lovely. The sun smiles upon you."


    The monk began walking away and we followed him; his gentle energy compelled us so. The path was lit with floating orbs of Father''s light, the golden globes massaging our flowerheads. Along the walkway were plant species unknown to me, each flower exuding vigor; the flowers were healthy, watered, proud. We arrived at the edge of the cliff; the view was prehistoric. A fine hydrating mist presided over the entire valley of plant species. The only metals were minerals¡ªnothing manufactured or welded to be found in this glowing expanse.


    Everything bloomed. The holy land was here.


    "Ooooooh," we said.


    Nobody aaah''d.


    In the distance, we heard The Fran?ois Royale''s thrusters firing. Ed had snuck away; she was leaving us. We boosted toward the ship, straining for more speed but Ed had only given us leisurely, levitating capabilities. The Monk kept up with us at no more than a power walk¡ªhow embarrassing. We didn''t have speed or speakers or signal flares even. We were flowers that could speak but without decibels to back our voices¡ª


    Suddenly, a trigger, another program coursing through our framework. Apollo had gifted us our blooming. Like the flowers of the golden valley, we bloomed, shining in our respective lights. We were the flare, we were the light to call our best friend Ed. The Fran?ois Royale ascended but quickly settled into a hover¡ªEd had seen us. The ship floated toward us and Fran?ois''s voice filled the air, harassing Ed with orders. "My God, Ed. Put your helmet back on! Are you mad, girl? The ascension pressure will kill you. And SEATBELTS. Why are you so viciously allergic to safety restraints. SIT, GIRL. SIT!"


    The ship spoke to Ed the way we envisioned Apollo would speak to us. The care and doting were reassuring on a primal level. The nanos in my soil buzzed with security. No search terms or context files in my library were available to describe the feeling inside me, the banter and bond between girl and ship. Ed and The Fran?ois Royale were a match made in comet trails.


    "Will you be back?" I yelled.


    "Of course. Ed is getting food."


    "But you have provisions!" The rest of us yelled.


    "I''m craving something warm."


    "Pancakes?" we asked. We already missed Ed; we already were panicking. Our systems had synced up into one bouquet, one heart.


    "I''ll bring some back. Ed promises!"


    Promise...That was all she had to say. The seeds of our worry disintegrated. We opened our petals, our arms, are mouths. We stretched open every part of us that we had, wanting her to understand our strange, floral hug.


    "Ed hugs you back!"


    Yes!


    "And next time I''m here..."


    We waited with anticipation. Every ant within us stood at attention.


    "I''ll bring back friends!"


    The scrap-lights of abandoned craft, their advertisements and logos, zoomed through our minds. Our future siblings were out there somewhere, and we''d already begun to name them.

 Firestarter

    Falln knew something was up¡ªhis monkey senses told him so. In the distance, plumes of smoke darkened the horizon line, and rows of once mighty trees gradually disappeared. As a tamarin, an un-fanged, un-formidable monkey, vigilance was a way of life, and the steadily burning forest was something to take note of. What he noticed was twofold: firstly, that burning was a beautiful thing¡ªbecause flames crackled and snapped and danced and reveled in all the fun that monkey-kind craved, especially for Falln and his tribe, as their fur was the red-orange of every blaze. They called themselves fire monkeys, the flaming tamarins¡ªflamarins. It was catchy. Very cute. The tribe loved it. When they swung, they swung together, flouncing about the forest like flames. But secondly, though, flames were deadly. Their fur was flammable, their skins cookable, and no amount of fire worship could change that. Falln, being Falln, wasn''t a simple chimp. Not a smidgen of the expected banana-eating, poop-flinging ignorance could be found in him. He loved The Burning Forest as much as his kinfolk, he really did, but dying for it(?)¡ªhe wasn''t quite sold on all that. Death, to him at least, was decidedly problematic, so he figured speaking up would be the responsible thing to do.


    "Hey guys." Falln swung upside-down from his tail, pointed to the smoke. "The fires are close."


    "It''s warm, isn''t it?" The same dreamy smile swept amongst the flamarins.


    "Maybe we should get moving."


    "Why? The Burning Forest is home."


    "You do remember that this used to be called The Raining Forest?" And it was. Their home was absolutely The Raining Forest, though Falln was baby during the last of those days. Still, he''d remembered the tribe''s talk of it since he didn''t know what rain was. Water from the sky. He''d never seen it but it was a gorgeous story, one he''d held on to. Amusing enough. But the flames were what he knew.


    "What can you do?," his tribesman said, "The Burning Forest has a better ring to it. Besides, do we look like rain monkeys?" The flamarin lifted his arm to the light. The reds glistened, crackling spectacularly. "We''re flames."


    "That''s not how this works."


    "Says you."


    And that was that. The monkeys swung off without a care. As the smoke rose in the distance, the flames heightened, the flamarins chimped. They clapped their paws, their excited screeching piercing the air. For them, the Burning Forest was perfect in every way. Falln wanted to believe this too. The flames inspired him. They moved freely and decisively. Deep inside he too believed they were flame¡ªto a point. He gazed in admiration at the red-orange inferno, the black plumes of smoke trailing upwards into Heaven, the sky itself scarred in beautiful, beautiful soot¡ª


    And then a tree crumbled into a blackened pile of itself.


    Falln snapped to attention¡ªDeath, it was real¡ªand he left the territory and vine-swung over toward the flames, the steadily disintegrating horizon line. He focused toward distant vines in his travel route, looking everywhere but the ground. Falln, in his quest to avoid the surface, kept reinventing the game of his life.


    The Floor is Teeth was the first game¡ªback when the only dangers were snakes and jaguars and gators and other toothy creatures. Back when the forest was known for its rain. And then came the fires. The deafening crashing of trees. Unknown imprints in the floor which Falln later learned were tire tracks, machine trends. His game evolved to more frightful forms. The Floor is Wheels. The Floor is a Woodchipper. The Floor is a Bulldozed. There were a thousand ways for a tree to die, and thousands of more ways for a flamarin to suffer the carnage.


    Falln swung onwards, black smoke rising and choking him as he drew closer to the site of the burning. Suddenly, a bright glint caught his eye, a grounded object distracting him. And who was a monkey to ignore the draw of shine? He gingerly descended the thin branches, carefully bending them downward. As he drew closer to the ground, the treetops and smoke caged him, and his little heart pounded away. One branch above the ground. He curled his tail around the branch and hung upside-down, reaching for the object¡ªreaching, reaching¡ªuntil he grabbed it. Success. The small perplexing item was interesting. He shook it and liquid sloshed about its transparent container. He flicked his thumb over the ridged wheel and a sudden spark shocked him. He flicked again, produced flame, then he shot back upwards into the tree, punching through the smoke, grateful to escape solid ground.


    At the tribal grounds he settled into a tree nook and clutched the lighter. He played with the flame, flicking it on and off, on and off. He couldn''t stop. The magic provided by the Burning Forest, its warmth and flamarin color, was addictive. But he soon stopped¡ªtired was tired¡ªand curled up to sleep. But in the darkness he heard a soft commotion of his tribe, and even glimpsed an army of hazel eyes glowing between the tree branches. Falln, exhausted, drifted out of consciousness, but not before a chant formed. "King, King," the tribe said. "God, you''re God!" they also said.


    *


    He woke in a different spot from where he first slept. The tree branch didn''t caress him, the surface was decidedly thicker. He had a headache too, a strange weight bearing down on his skull¡ªwhich he soon discovered was a crown of bananas. The tribe surrounded him and stared, their hazel pupils no longer glowing but just reflecting in the sun. And, most noticeably, his hands and tail were empty¡ªpanic¡ªuntil seeing a few flamarins before him, tapping the Firestarter, shaking it and such.


    "Give it! You''ll burn us!" Falln shouted, snatching the Firestarter.


    "I can''t get it going anyway."


    "Because you''re being a dumb-dumb." Falln checked the Firestarter for damage, and worried over the mysterious liquid that sloshed inside.


    "That''s okay, fire is for kings."


    "How''d you decide that?"


    "We''re flames but you''re the most flaming of us all. You''re the Fire King!"


    "Falln, I''m just Falln."


    "King Falln!"


    "No, Falln¡ª"


    "Gather round! King Falln will show us flame!"


    They stared at Falln with hope, and he, not seeing the harm, summoned the flame. A chorus of screeching, clapping, backflips. They leapt from tree to tree. The monkeys converged jubilantly as one being, one flame. Falln couldn''t kill their joy, and in fact, felt it too. He waved the Firestarter in the air, conducting the clan''s primal performance.


    "Lead us," they said. "Tell us what to do!"


    Falln wasn''t prepared for that. He didn''t care to lead or anything like that, but since he was here, since life presented him with a tangible, controllable fire, he thought, Hey, why not? Let''s get ambitious.


    "Humans," Falln said. "They''re always up to something. Let''s see what."


    *


    Falln had a plan: he''d give the tribe the basics about the humans he''d seen in The Burning Forest. In his daily life, he''d seen a thing or two. Such as each former burn site, within weeks and months of the fires, becoming settled by humans. An obvious cycle. Fire, then humans. One came and the other came next. The mystery of humans was slightly unlocked. Just like birds came and went with the seasons, humans followed the flames.


    Find their fire, Falln was going to say next, Maybe they''re the living firestarters. But the tribe dispersed. No direction, no clues, no order. As soon as he said humans, the tribe began their pursuit. Their chief concern was playing with fire. Saving the forest wasn''t a concern at all.


    So Falln stood in the tree, alone, with nothing to do but eat from his banana crown and restlessly wait.


