The chill breeze that skips off the waves to power her flight tells she is somewhere north (the Bering sea, maybe?). Her shoulder muscles, the ones that power her flapping, ache. There is not so much as a piece of driftwood. There is only the vast, unbroken sea.

Calypso flies for days.

She expects hunger to gnaw at her stomach but she only feels emptiness. It’s like meditation, just like emptying my mind, but I’m terrible at that, aren’t I. Her muscles suffer but do not fail. She yearns for sleep. Calypso soars onwards.

Days become weeks become months. She waits for the moment when her body can no longer sustain her, but it never comes.

What torments her more than the starvation, the sleeplessness and the physical fatigue, is the boredom. The ubiquity of her numb flight never changes. One day she looks around and wonders if she has moved at all. The slapping of the waves is the same as it has always been. Calypso has adjusted to the sensation of air under her feathers so much that she is unsure whether she is moving or floating in one place. Maybe this is meditation, maybe I finally figured it out.

Calypso angles her beak downward and closes her wings into her body. She plummets towards the waves. The arctic air is freezing but the water will be colder. Bald eagles cannot swim. Even this sensation (faster, faster) of dive bombing does not shock, exhilarate, or scare her.

The moment Calypso the eagle’s beak pierces the surface is the moment Calypso the woman wakes. Under the outline of her body, the mattress is damp with sweat that has cooled. On the bedside table is the empty potion bottle, which is really no different than a mason jar, but Calypso can’t help but think of it as a potion bottle. A dried film of the purple liquid paints the floor of the bottle and traces a riverbed up one side towards the mouth to record the path the draught flowed on its way to her lips.

The enormously fat man, built like a blob of melted wax, shuffles over to her bed.

“Just coming up on fifteen hours. Not so bad.”

Calypso wonders hazily what his name was. Pemba. That’s right. Her bed is the third in a row of identical cots. Every other one is unoccupied. Calypso tries to sit up but Pemba forces her down with meaty hands.

“Don’t stand. You’re awake but that doesn’t mean that all of the chemical has left you. Stay and rest.”

Pemba presses something with his foot, and with a metallic vrrr, Calypso is sitting up. The sheets shift slightly and Calypso recalls she is naked.

“How did you get your hands on a dozen hospital beds?” Calypso’s voice is dull and feels like it is coming from somewhere far away, certainly not her mouth.

“You were out for fifteen hours. Pretty good for a first potion.”

Calypso shakes her head, trying to rid herself of the fatigue like a cloud of black flies. She feels the pounding of a bell knocker between her ears. Her head droops the way your eyelids do after many hours of sleeplessness, but she cannot shut her brain as she has just woken up from fifteen hours of unconsciousness. In the back of her throat is acid.

She looks at Pemba and says, as clearly as she can, “Where was the fucking sage?”

“That potion does not induce a sage. You know this.”

“I was an eagle. A stupid bald eagle! And I didn’t see shit. So what’s the point?”

“Your mind needs time to adjust. Otherwise it will be unable to handle the stronger drugs. This first potion went well.”

“I paid for a sage. Give me the fucking sage.” Calypso glares at Pemba. She may not have the physical strength to overpower the man, but she knows what she looks like. She knows the half-moons beneath her eyes and the menacing darkness behind them. Calypso has seen the effect she has on passersby when she pierces them with her gaze; she’s seen how they shrink on the sidewalk, how they are caught between pretending she does not exist and keeping an eye on her.

Pemba does not flinch. Pemba sees people as desperate as her every day.

“You will not see a sage today. It would kill you. I have told you this.”

“Give me the sage or you can kiss goodbye to any more cash you think you’re getting out of me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you’re not exactly overflowing with customers.”

“If you die, I will receive no more payments.”

The cloud in Calypso’s head is dispersing, leaving a biting vacuum. She lurches forward, and, lightning quick, Pemba pushes her back down. Now Pemba is the one scowling, and Calypso, despite herself, is shocked at how the round, even countenance can flip to hostility.

“I need you to behave if we are going to have any relationship. I cannot bring the sages to those who don’t behave. It is dangerous, and I don’t do well with danger.”

“Fuck.”

“I do well with trust.”

“I’ve gotta get out of here. I’ve gotta get home. I need to sleep.”

“Can I trust you, Calypso?” Pemba’s hand is on Calypso’s collarbone.

“Goddamn it. You can trust me.”

“Stay here to rest for one hour. Then you may leave. I will see you in a week. You will bring me the rest of the payment then. If you try to see a sage today, you will die. And then neither of us will get what we want.”

Calypso remains silent and refuses to meet the man’s gaze. Pemba appears unbothered.

“Do your best to relax. Clear your mind. You have been meditating?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

He is nonplussed. “Have you been meditating?”