    By sunset the flamarins returned, bringing back an assortment of items. The haul was mostly trinkets from the nearby human villages. Some wore headscarves from the women. Shirts, tank tops, sandals. Others stole shiny rings. One, in particular, kept bringing back boiled eggs, which especially irked Falln¡ªbaby theft and all.


    "The humans made these," the tribesman said, "With fire."


    Screeching, nervous climbing, eyes widening.


    Falln himself was confused. He knew about cooking¡ªhuman magic¡ªbut was deeply irked by the disappeared hatchlings, the arcane kidnapping. Besides, that didn''t get them any closer to the reason for the Burning Forest. Villages never burned. Cooking, though performed with open flame, didn''t do this. His mind turned and turned...but the hearts of his clan were filled with unrestrained fervor for the human bounty of flames. An antsy energy tore through them, urging them to find more, touch more, and become sticky with soot.


    "Wait, hold it¡ª"


    But they were off again. Boiled eggs, fire-craft¡ªFalln''s plan was purely in shambles.


    The reluctant king had had enough.


    Falln left under the cover of darkness, clutching the Firestarter within his curled tail. The stars were pretty. The moon glowed with a non-threatening, non-burning splendor. And most importantly of all, the tribe was asleep. He swung from the vines, leaping from treetop to treetop, speeding through the night toward the source of the fires.


    Soon he arrived to the fire site, a graveyard of blackened trees, and perched on a naked treetop. Burnt, flaky leaves floated down upon his landing. He gingerly navigated the burned branches and surveyed the surroundings. All night long he scaled trees, sniffed their crevices, dug his claws underneath the bark, but found nothing. Though, of course, he wasn''t exactly sure what he was looking for. With the last of the moonlight, he left the graveyard and slept in the foliage of a nearby tree untouched by flame but dusty with ashes.


    In the morning Falln set off again. He hid from sight and swung through the thicket, following the paths and trails and roads that linked one human village to the next. Occasionally he spotted one of his fellow tribe members slinking about a village, sneaking off with clothes and pots and beads and rings. He ignored them, though, and pressed on. He travelled until nightfall. He was tired and weak and hardly able to grip a branch. But the more he fatigued, the harder he gripped¡ªThe Floor is Danger, The Floor is Hell, after all. He propelled through the forest, a small determined spark in the night, until at last encountering a terrifying yet marvelous sight: lights.


    Hundreds of them. Thousands of them.


    The lights scaled the mountainous city, decorating the curves and hills and winding roadways.


    He''d heard humans speak of such immense settlements before. And now he was here. In the night, the city was illuminated. The bright lights glowed and glowed, and an ease was pulled from his exhausted body. New energy filled him: hope, he guessed.


    Falln screeched, he backflipped, he''d gone full chimp.


    *


    The City of Flames, that''s what Falln called it, and its buildings were painted in whites and blues and oranges and yellows. There were pink buildings too. Lime as well. And naturally there was fire: cooking fires and matches and candlelight. There were flames filling lanterns, and streetlamp bulbs glowing hot and bright. Humans lit fires by their mouths and exhaled smoke. Dark alleys brightened as trashcan fires flashed to life. Fire¡ªfire everywhere. Falln was positively seduced.


    He''d scale the apartments, clinging to the windowsills, peering inside. He watched people watch TV. He watched children watch their phones. He danced when they danced, and sung when they sung¡ªthough he scurried away when folks investigated his screechy high notes. After having his fill of one sight, he moved on to the next, the continuous itch of his curiosity urging him onwards.


    And within each home, the flame-related novelties continued to appear.


    Rooms were illuminated by glowing bulbs. Stoves summoned flame¡ªreds, oranges, even blue ones. Objects of flame were abundant. A lamp. A lantern. Candles. Incense. There were Firestarters like what he gripped in his tail, what the humans called lighters.


    Fire lived everywhere yet nothing burned down.


    He waited for the damage, for the flames to take all their items away. Yet the fires caught at the city''s convenience and graciously disappeared¡ªon command it seemed¡ªand Falln couldn''t help but take it a little personally. The City of Flames was untouched while the Burning Forest crumbled.


    He''d ruminate over the legend of the Raining Forest. How could we be fire monkeys when we were rain monkeys first? Do the flames love us or are we lying to ourselves? But Falln shook the thoughts away; the negativity didn''t serve him. He geared his mental energies on appreciating the city instead.


    He''d pluck fruit from the food stands, trade a couple backflips for bags of peanuts, and swipe handfuls of popcorn while behind as vendors'' backs were turned.


    Falln even climbed to the peak of an immense building, a silver fortress of glass called a skyscraper, and perched atop its roof edge. Intermittent windows were lit by lamps and hallway lighting. And by sundown the humans were gone: the building emptied out on a schedule, a flood of suits and dresses rushing outside to join the city''s bustle. Nights, the shining tower belonged to Falln and Falln alone.


    In one days, he''d accomplished so much.


    He''d even begun his mission.


    Atop the skyscraper he stored the city''s fire. He didn''t know what caused The Burning Forest to burn, but he possessed a vague sense that the source was here. As such, he stole all the flames he could.


    Falln dragged about a potato sack and collected matchbooks from people''s back pockets. He stole lighters from Quik-Marts and gas stations. He''d discovered Bunsen burners, sparklers, and firecrackers. He smashed high voltage boxes and fuse boxes and car headlights. At night he threw rocks at street-lamps. He tipped over lanterns. Before he slept, he emptied his potato sack bounty onto the skyscraper and hoped for a dimmer cityscape.


    Stolen story; please report.


    But from atop his skyscraper, tired from a long evening of work, The City of Flames exploded with light. The windows, the porches, the traffic posts all beamed.


    Firestarters sounded crisply in the night as the city folks dragged on their cigarettes, indulgently swallowing flames.


    *


    The second day, foolishness day, one that Falln should''ve known he was bound for.


    That morning he awoke to the city''s typical signs of morning, the odors of cooked eggs (yuck!), the screaming of vendors, honking cars, construction equipment roaring to life, good-morning-good-day-hello-beautiful-I-love-you-be-well chatter¡ªand one other dreadful sight: flamarins swinging from the power lines.


    "Hey guys!" Falln called out. "What are you doing?"


    "Monkeying around, obviously." They continued to swing, a split growing in the wire.


    "Stop, that''s dangerous!"


    "Come on Falln, we won''t fall." They laughed, they swung, and¡ªwhen the wire sparked¡ªthe monkeys jumped off and landed on a building canopy. "Fire," they said in unison, awed, and ran off.


    Falln traveled around the city, searching for the others. He quickly found them¡ªwho''d miss them with their reckless antics(?). They snatched the lights out of smokers'' hands. They hid away the long wax candles on the altars of churches and scattered them on the church steps. They climbed street lanterns and punched at the glass. They snuck into gas stations and crushed every pack of cigarettes. The fire monkeys weren''t as slick as Falln¡ªthey were brazen and loud and never hid. They just climbed out of reach, taunting the humans.


    And the humans were upset. They threw bread, they threw rocks, they brandished brooms. Some pulled out guns. Even the most unsophisticated forest critter knew about guns. Even the snails and grubs knew. The fish knew. And the flamarins, obviously, knew¡ªbut didn''t care. Shots were fired. The monkeys dodged, thankfully, and returned later to pick up the still-warm shell-casings. You didn''t need a human brain to know that shots were done with fire.


    The city was large, its entertainments constant and various, and there was no taming the flamarins amid the flames and noise and climbable structures. Monkey see, monkey do and do and do, never stopping, obsessively engaging their new toy-filled world.


    "Help me!" Falln called to a clan mate, "There''s lighters in this gas station!"


    "I already have one!" the monkey responded, turning away to light a cigarette. He puffed rapidly, the cigarette burning down to its end within seconds. And then he lit another.


    Falln tried with others but found his brethren in various states of disgrace: some monkeys stood on chimneys, inhaling the smoke; a few ate candles; others climbed the streetlights and traffic lights and porchlights, burning their eyeballs against the glowing bulbs; and the monkey who''d chain-smoked his entire pack now licked and snorted the pile of ash.


    The flamarins were one with flame¡ªsupposedly.


    Though to Falln it was madness through and through. "We don''t have time for this chimping," he sighed.


    That night he didn''t climb atop the skyscraper. The sites were too bothersome. He broke one of the mid-level windows with a rock and curled up on a office chair. The ambient hallway lighting grated his nerves some, but at least his surroundings were the dimmest he''d seen in months.


    Once asleep, he dreamed of the Raining Forest.


    The sky was dark blue. The vegetation was green and damp. The world was humidity-hot, not flame-hot like what he was used to. Everything was strange and unfamiliar but the nesting grounds were intact. The tree wood were many-ringed and long-lived, no traces of burn-marks or cinders. And the flamarins were simply tamarins, orange-haired and wet, relaxingly drenched.


    He walked on the forest floor. He didn''t think of a human. He didn''t think of a machine. No industrial hardware or tenacious blaze could keep him from the luxury of feeling the soil between his toes.


    The earth was his. The earth was everyone''s.


    He got on all fours and kissed the ground.


    *


    Day three¡ªhe''d stirred himself awake and from out the office window he witnessed the sight of smoke clouds darkening the forest.


    Footsteps, office chatter, the expresso steam wafting through the halls.


    Falln ran for the broken window and climbed out on the ledge.


    And that''s when he got a better look at the rolling darkness, the smoke plumes gathering right above his clan''s nesting grounds. He was frustrated. For a moment he hoped that it was just rain. That maybe the sky was in a bad mood. But no¡ªit was never a storm cloud, always a fire.


    He screeched, a shrill outcry used in emergency, and he hoped the tribe would respond. But as he descended the skyscraper, his paws burning on the hot windows, he only received pain and silence. Each monkey he saw was laid about in disgusting leisure, collapsed atop awnings, poking at sparking power lines, standing over chimneys as soot blasted their faces.


    Falln went about the town, enlisting help. He soon found some of his tribe, gathered around, looking more human than ever. They wore the same thing: black ties decorated in gold coins, stodgy fingers flipping through stack of bills, unlit cigars dangling from their mouths.


    "Guys," Falln pointed to the smoke clouds, "Our home is burning."


    "It is, isn''t it?"


    "We have to check on it!" Falln shouted.


    "If the city''s fine, we''re fine."


    "The forest, idiot. The forest."


    "What about it?" The clan mate brought his face close to Falln''s, poking his cigar out. "Hey, King. Light this, yeah? Give me a good blaze!"


    Falln zoned out¡ªhis brain couldn''t handle any more of his brethren gone chimp.


    A firetruck hit a tight corner and Falln jumped onto the rear bumper.


    "Hey! My light!" his tribesman yelled, but Falln was off.


    Other firetrucks sped out of the city as well, sirens blaring. Firefighters! The people said. Firefighters! It was the first time Falln had seen them defend the forest. Apparently they were going to save it.


    "It''s spreading!" he''d heard the firefighters say to each other, "The flames will take the city!"


    Makes sense, Falln thought, Saving yourselves.


    Disgusted as he felt, these selfish people were his only hope, so he clung tightly to the bumper, shielding himself from the wind and bugs. He kept his head low as they arrived to the fires, the black smoke rising. He could even hear the birds choke, and stray squirrels screaming as they were singed by flame. The anxiety, the heat, the dark smoke obscuring his vision. It''d all become real. Falln had never, not once, been burned by flame. He respected the fire, its touch of death, but he didn''t know the first thing about extinguishing it. Who was he, a mere monkey, to win this fight against the flamarin''s God?


    Suddenly the firetruck stopped before a burning row of trees, and Falln was first to unroll the hose reel. The firefighters didn''t flinch at the oddity of his help. They held the hose until fully released. Without a glance or sign, Falln hopped to the water pressure valve and turned it. The men gripped the hose firmly, guiding its blast into the flames. The jet damaged branches and leaves and bunches of fruit. The white smoke flew upwards from the burnt black branches. Dead tree, but dead fire too. So the firefighters persisted, and so too did Falln, hopping from truck to truck, releasing each valve.


    As Falln and the firefighters battled the flames, there were human onlookers that spoke on the disaster. The villagers were full of exclamations, mostly of the oh-no-oh-why-oh-God sort. And there were other men standing off by their trucks. They wore yellow construction vests and hard-hats. Stacks of chopped wood were tied to their vehicle roofs.


    "Can we help?" one of the workers said.


    "You''ve done enough!" a firefighter said.


    "We didn''t mean to!"


    "Who told you to clear the forest like this?"


    "We usually contain the fire!"


    The firefighter turned to the others, "Hey look! Guy never heard of an axe before. Who knew? The hard-hat kept protesting but the firefighter rolled his eyes, signaled for others to direct the spray elsewhere.


    Falln was stunned. The admission was so clear and plain. The forest fires were a human creation. The Burning Forest didn''t exist¡ªjust people who''d set the fires and built shelter upon the cinders. They''d built villages and farms and roads. They''d built the City of Flames. Within the luminous, magnificent city, Falln found refuge, and he now discovered that it was the fraud of a lifetime. Everything the humans enjoyed, the forest suffered for. And all Falln knew about the beauty of flames, their beloved wildness, had dissolved into ash.


    He unraveled his tail, and let the Firestarter go.


    *


    At some point, Falln acquired a hard-hat. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, he''d overheard from one person or another, but he didn''t know what that meant. He''d learned long ago that people say things just to say things¡ªand apparently flamarins do things just to do them. So when one firefighter said, "Hey, give that monkey some head-gear!" Falln caught the incoming helmet and put it on.


    Heavy(?)¡ªyes. And oversized, too. But it had a strap so he secured it with ease.


    Good timing, too, as entire clusters of foliage dropped onto the emergency vehicles, impacting in harsh thuds. But nobody ducked out the way or sidestepped or otherwise dodged. Everyone was singularly focused on combatting the spreading flames. As more firetrucks sped into the forest, screeching to sudden stops, Falln bolted toward their hose reels and worked the cranks like a professional. The dust flew up from the crackling wildfire. The ashes and soot caked every human face, and every inch of Falln''s fur. And the burnt hollows emitted sickening pop-pops that Falln knew were incinerated, exploded grubs.


    But the Burning Forest¡ªor Burning Humanity, rather¡ªdid its thing: it burned, it smoldered, it blackened, and in the distance out towards Falln''s home...it reduced.


    The water jets continued onwards, uselessly producing smoke. From up above, helicopters dumped great quantities of sand over the forest. But the taunting inferno remained just as strong, refusing to be smothered.


    Right above the flamarin home, the flames erupted.


    Falln fought the flames, angry at his former god. He helped aim a hose-reel with several other men. Go out, please. Don''t take the whole forest.


    Meanwhile his tribe, hopelessly addicted to fire, streamed into the forest. Dozens of clan-mates swung across the tree branches, deftly avoiding the flames, shooting right over Falln''s head. Each monkey was so mindlessly delighted by the burning, they hadn''t considered that they should save their homes.


    In fact: their were madly invested in doing the opposite.


    When the tribe realized the firefighters were, indeed, fighting the fires, they rained down upon them, ripping off their hats, biting their hands, throwing rocks. A melee erupted: the firefighters abandoning their posts, running from the monkeys. But the flamarins were relentless. They chased the humans down. They stomped and clawed at the rubber hoses. They created lit torches from thick branches and torched the nearby brush.


    Wildfire consumed the flamarins, their souls, a tenacious blaze that then ignited tree after tree after tree after tree, endlessly it seemed.


    This is how the Burning Forest died. The humans torched it. And the tribe finished the job.


    And there were no more valves to turn, no amount of dirt to blanket the wildfire, nothing Falln could possibly do but flee as the flames were everywhere by now. Suddenly, he found himself within a ring of burning trees, and he hopped to the first safe tree he spotted and ditched the scene.


    Falln frantically swung away, heading straight to the only sanctuary he could think of: the city. Each tree he leapt from was set aflame seconds after. The gap in time grew shorter and he was riddled with anxiety. He kept poised, though, because the fires were nothing new, and he weighed his options as calmly as a monkey running for his life possibly could. Putting out the fires? Beyond his means. Running from the fire? Not forever¡ªthese fires were fierce and only getting faster.


    Flight. That''s all he could think of. He''d lost his forest but there was so much world for him to inhabit. And as he pressed onward, panicked and fatigued, he did his best to convince himself of that. The world is large. It can''t all burn. There was no possible way. No way at all. But the doubts lingered. And sparks of embers danced in his peripheral vision, taunting him, threatening him.


    And his uncertainties only flared when he''d at last reached the city: a tremendous blaze had taken over, and the backdrop of rejoicing flamarins and panicked humans told him all he needed to know. The buildings, the power lines, the cars and flowerbeds and store signs were burning. In the distance, the flames crept up the many floors of Falln''s own skyscraper, its glass melting within the heat and transforming the building into a burning, black tower: a scene of destruction through and through¡ªand Heaven to the tribe.


    Though in the midst of raging incineration, a curious sight caught Falln''s eye.


    While the various metals and cloths and glassworks were melted down in various ways, the vast majority of the city''s masonry remained undamaged, wholly intact.


    The flames licked the stones, kissed the stones, loved the stones. It had to be love because the singed stones never crumbled or cracked or broke beyond repair.


    The walls could handle the burn. Both stone and flame could exist together. Trees couldn''t survive. But rocks were forever.


    Falln curled his tail around a broken piece of brick and picked he up. He squeezed hard. He slammed it against the ground. He tried to tear it open with his hands. He then attempted peeling it like a banana. But its constitution remained intact, impenetrable. Whatever secrets the stone contained, couldn''t be razed or dissolved or otherwise melted. Yes! Falln thought, There''s hope!


    And then he left the city¡ªtoo chaotic, too risky. His "The Floor Is" game was rendered obsolete by his climbing, swinging, torch-wielding brethren. The entire settlement was a risk, a hot zone, a chaotic and unpredictable death waiting to happen.


    Falln took off along the river which, thankfully, was untouched by the blaze. He slept on the ground for once, cooled by the damp soil on the bank. He camped out there for a week, watching the forest lose height with each passing day. After the week, the forest was done, purely flattened and black. A crispy landscape, dead but beautiful, its smokiness filling Falln''s soul with the memory of the greatest blaze ever. He hated that it costed him his home but at least he had his life¡ªand at least he had a vision for his new life, his durable, promising future. Alright, let''s find these idiots.


    He crawled along the bank, seeking out his siblings, the precious stone in tow.


    *


    A month later: The City of Flames was mostly restored. Gosh, the humans are fast. Falln was impressed at the human ability to construct shelter, to turn the world''s resources into forms that served them and them alone.


    And now the flamarins benefited, too.


    Falln''s assistance was noticed by the fire rescue people, so when he arrived back to the city he was immediately recognized. Some firefighters knew him as a brother because they had a sense for strong-spirited risk-takers, another kind of clan that Falln never expected to find himself in. But the locals mostly noticed Falln by his hard-hat¡ªhe''d kept it on during the week-long inferno. He''d used it to collect insects and berries. He scooped river water in it. And he wore it for its intended purpose as he traveled beneath, crinkled, hell-blasted trees.


    As soon as Falln approached a firetruck, the pair of gruff men inside flagged him down. "Brother! You survived!"


    Falln didn''t really want to greet him them with the unintelligible oo-oo-ah-ah jabber. He was a monkey, of course, but in this situation it somehow felt unbecoming. He tipped his hard-hat to the men and they smiled.


    "So polite!" One man said. "Cigar?"


    Falln waved his hand to say No¡ªbut his clansman behind him held out their open palms. The oo-oo-ah-ah''s were significant and shameless. The fireman went around to each monkey, handing out cigars, while the second firefighter followed-up with a lighter.


    They all stood around, smoking, reminiscing¡ªmeaning the humans talked while Falln nodded.


    "I see you have no place else, huh?" One man sadly said.


    A nod, but expressive, a bit of soap-opera sadness that Falln saw on TV once.


    "We''re doing our own rebuilding, too."


    Falln looked the man in the eyes, smiled, and with his tail he lifted up the rock. The tribe¡ªwhile puffing away at their cigars¡ªalso lifted up their tail-gripped rocks. And now their monkey vocalizations were calmer, explanatory, and this time it was the firemen who were nodding. There was a language barrier, yes, but shelter was something all animals understood.


    Fast-forward an entire month: the City of Flames was restored with the addition of a Flamarin reserve. At the entrance was a stone-etched obelisk labelled, MONK¨¦ PARK. Inside, the tribe lived their best, fire-worshipping lives as the territory was completely made of stone. Every other day or so, a huge van would come deliver more monkey-friendly masonry, a wide array of rock-sculpted trees and jungle gyms and torches. For nighttime, they were provided cement domes with in-ground fire pits.


    For Falln, they even provided him a throne. He never sat in it, though, as lording over other beings didn''t sit right with him. He instead encouraged his siblings to store the fire-starting implements in the empty seat, an altar to their god.


    Besides, his real gift had nothing to do with flame.


    Way in the back of the Monk¨¦ Park was a cinderblock cave, tunnel-like and dark. He''d go inside for restful isolation after a long day of making sure their home was truly fireproof¡ªMenace-proof actually. There were sounds, drip-drip, drip-drip, accompanied by a manufactured mist machine that spread dampness all over. This building contained the only pieces of technology in the entire reserve.


    And the star feature(?): a state-of-the-art rain wall with a projected forest and never-ending deluge.


    Falln hadn''t asked for this but there were apparently many humans who remembered the days of the Raining Forest. On top of being inventive, destructive, and unpredictable, the humans were also long-lived, casually and frivolously ancient.


    He''d stay there for hours, sleeping in his chilly refuge. For the first time in his life, he had access to the sensation of coolness, to a frosty and soothing tranquility. And he had access to the wall, its stunning visuals, its convincing audio, and the hidden feature the human who installed it bragged about. Touch it, my friend. Don''t be afraid! It''s truly amazing, the things we engineers can do.


    Falln remembered back to when he first tried it out. He closed his eyes, which made the rain hit louder, vigorous pitter-patters consuming his mind. He thought about the raining monkeys, the unsuspecting and peace-filled ancestors. What a beautiful life they must''ve had¡ªto not try so hard, to be in the essence of rain, to be a monkey and nothing more. And that was the mindset Falln adopted in that moment, of forgetting everything and of knowing very little.


    He reached out his hand, slowly, slowly...


    And when he at last touched the wall, his soul felt it as a waterfall.

 Doom Blossom

    The doom blossom rose out of Sun Girl''s head like a precious newborn¡ªcute, but undeniably dumb-looking, especially to the other residents of Soul''s Landing. In these parts, everyone, everything, was dead. Sun Girl''s flower, while charming and accurate¡ªshe''d died of seasonal allergies, after all¡ªobviously signaled that she wasn''t representing death the way she should. Death had its own aesthetic, and the doom blossom appeared to the other ghouls, ghosts, skeletons, and Frankenfolks what the living would call hipster. Just be dead was the general sentiment. The flower didn''t even limp or decay; it perked up tall and rigid and shone in an aggravating bright yellow. A sunflower of all things¡ªnot a nightshade or white snakeroot or oleander or other poisonous, lethal flowers¡ªbut a happy, obnoxiously alive sunflower.


    At night Sun Girl lay in her tombstone-shaped home, purely constructed of the stone and clay she''d been buried in, and wondered if there were others like her that displayed a "living" quirk, a twist. Her current neighbors just didn''t understand her gift, the botanical charms of the dirt in her head, the roots that nourished themselves beneath her face. Even in death, individuality, creativity, were important to her. And she honestly didn''t believe it should be all that unique to appreciate life. We''d all lived it, she thought. Who hurt you?


    As a bleach-white skull, she still retained memories of her human upbringing¡ªbeing the only black chick in school with Vans, openly loving white-boy bands like Linkin Park and Panic at the Disco, being a Christian even though she was a "smart girl". Doom Blossom life was annoyingly similar to flesh-and-bone life, but those commonalities convinced her of one thing: that she couldn''t possibly be the only soul with soil in her head and flowers on the mind.


    She''d heard of one person like her, a prior resident of Soul''s Landing, a renown idiot for much the same reasons as her¡ªbut also because the dude was objectively stupid. They called him Loon, a play on the massive snot bubble ballooning out of his skull. His living quirk was all-too-noticeable, and completely representative of sub-human IQ. Honestly, Sun Girl thought it was dumb too. Snot, really? Such a boy. But the genius¡ªor perhaps happenstance¡ªof the dead producing mucus was more captivating than she cared to admit. Folks knew him because Loon was said to fly. The snot bubble couldn''t contain helium, but managed helium physics anyway. Loon was just like that. He made things work, even when they shouldn''t.


    Rumor had it, there was a colony full of the dead with living twists. They were aptly named Twist Tribe, a community of dead possessing exiled strangenesses. Life, like everyone else, escaped them, but not completely. Something in their souls compelled them to live, even after their conventional lives expired.


    On the night of a silvery full moon, Sun Girl left Soul''s Landing and entered the Weeping Forest.


    She''d left for Twist Tribe with nothing but the clothes on her back¡ªa black crop top, black leggings (slimly fitted to her bone legs), and a red flannel around her waist. Another leftover of her past life: the fashion. As a final touch, she also wore a yellow headscarf over her sunflower. It was something she did at night, another remnant of her human existence. Wrap it. Wrap it tight. In life, the scarf protected her hair, but post-death the headwear served a more vital function: protecting her living quirk from wicked spirits.


    Bloodlusts, they were called, spirits that floated in the wild as red, demonic energy. These were folks that died bitter or with grudges, whose souls rejected second forms. Instead, they were empowered by envy and greed, and chose to possess others and vaporize their souls into red, toxifying energy.


    The Weeping Forest were named for the bloodlusts, their sorrowful outcries when searching for a soul.


    Needless to say, precautions¡ªor in Sun Girl''s case, headscarves¡ªwere a must.


    For three days she travelled through the Weeping Forest, passing treacherous landmarks such as Banshee''s Grove and Lake Styx, concealing her petals from the haunting spirits of the wild. It was dangerous to travel without a tribe, but at the current moment, she was tribeless¡ªwhat choice did she have? Without a real tribe, the after-life would be long, eternally disheartening.


    So she followed her inner compass toward Twist Tribe, carefully avoiding the dangers of the woods. There were no road signs in the forest, but the dead had an awareness of kindred spirits, of familial souls. The extra-sensory clan-finding was built into their essence. It''s how spirits found peace. So Sun Girl¡ªmapless, directionless¡ªhad legitimate guidance toward her destination. She followed her intuition, slowly but surely moving closer to a true home¡ª


    You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    Suddenly, a gust.


    Frozen wind¡ªthen hot.


    The bloodlusts as a red, distorted wall.


    "Pay the toll."


    "Like with money?"


    "Your soul."


    "I like my soul. Go away."


    "We like it too. It feels...bright."


    "Leave me alone. I''m passing through."


    "Sure, continue on. Once we''ve fed!"


    The bloodlusts lunged at Sun Girl, shooting at her in a fluid stream. The girl ran like she''d never run before, tightening her head scarf mid-stride. She knew that if they possessed her soul, the flower would be the first to go. She imagined its future wilt, its final browning before crumbling in the middle of this loveless, spite-fueled forest. Hide your quirk, the number one rule. And, of course: run.


    She ran and ran and ran and ran, hopping over logs and rocks and creeks when necessary. The good thing about death: you didn''t need to catch breath or pump oxygen through a framework of bone. But without muscle to propel her she could only travel half as fast as typical fleshlings¡ªmeanwhile, the bloodlusts flew. Sun Girl leapt over a small creek and headed straight into a wooded clearing. Immediately, she knew this was a bad idea. The trees told her so, their decayed wood rising up like the bars of a grotesque birdcage. And the darkness between the trees suddenly filled with the red, swirling essence of bloodlusts.


    "Your scarf. Remove it."


    "No," Sun Girl lifted her fists and slowly rotated to scope out her situation. Punching a bloodlust would gain nothing¡ªthey were nothing but bad, unbreathable air¡ªbut fighting seemed like the only option, her best chance at escaping the woods. She pivoted about, confirmed that yes, she was surrounded. The red, boiling vengeance thickened around her. She wished for a weapon, a blessing against the spirits who sought to consume her. Even without true recourse against the demons, she was determined to survive the situation, petals intact.


    In life, God''s protection helped her, and as a spirit she believed no differently. Please God, help a loyal skull out. Grant me protection¡ª


    The bloodlusts lunged at her¡ªthrough her¡ªand the heaviness of their grudge weighed her down, forcing her to her knees. The headscarf was blown away like a limp, helpless sun. The sunflower was exposed, swirling with the red forces that threatened it. Seeds scattered about the ground¡ªSun Girl didn''t know she had them¡ªbut the petals remained unharmed. Still, the bloodlusts were unrelenting, and their menacing tornado gave Sun Girl a sinking, dreadful feeling.


    And then it stopped: the swirling, the redness, the scattering seeds¡ªeverything.


    From her peripherals, a golden light began to glow and expand from her head, from her sunflower. The Doom Blossom collected light, just as sunflower science dictated. But the release of light was a completely new trick, and a welcome blessing for that moment. The radiance tore the bloodlusts away from each other, their once-solid whirlwind thinning and dissipating and at last dropping to the ground as a fine red powder. Their remnant dust slunk away slowly, escaping the Doom Blossom''s rays, taking refuge behind the shadows of the twisted trees.


    A cold, ghoulish wind blew through the clearing, banishing the leftover particles.


    And Sun Girl''s light dissipated as well, darkness creeping back into its rightful home between the trees. The forests'' dangers were gone for now, but the girl had to move quickly. She picked her scarf up off the ground and began wrapping it around her head¡ª


    "Do it again," said a voice.


    "Do what?" She tied her scarf hastily, expecting the return of a bloodlust.


    "The glowy thing."


    "I don''t even know what that is."


    "Me neither, but it was cool."


    A popping sound was heard in the pitch. Snot bubble pop.


    Sun Girl relaxed. "You''re Loon."


    "If you know that then let''s go already."


    "What¡ª"


    He snatched Sun Girl''s hand, jerking her beyond the trees. She couldn''t free herself from his firm grip, and panic set in once more, especially at the mysterious blowing sound that followed. And in that moment of terror, her illumination returned, beaming from the sunflower with a radiant spiritual energy.


    "I read somewhere that flowers absorb evil¡ª"


    "Shut up and let me go!"


    "They cripple bad energy, like, badly."


    Sun Girl bit him, hard, but Loon was a skull too. No flesh or nerves or physical pain.


    His grip tightened.


    But the doom blossom''s light revealed the truth¡ªthis wasn''t a kidnapping or an act of evil. A massive snot bubble expanded from Loon''s nasal passages, growing 2-, 3-times as large as their own bodies, expanding into the form of a hot air balloon.


    "This is gross."


    Loon smiled. He blew once more and up they went, their feet levitating above the ground. Sun Girl''s fears slowly transformed into mild disgust and then amazement. She held onto Loon with both hands, and her flower''s glow remained luminous. She''d become a fully animate headlight, a guide through the darkness toward Twist Tribe. Their ascension lifted them high above the forest, away from the bloodlusts, and away from Sun Girl''s former home.


    Hidden in the treetops within the towns and villages below, Sun Girl felt the eyes of the dead, the twist-less haters grumbling about what appeared to be an annoying golden balloon, floating haplessly, eclipsing their view of moon. But the kindness in her prayed for their fun, for their discovery of imagination, and that in her and Loon''s flight the others would accept another face of death, a doomless sight, a happy, happy way to be dead and treasure your second, unexpected lives.

 Swamp Daddy

    Legend has it...began the stories about infamous scourge of southern Louisiana, the monster that''d roamed the murky waters for the past thirty-five summers. Swamp Daddy, being the boogie monster of the Bayou, had heard all the tales, many of which were true. For starters, he was huge, a full tail longer than even the largest of gators, and much thicker and heftier too, a living stone. The gator had also destroyed countless boats belonging to human pursuers. He''d swallow their handguns and rifles, tear their fishing lines to shreds, and bludgeon the most tenacious hunters with his bulbous tail. He, too, was a ferocious hunter, his mouth opening into a dark chasm of his prey''s certain demise¡ªnothing escaped, nothing met the light ever again.


    But that''s where the truth ended¡ªthe rampant tales of hunting humans were false. They''d said he''d wandered onto back porches and stolen human young, an outrageous accusation.


    Swamp Daddy simply fed in typical gator fashion, attacking whatever happened to pass by¡ªa heron dipping too low to the water, a frog edging off a lily pad, vicious wildcats that dared challenge him, and all manners of creatures that fell from capsized fishing boats: bait, crawfish, catfish, other dead gators. He didn''t feel bad for consuming his brethren, but he was grateful for their sacrifice. He''d raised himself; from the moment of his hatching he relied on the swamp to sustain him, to shield him from danger until he grew large enough to become the danger.


    Swamp Daddy was convinced that nature took care of him, that nature was a patient, forgiving daddy, so he obediently followed the examples of the sun, the winds, and the fish-filled waters and led a passive existence. He disguised his shadowy presence right beneath the water''s surface, eating on opportunity, consuming the gifts that were his to take. And, whenever necessary, he fought off humans, never failing to instill hard kernels of fear in their throats. The humans called him Big Daddy then¡ªbecause he was big and they were excited about that bigness. They''d caught big gators before; they knew how to handle one. But years of failures transformed excitable litanies of We hooked Big Daddy! We finally got him! into panicked flurries of Swamp Daddy! Jesus almighty! It''s Swamp Daddy! Help!


    But as the years progressed and people realized that Swamp Daddy victims were unmaimed, uneaten, stories circulated of the gator speaking English, repeating, Stop it already! It''s pointless! Once the scared pursuers got used to the idea of a talking gator, once said gator talked them off the ledge of their own terror (It''s alright, I won''t hurt you, your kind tastes badly anyway), he''d finally gotten around to asking¡ªpolitely¡ªfor their onboard catch. That''s how he intended to eat from now on, with charm, with simple predatory diplomacy. The practice succeeded, and within that same year folks began to release half of their day''s catch into the waters where Swamp Daddy was said to roam, an offering to their newly recognized God.


    On a sunny day in late summer, he''d spotted a motorboat about twenty yards off. A three-man crew removed the tackle box and fishing gear from the vessel. Swamp Daddy''s stomach rumbled at the sight of the tackle box. He could hear the hard slaps of the flopping fish¡ªhe could almost taste them. Swamp Daddy swam up slowly, his body concealed by the waters, steadily coming into visibility starting with its eyes, then head, and finally his broad, scaly back. Thirty-five summers of this same menacing approach, thirty-five summers of fear followed by food or flight¡ªSwamp Daddy, while passive, relished in the thrill of inciting terror, an un-daddy-like indulgence in his legend.


    One long-necked man had seen the beast approaching, had stiffened in fear at the sight of the cracked yellow eyes, before quickly softening.


    "Oh, hey, look guys! It''s Swamp Daddy! Man, I thought I''d have to shoot you."


    But Long Neck didn''t even reach for the rifle at his feet; he lied because it was something good to say. Swamp Daddy felt strangely about that, an odd injury inflicted on his pride. The gator climbed ashore, disappointed. He''d adopted the human tendency to hang his shoulders like men who''d lost a large catch. But the men couldn''t read any discouragement in his expression; the gator''s primordial bone structure disguised all softness, all pretensions to humanity.


    "You hungry, Mr. Gator?" said a second man with a potbelly.


    "It''s getting to that time," Swamp Daddy answered honestly.


    "You know," the third man began to say, his dimpled chin splitting like a ditch, "They finished building that Harvest Mart past the old catfish burrows. A little pricy, a little fancy, but it ain''t so bad."


    "Pricy? What''s a price?"


    "The only way you''re gonna get food from a mega-mart like that," Dimpled Chin continued. "They''re real health conscious. Anti-preservative, anti-gluten. They sell organic."


    "You should try it!" Long Neck said, now polishing his rifle with a cloth. "That whole hipster thing isn''t right with me, but they sure do have fresh ingredients."


    "Couldn''t have said it better," Potbelly said. "They have loads of variety too."


    "Good to know," Swamp Daddy said, "I''m not opposed to some catfish."


    "Catfish?" Dimpled Chin was excited¡ªSwamp Daddy could smell several within the tackle box. "You know they got that! In fact, they got everything you can find in the swamp. But without the chemicals and cruelty."


    Swamp Daddy tilted his head to the side. He couldn''t quite marry the concepts of non-cruelty and fish kill. "But it''s dead."


    "Humanely dead!" all three said, laughing.


    Swamp Daddy wasn''t completely sold on Harvest Mart but he was hungry. "See you boys later!" He trudged along the muddy shore toward the nearby town. Along the way he''d cross the abandoned catfish burrows. The fish had been cleaned out by humans, but Swamp Daddy didn''t fault them that. Everyone had to eat, himself included. He dragged his girth along the clay, anticipating his meal of humanely killed catfish from the Harvest Mart.


    *


    Swamp Daddy lumbered through the automatic sliding doors of Harvest Mart and was greeted by a blast of cold air and a nervous smile from the pimpled boy holding the samples tray.


    "Here." The boy held out a paper cup. "Try Happy Farms Chicken Tenders."


    Swamp Daddy shook his head, no less confused by the human insistence on happily dead prey. But his stomach rumbled loudly, a growl that resonated from his cavernous belly and vibrated along the magazine racks. He opened his gigantic mouth, his yellowed teeth gleaming under the fluorescent lights, and the kid tossed the sample in. Swamp Daddy blanched at the distasteful breading, let alone the cooked meat, but he politely swallowed the happy tenders.


    "Excuse me, but do you sell catfish here?"


    "Only the happiest!" said the boy, whose nametag read ZAK.


    The response ticked against the gator''s nerves but he controlled his irritation. "Where is it?" Swamp Daddy asked.


    "The Butcher Block."


    Swamp Daddy smiled at the word butcher, and its refreshing truthfulness.


    The gator mustered what he could of a nod and pushed a grocery cart with his snout to the meat section where¡ªas far as Swamp Daddy could tell¡ªthey skinned and chopped the meat. He approached the refrigerated display and eased his head forward. The frozen air was a new sensation; the icy mist prickled his hide. He gingerly gripped a package of catfish between his teeth, struggling not to puncture the plastic wrapping, and head-whipped it into the grocery cart.


    As he reached for more, his thoughts zoomed to the plastic in his mouth, the very same plastic known to trap fish in the nearby marshland. All things die, but the introduction of plastic didn''t seem like a product of the swamp''s all-encompassing paternity. But Swamp Daddy firmly believed that plastic was a natural human by-product, just like snakes shedding their skin¡ªplastic was human skin, or something akin to it. Swamp Daddy imagined humans concealed within the walls of their waterfront houses, stepping out of their skin-tight plastic husks. This is normal human life, he told himself, They must need this.


    But there, in the meat section, he''d finally sensed the unnatural elements in plastic, its manufactured evil. Swamp Daddy, having lots of Daddy in his nature, told himself to be understanding. It''s holding the meat. It''s maintaining the blood. Yet his insides boiled, producing a small ball of rage that swirled within him, contained, controlled.


    He calmly pushed his cart toward the automatic sliding doors where Zak politely slid in front of him. "Your receipt, sir?"


    "I don''t know what that is."


    "You paid for your items, correct?" The boy stared wide-eyed at the cart full of catfish, ten packs in all.


    Swamp Daddy briefly studied the specimen of Zak¡ªthin, gangly, fragile. The gator became concerned, figured that the boy simply didn''t know how to hunt, so a short lecture began.


    "I normally make my own catches. I feed from the exact waters ya''ll found these fish. We all can eat for free¡ªnature provides. I can teach you how to fish. My techniques are for everybody. The way I see it, fish is for sharing." Swamp Daddy was proud of his response, of his handing down of a valuable lesson to the boy. If anything, the humans would be impressed by his guidance for their young.


    But the lesson didn''t appear to sink in as Zak fidgeted before the cross-eyed gator. "I''m sorry, sir. Let me get the manager." He ran across the next couple check stands and spoke to a tall, slightly muscular man with a trimmed beard, hair bun, and moccasins¡ªSwamp Daddy recognized the material as rabbit skin. The man turned toward Swamp Daddy and smiled. His swift pace triggered the gator''s skin sensors, activating his predator''s instinct. Everything in him told him to eat this man, but Harvest Mart wasn''t the place for that; violence wouldn''t have left a daddy-like impression on the locals.


    "Swamp Daddy!" The man outstretched his arms in welcome. "Never expected to be in the presence of a legend."


    "Thank you..." Swamp Daddy read the employee nametag hanging from the apron strap. "Tom."


    "I understand you are concerned about our system of payment. And I understand those concerns. You''re right¡ªwe raise our catfish locally in these same waters you roam every day. However, we have a system that cares for everybody. Our goal is to compensate those who primarily hunt and gather, those who raise the fish and sell them, and those like our buddy Zak who greets customers with fresh samples. The way we do things, everybody wins."


    "I suppose so..."


    "I get it, Swamp Daddy sir. It''s not your way. We at Harvest Mart are an all-inclusive community, and we do everything in our power to include newcomers to our community vision of health, which includes offering fresh, affordable food to our patrons." Tom pulled his cell phone from his apron pocket, tapped into his screen, and read to himself. "Says here alligators eat once a week. Tell you what¡ªwe pay once a week. We have new specials weekly, even daily. I''d be honored to offer you a position with the Harvest Mart team."


    Swamp Daddy opened his jowls to respond¡ª


    "Zak!" Tom yelled, "Grab Swamp Daddy an apron." He then turned to the gator. "Stop by tomorrow and give our way a try. You might like it. And don''t worry about these fish." He patted the cart. "Take ''em, take ''em, you''re the gator lord. I''m sure this is a small haul for the likes of you. I''m just glad you decided to shop with us today."


    "It''s okay, Tom¡ª"


    But Tom was gone¡ªhe''d pushed the cart of catfish through the automatic sliding doors as Zak rushed after him with an apron. Swamp Daddy, baffled, followed the slim, top-knotted gentleman out.


    *


    Swamp Daddy''s first day. Zak stood over the gator, confused, baffled as to how to put an apron on him.


    "Drape it over me," Swamp Daddy suggested. "So the logo shows."


    "Ah, a cape." Zak grinned, his excitement palpable as he made his adjustments.


    "Whatever that is, but yes."


    "Yes, this looks good. Real snazzy Mr. Daddy."


    Mister. He kind of liked the sound of it.


    "Great cape-ron!" Zak was amused at his own joke.


    When Tom saw the apron he beamed a benevolent smile, "That''ll do, gator, that''ll do," before walking toward an elderly lady to explain the benefits of the gluten-free lentils¡ªGlentils they were named¡ªwhich she held in her hands.


    He felt gratefulness toward the twiggy child. "Thanks, young man."


    "Don''t mention it. Let me show you around."


    Swamp Daddy followed Zak into the produce section, cape-pron strings dragging across the floor. He studied the expansive building: customers compared labels and turned jars in their fingers. Young patrons poked at cereal boxes and ran around their parents'' legs. Strange business, but business as usual it seemed. Folks noticed Swamp Daddy and offered smiles, nods, waves, tipped caps.


    He didn''t know how to feel about the comfort to his presence. After all, his mystique had been carved in fear. And he liked it that way. But the changes he desired, the gentleness he attempted to project, ran counter to the intoxicating feeling of being feared. He slowly, over the course of his lifetime, had grown out of the snug, comfortable mold of terror. But now, suddenly thrown into life as a food vendor, relinquishing the terror-inducing persona made him anxious. It was hard to let go, to become new.


    "Okay, Mr. Daddy. First lesson. Produce."


    Zak immediately tackled tricky subjects, focusing mostly on similar-looking vegetables¡ªbasil and mint, cilantro and clover, garlic and shallots, yams and sweet potatoes. He talked about kale, a leaf most holy, healing agent for all. Each of Zak''s words floated on the surface of Swamp Daddy''s mind, a whole new lexicon including anti-oxidants, organic, farm fresh, non-GMO, non-pesticide, non-caged, non-cruelty.


    As Zak spoke about the current state of the food industry, Swamp Daddy''s expression became rigid and stony, a gator gargoyle of horror. Swamp Daddy had always walked past local farms but he never realized the truth: that humans altered the growth and lives of their food through these so-called pesticides and preservatives. Humans poisoned themselves, something he''d never known a creature to do.


    He learned about diabetes. He learned about cancer. His mind darkened with the threat of a predator growing inside of you, a foe you couldn''t smash or bite or swallow, a foe you willingly consumed. A disturbance formed in Swamp Daddy, actual fear, his first time feeling it since he was young and small. And it didn''t feel good.


    "I eat Harvest Mart stuff because it helps with my acne."


    "That''s good," Swamp Daddy managed to say, refraining from asking about acne. He hoped to nature for a cure to Zak''s disease.


    Swamp Daddy tried different roles throughout the first week. Zak taught him the organization of the aisles and how to shelve products accordingly. Even within a single food group such as the bean aisle, there were sub-groupings of said beans¡ªgluten-free, soy, refried, black beans, and even bean paste. For five glorious minutes, Swamp Daddy deftly organized the lower shelf, but was thwarted by his inability to reach the upper shelves¡ªnot to mention the punctured cans from his toothy grip. Zak pulled a leaking can of black beans from Swamp Daddy''s mouth. "Let''s try something else."


    They were to the back of the store and entered the gray double doors. Swamp Daddy admired the wooden cabinets, cardboard boxes, and steel trolleys. A cramped situation but impressively organized. He was reminded of his own onshore nest where he stored meat scraps and pilfered eggs. "Storage!" Swamp Daddy said.


    "Yes!" Zak pushed the steel trolley toward Swamp Daddy. "Here use this." Throughout the day, Swamp Daddy stayed in the back and head-butted the heaviest boxes onto the trolley for Zak. Teamwork, the Harvest Mart way, and Swamp Daddy took pride in his helpfulness. After Zak restocked he approached Swamp Daddy with a hi-five¡ªagainst which Swamp Daddy bopped his snout.


    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Later, when the sun lowered in the sky and carts littered all corners of the parking lot, Swamp Daddy retrieved them himself. He went to the parking lot and used his headbutting technique to bully the carts into the designated metal frames. The sun was oppressive, the air thick with moisture, which constituted sweet paradise for the king of gators. All the information, the human interaction, the strange food culture, exhausted him. For a blissful half hour, Swamp Daddy returned to his gator element, warming in the sun as he performed everyone''s least favorite job.


    "Swamp Daddy!" Tom ran outside toward Swamp Daddy, brandishing his phone.


    "Hi Tom! Just sunning."


    "Golden hour has come!"


    "What''s that?"


    "When the sun is low and everything is golden¡ªpicture perfect for a first-day commemoration(!)."


    The gator understood little but liked Tom''s energy. "Beautiful," Swamp Daddy said.


    Tom bent down beside the gator''s head and stretched his arm out in front of them. Swamp Daddy recoiled from him and Tom''s reflection within the phone, the tiny square capturing their image like water. He''d seen phones pointed at him just as much as guns¡ªbut he never saw himself in one. It''s only another human thing, Swamp Daddy told himself. It''s alright. Golden hour is nature''s gift.


    Tom pressed a button on the side¡ªclick! Their faces froze within the square. The moment was captured: Tom, whose joyous mouth broke through his silky beard, and Swamp Daddy, whose smile was surprisingly vibrant¡ªmouth stretched open, mud-stained teeth greeting the world. Swamp Daddy loved the joy¡ªand he, especially, admired the distinctive golden glow.


    *


    Week 1¨Ceasy. Week 2¨Charder, a bit more of a grind. His unprecedented amount of activity and interaction wore him down. His pre-Harvest Mart life featured aloneness, slinking in mud, conserving energy. But humans were beyond social: they congregated like fish. Niceties weighed on the tip of every tongue. Swamp Daddy had taken over Zak''s samples duty¡ªthe tray precisely positioned on top of his head. Customers approached and mercilessly told variations of the same joke.


    "Oh, I get to pet a gator."


    "I suppose you do."


    "You kill this yourself?"


    "What do you think they''re paying me for?"


    (Laughter.)


    "Now you''re not gonna bite my hand off, are you?"


    "Of course not. Hands aren''t even the best part!"


    (Nervous laughter.)


    And, most commonly of all, Is that Swamp Daddy? Wow, let''s take a picture! Swamp Daddy appreciated the attention, the happiness he brought to people, but he quickly resented phones. And it seemed the more pictures he took, the more people came into the store. At some point, Zak¡ªunder Tom''s instruction¡ªhad even placed a banner outside of the Harvest Mart, #WelcomeSwampDaddy. Swamp Daddy watched as the boy stood on the ladder, confused.


    "You got a question, Swamp Daddy?"


    "Why is it all one word?"


    "That''s just an internet thing."


    Swamp Daddy didn''t know what an internet was, but he knew best to tread into humanity one question at a time. "What''s with the thing on the left? That''s not even a letter."


    "A hashtag. It lets people can find whatever is next to it."


    Swamp Daddy was used to notoriety, but until now nobody could access him. "If these people want to find me so bad, they can at least tell better jokes."


    Zak laughed, almost losing balance on the ladder. Swamp Daddy returned to the air-conditioned entrance, leaving Zak outside to concentrate on not breaking himself. Back to samples, he lamented. And small talk...


    Twenty minutes passed¡ªnormally, no exceptional annoyances noted¡ªbefore a hand pressed down on the samples tray. Swamp Daddy braced himself for a joke.


    "These low-fat tuna crisps are delish." Tom threw back the contents of the cup into his mouth.


    "Yuck."


    "Yes, I know Swamp Daddy. Anyway, here!" Tom pulled an envelope from his apron pocket and held it out.


    "This is?"


    "Payday of course!"


    "Wow, my first money."


    "Yes, yes indeed." The benevolent smile shined on Tom''s face. His top-knot shined under the blinding light. "Let me open that for you."


    Swamp Daddy nodded slowly in ascent, careful to not drop the samples.


    Tom opened the envelope and laid the check on the ground for Swamp Daddy to see. The customers shifted their eyes from the products in their hands to the spectacle of a gator on the payroll. Swamp Daddy shrunk beneath the eyes. The attention, naturally, made him nervous, battle ready. He swallowed his urge to attack and studied the paper before him. He expected actual money but instead received a white page with the Harvest Mart logo and several lines of items and numbers. The foreign words zipped through his consciousness like angry, disorienting wasps: social security, federal tax, state tax, exemptions, gross pay, net amount earned.


    "That doesn''t look right," Swamp Daddy finally said. "40 hours at $7.25 is $290."


    Tom stood there, perplexed. "Where''d you learn math?"


    "Come on, focus. Why don''t I net the full $290?"


    "Your gross is $290. It says it right there. But then you include the taxes, the social costs of human living. Your deductions uplift others, it maintains community, which puts your fair share at $235."


    Swamp Daddy, was no less confused. What was my money being spent on? Who benefits? But he forced those questions¡ªand the sense of unfairness¡ªinto the depths of him. He was proud. He''d earned honey. He''d done himself and unknown tax recipients some good. Swamp Daddy, tapping into the positive well of his Daddy nature, stoked the small flame of his achievement into an explosive joy. That is what he told himself to feel, simple joy, unshakable gratitude¡ª


    Click!


    Tom had taken a picture. He bent down and showed Swamp Daddy the screen. The phone displayed Swamp Daddy bent over his check, a white border surrounding the image, and a word in a curvy font at the very top of the screen: Instagram.


    "It''s not golden hour. Give it a rest."


    "Oh Swamp Daddy, you look good in any light." Then he turned to Zak¡ªwho, several paces away, held a device labeled GoPro, its red dot steady...recording.


    Ugh!


    "And is this going on the Instagram too?"


    "Of course! (And don''t forget YouTube)! It''s for your Vlog."


    "Vlog?" Another weird word, distasteful-sounding, invasive.


    "Pay me for it, then." Swamp Daddy knew what he signed up for. For anything extra, he needed extra for it. Right is right. And he wouldn''t compromise on that.


    "Compensation can be discussed," Tom strained to maintain that wide, poster-boy smile, but it wavered at the corners.


    "The discussion is now. Bring me another money claim thingy."


    "A check?"


    "If you know, then yes, bring me another."


    "Now Swamp Daddy, you''ve been on the Internet for a long time now¡ªway, way before you ever started working here. We''re all captured in one way or another. Just let us be excited to have you here. This isn''t about work. This isn''t about money. It''s about memory. Memory¡ªnot money¡ªis what matters in the end."


    "Just for that I want two more checks. A hunter gets his due. You''d be wise to remember that."


    But Tom was already walking away, his beard and top-knot angled downwards as he rapidly tapped his phone screen. He muttered strange words, "#Payday...#GatorPay...#WelcomeSwampDaddy...#SwampDaddyHereToStay."


    Swamp Daddy gingerly balanced the samples tray on his head as he moved toward the recording Zak¡ªwho meekly smiled and waved. He yelled for him but couldn''t move¡ªa customer arrived, a sample was taken, and a joke was told. They pay you? (The customer pointed to the Swamp Daddy''s floored check with the tuna crisp.) Don''t you eat for free in the wild? What you gonna buy, hahaha?


    FOOD, Swamp Daddy mentally shouted. My fair share of food. But he paid no attention to the customer. He needed Zak. Who else would confirm the purpose of taxes? Who else would tell him how to turn a check into paper money?


    *


    Swamp Daddy returned to the marsh later that night, his haul of groceries balanced on his back, his blue plastic debit card held between his teeth. The silver raised lettering read: SWAMP DADDY. He dropped the card by the cypress he slept under, leaving it on the driest patch he could find. He shook the groceries and apron off his back; seven packs of white bass spilled from the Harvest Mart paper bag. Exhausted, the gator slunk into the waters, soaking up precious alone time. Lurking, making bubbles in the water with his guttural voice, and staring up at the half-eaten moon were all he needed during his weekend off.


    He liked isolating, living under his own rules, but in passing years human homes spread more numerously into the swampland. Swamp Daddy invisibly swam through his changed world, slinking between the rows of moss-covered waterfront houses. He soundlessly slipped beneath the surface, hiding from the people that smoked and read and played cards on their porches.


    He swam anonymously, unwilling to reveal himself. He wanted to surface¡ªhis taxes said that he had every right to¡ªbut he knew better. No amount of debit cards could un-do the gator fear. The simple world of decades past¡ªthe undeveloped swamp full of snake nests and catfish burrows¡ªwas sorely missed. Back before foundation stakes plunged into the swamp bottom, back before the settling humans defended their houses with guns and harpoons and fishing hooks.


    They couldn''t kill Swamp Daddy, though. They simply stood their ground, expanding it, edging him further and further away from his native waters.


    Swamp Daddy wanted to share, just as nature shared its bounty with him the past 35 summers. He was a god amongst predators¡ªbut never greedy. Had he been any lesser, he could''ve been panther food or python food. He could''ve been plastic-wrapped and sold on special at Harvest Mart.


    That''s right: his power gave him the opportunity to protect himself from people, to live peacefully with them. He swam for the entire weekend, recharging, forgiving his garnished check, cutting slack to the photo-obsessed people.


    (...)


    Monday morning¡ªhe showed up late.


    He showed up naked, too, gator in the raw.


    Swamp Daddy arrived at Harvest Mart prepared to exhibit patience, kindness, peace¡ªbut those intentions quickly flamed out at the sight of the banner hanging out front: PHOTO OP WITH SWAMP DADDY. FUN FOR THE KIDS! The kids, he could handle, but the endless photos were another story. Rage, impatience, indigence, disappointment¡ªhe suppressed them all.


    Zak spotted him immediately and ran-up, blushing. "Here sir, let me get your cape."


    "Thank you, boy."


    "You sure are...a lot of gator."


    "So I''ve been told, my boy, so I''ve been told."


    Zak clothed him. "There, you''re decent now."


    Swamp Daddy just stood in the automatic doorway, his cape-pron gusting upwards from the high-powered AC.


    Upon lumbering into Harvest Mart, a line of children assaulted the gator with their attention, screaming, waving, crying tears of joy. There was a line to the right of the entrance, three feet beyond the free samples area, outfitted with those black fabric barricades from the bank and a tall, green screen.


    Zak ran towards the set-up and hurriedly adjusted a camera and tripod. He swung his neck toward Swamp Daddy, a worried look shadowing his face. He paled, suddenly becoming white as flour, white as alligator eggs. His pimpled nose appeared as a red sun, shiny, threatening to burst. "So Swamp Daddy...how was the weekend?"


    "I swam in mud."


    "Good to hear, sir." Zak nervously rotated his camera in his hands.


    "What''s all this?"


    "Well, this is my camera and that''s my tripod and that over there is a backdrop. I''m taking photography at the community college, it''s really inter¡ª"


    "Okay, but why am I taking more pictures?"


    "For advertising, I guess."


    Swamp Daddy snorted. "Nobody told me."


    "Ah yeah...Tom does things when he does them."


    "Does that feel right to you?"


    Zak sighed, looking pained. "It just feels like work, Swamp Daddy. I don''t direct the traffic. I just help where I''m told to." His eyes were solidly black. He no longer seemed like a young man who couldn''t kill his own food. He knew the meaning of work just as much as the adults, which both relieved and embittered Swamp Daddy. It doesn''t have to be like this, he seethed inside. We can be freer! Swamp Daddy''s frustration thickened into a suffocating fury, radiating throughout the store. Arm hairs prickled. Eyes suddenly dried. The humans shuffled about in unease.


    Zak backed away from the camera, trembling. "I''ll go get Tom¡ª"


    "No!" The utterance came out angry, unrestrained. Zak gasped and knocked over the tripod, camera and all, a clattering commotion which drew everyone''s attention. A wave of fear dispersed throughout the store, swallowing the excitable children, the wary parents, the morose co-workers. Nobody knew the gator''s next move, but everyone imagined disastrous outcomes. One child, a small boy with a Florida Gators shirt, said: "Mommy, mommy, if the ugly boy gets eaten who''s going to take the pictures?"


    Other children piped up as well, desperate to avoid the jowls of the gator.


    I don''t want to get eaten!


    I don''t taste good!


    Can I say bye to my toys first?


    Swamp Daddy flinched at the crises of the children, the grotesquery of innocent terror. He liked being a daddy, a protector. The shame rose into his throat. How could I lash out around kids? But he knew the answer. People demanded a pet monster, a docile Swamp Daddy. His rage squelched those feelings, though, and the violence he''d taken pride in, the predatory ways he''d sworn from, suddenly surged forth.


    Tom appeared from within the bean aisle, holding several packages of Glentils. He''d been restocking, showing face, entertaining the customers. "What''s wrong, SD? What''s eating you?¡ªWell, nothing can I guess!" He laughed at his own joke.


    Swamp Daddy smoldered.


    "Okay, what''s wrong? Why are you being so loud in the store?"


    Swamp Daddy would make this right, one way or another. He attempted the first way, the compensatory way. "Pay. I need more pay."


    "It''s barely your third week. You''re valued here at Harvest Mart, don''t get me wrong, but we all need to put in time."


    "I was hired for inventory, restocking, samples. The photos and vlog are different. That''s my image and I need different money for that."


    "Understood. A dollar more per shoot. Done!" He began restocking, placing the Glentils with the black beans¡ªpretending, ignoring the gator.


    "If I show up expecting a shoot, I want to be paid for my time. I don''t get paid less just because it''s not busy. I need a flat rate for the remote chance of taking a camera¡ªor phone¡ªphoto."


    "That can be discussed later. For now, let''s strike while the iron is hot! Can''t keep these cute kids waiting, now can we?"


    The children were all around the store, holding balloons, samples, or both. They couldn''t take their eyes off the gator.


    "Hey kids!" Swamp Daddy said.


    The children clamored for the gator, a cacophony of thrilled greetings, mostly oooh''s and whoa'' s and you''re-so-big-you''re-awesome''s.


    "Harvest Mart doesn''t want to pay me for my time. Do you think that''s fair?"


    A wild response of no-fair, unfair, rip-off, how-could-they.


    "Whoa-whoa-whoa," Tom dropped the Glentils, holding his hands up in defense. "I''ll pay double for today and then we renegotiate later in the week."


    "I''ll accept my standard wage for my store-work: shelving, samples, carts. But social media promo is a different job, a different and higher wage."


    "You''re kidding. We all do multiple things. That''s not just Harvest Mart. That''s any job. If you want money, you work for it."


    "You''re just Tom. There''s thousands of you¡ªbut only one of me. The photos are with me, not top-knot Tom. My image, my promo."


    "Let me consider the rate. How about..."


    "15% of the daily take."


    "Not a chance!"


    "And that''s short, considering Harvest Mart is built atop my old stomping grounds. There were burrows for eels, catfish, turtles, all sorts of animal life. You settled there for free. And that may be your right. You humans are the bigger animal. I know well what it feels like to win and take freely. But we''re working together. I''m working with you and you''re to work with me...fairly."


    Swamp Daddy walked past Tom, intending to retrieve his steel inventory cart in the back, when Tom fell backwards and slammed into the bean shelves.


    "Are you okay?" Swamp Daddy paused, concerned, his intense eyes focused on his clumsy boss.


    Tom looked around, stunned, hurt even...His eyes watered. His jaw wavered. Swamp Daddy prepared to console his wayward yet fragile boss. "I''m hurt," Tom said, almost in disbelief. "I''m hurt," he repeated as a matter-of-fact. "I''m hurt!"¡ªwith gusto this time. He laughed, a low laugh, as if sharing some secret with himself, some plot. "He hurt me!"


    "We didn''t even touch!"


    "He''s shouting!"


    "Yes! Because you fell on your own!"


    "His jowls! His gaping jowls...Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God!"


    A hush stole through the store, silencing the clamor of children and murmurings of adults. Something was coming, so said his gator senses. Vibrations skittered through his entire hide. Bulletproof as he was, Swamp Daddy froze at the metallic clatter of guns being drawn. Guns in the entrance, guns in the adjacent aisles, guns at the cash register and magazine rack. Swamp Daddy heard the hammers of three guns, and a woman beyond the sliding door pulling a sawed-off from her stroller. Outside, police sirens.


    Tom stared up at the gator, a smirk playing through his shaggy, wind-blasted beard. "Aisle 6!" Tom yelled. "This trespassing gator is beyond control! He''s beyond help!"


    A gunshot bounced off the back of Swamp Daddy''s neck, a few inches from the coin-sized weak spot atop his skull. Just like a human to know such a thing. The gator was unsurprised but disgusted all the same.


    Swamp Daddy rushed past Tom as someone fired at him. The bullet burned through the cape-pron and ricocheted off his hide. Everyone ducked the deflected shot and cursed at the careless shooter.


    Swamp Daddy, burst through the two gray double doors at the store''s rear. Surrounded by shelves and boxes and trolleys, the gator was temporarily shielded. He rushed past them all, purposefully knocking the shelves and trolleys over, creating obstacles for his pursuers.


    He reached the end of the inventory room. A large poster loomed above him of the photo he''d taken with Tom, the top of which read: SWAMP DADDY SALE. 50% OFF GATOR TAIL THIS WEEK. Swamp Daddy''s heart shriveled into grains of sand. The selling of gator tail was okay with Swamp Daddy¡ªwhat you kill is yours, without question¡ªbut he wished they''d told him about the sale. He was a team player. He aimed for collaboration, compromise. And what he got was hurt.


    The double doors creaked open. The footsteps sent vibrations through Swamp Daddy''s entire body. His muscles tightened. His skin hummed. Metal clanged as the unseen person maneuvered around the toppled shelves, the upturned trolleys. He loaded bullets into the chamber and cocked the gun. No words. Slow breaths. Soft, flopping steps¡ªTom''s rabbit-skinned moccasins no doubt. The gator had faced adversaries a thousand times before, always by lying in wait, camouflaging his size, becoming a shadow of teeth and muscle. But Swamp Daddy was changed. He''d discovered something new in him, an untold chapter of his ever-growing legend. Today, he''d hunt differently.


    Swamp Daddy ceased hiding, stepping directly into the line of fire.


    Tom fired¡ªone, two, three shots. The bullets pierced additional holes through Swamp Daddy''s cape-pron, but failed to penetrate the gator''s armored hide, his callused conviction.


    "If you''re so thick-skinned, then what''s the harm in a couple pictures?"


    "It''s not about harm, it''s about fairness."


    "I''ve paid what''s owed."


    "So you say..." Swamp Daddy''s words dripped with disappointment.


    Tom reloaded. Meanwhile, a few armed customers lined up beside him. The Harvest Mart firing squad raised their weaponry, a mere moment away from unleashing a bullet storm.


    Tom chuckled. "I can''t wait to put you on the samples tray."


    "Do you know my legend? Do you know who I am?"


    "I don''t care. Once you''re gone you''ll be just another dead gator."


    The bullet-storm commenced, a racket of death engulfed the inventory room. The gunshots flashed in the darkness. And the bouncing shots tore through the bags of brown rice and soy. They shot Swamp Daddy. They blasted him dozens of times. And then they reloaded and hit him a dozen more. They didn''t know if the gator died, only that it''d take a lot of bullets for that to happen. Ammo and ambition, the Harvest Mart way.


    A pause. Smoke jaggedly traveled through the room. The gunpowder aroma blessed every nose.


    "Now let''s skin that sucker," Tom said.


    "Legend has it..." Swamp Daddy jowls opened wide¡ª


    Gasps, paused breath, stolen souls.


    Dropped guns.


    A defeated, helpless clattering.


    Tom whimpered. Yes, yes, that''s what Daddy likes.


    Swamp Daddy''s mouth continued to open, wider and wider, way past the point of its hinging. The darkness of it spread throughout the storage area, becoming the room. The mythic gator observed the humans freeze within the primordial dark, their eyes cracked with terror. And though they desired to back away each person was rendered motionless. Until suddenly, gently, they were vacuumed into the solid pitch.


    Swamp Daddy no longer spoke. He told the story in towering blackness, in a promised oblivion. Before the gator''s power, the human notion of a future reduced to a puddle of gastric acid. Gone were the visions of health, of GMO-free diets, of bulky profits from an ill-advised gator tail sale.


    The room collapsed, the people collapsed, everything folded like crumpled paper before the black-hole gravitation of the monster''s mouth.


    As Harvest Mart and its people approached their natural ends, disintegrating into food, only one sensation remained as vigorous and insistent as ever. Within the endless mouth of the legend, an overbearing, robust sound, progression of rhythmic thumps¡ªan impossibly powerful heartbeat, the pulse of a swamp that never dies.