“Of course! That’s the one thing you told me to do, isn’t it?”

“Keep meditating. I’ll see you in a week.”

Pemba ambles away from the bed, easy as can be. His bulk vanishes into the darkness.

As soon as the fat man is out of sight, Calypso grabs the handrail and pulls herself up from the bed. “Probably stole ’em from a fucking hospital,” she mutters. When she gets to her feet she sways and her vision shrinks to a tunnel through which the only thing that can be seen is a colorless plastic package of syringes. As her sight returns, she throws on her clothes and flees the basement as quickly as her feet will take her. Calypso bangs her head on a hanging pipe and bruises her knees falling on the stairs and yells out a cuss each time, but Pemba does not reappear.

A week later, Calypso is supine on the hospital bed and Pemba is holding a vial to the light. The circles under her eyes are no smaller.

“I told you to rest.”

Calypso doesn’t know if she can feel the dried sweat from her last visit still on the mattress or if she’s imagining it. There are no windows in Pemba’s lair.

“I’ve been sleeping like a baby.”

“If you lie to me, it does not matter. If you lie to yourself, you may die. You know this is true.”

“I’ve been fucking sleeping. Shut up and give me the potion already. I don’t pay you to talk.”

“You don’t pay me at all.”

“I’ve paid you some.”

“You don’t pay me what you owe me.”

“How many fucking times do I have to tell you? The money’s on the way. It’s tied up with the lawyers.”

“Calypso, you must rest. Rest clears your mind. And meditate. This is the only way the sages will consent to meet with you.”

Calypso does not so much as twitch a muscle. The only sound that can be heard is the drip of some unseen liquid.

Pemba sighs and walks away. “Sleep for a week and come back with money.”

“Hey!” Pemba wheels at Calypso’s shout and raises his eyebrows. “I can’t fucking sleep, don’t you know that? Why the hell else would I be in this hellhole spending my last dime shooting up all this shit with some fucking crackpot?”

Pemba returns to the bed and stands statuesque for a moment. Then he hands her the vial. “Be careful,” he says. “You are in a tough spot, and the sages may help. But they can only reveal what is already inside of you. There is no help from outside that can fix what is inside. You must do that.”

By the time Pemba has finished talking, Calypso is adjusting to her form as a silkworm. Crawling with six legs comes instinctively to her and requires no more conscious thought than walking on two legs does. Her body trundles across the web of silk like a sleeve of coagulated milk.

“Look up,” says the silkworm (is she the sage?) next to her. Her tone is serene and Calypso feels that if the silkworm had been a human, she would be smiling. The two silkworms are alone on a cluster of mulberry leaves pockmarked with holes where they have grazed. The stem of the mulberry bush curves downward into a white abyss, giving Calypso the sense that they are above the sky. As Calypso moves, the plant jiggles, but she feels certain she will not fall.

“You must be the sage,” she says to the other silkworm (fucking finally, a sage!). The sage does not respond. Her back is arched in an upward-dog yoga pose.

Calypso follows suit. Two inches above them, a tapestry of silk extends infinitely. It is dense enough to block the view of anything behind it. Calypso looks from filament to filament, entranced by its luster. The weave contains no discernible pattern but instead a random assortment of dizzying colors. These colors are so vibrant they give the impression that they’re not dyed silk. The silk really is that color, right down to its core.

“What is this?” Calypso asks.

“You should have listened to Pemba’s briefing,” says the sage (damn it, she’s right, isn’t she?), and lets out a slow, echoing laugh.

Some threads, Calypso notices, are the same color as others — the exact same color. The most common color is somewhere between yellow and pink, like the blush she’d blend onto her cheeks (don’t think of that) or the rosé that she and Britt would drink on the rooftop of the Classics department (don’t think of that, for god’s sake). She hones in on one thread of this color. As she stares, its end disconnects from the web, leaving a pinpoint of white light, and bends towards her. Calypso the silkworm stares at it in recognition. I know exactly what color that yellow-pink is.

The other silkworm swivels towards her. “Don’t touch that,” she screams. It is too late. Calypso’s silkworm nose nudges the tip of the strand to find that it is the soft of pure silk, not the poke of plastic twine.

The yellow-pink strand doubles, then doubles, then doubles again. It grows to a sheet of threads, slapping and rubbing its ends against Calypso’s face all the while. They tickle her and she feels as if she is going to sneeze so she pushes forward, hard but controlled, an equal effort between her two arms (I have arms again?) like pushing a swing. The fluttering of the silken head of hair flies in the breeze (no) but it’s a few feet ahead of her and below it, she can see the furious pedaling of sneakers that she found at Goodwill not two weeks ago (No) and the girl is biking, she’s biking all by herself and something like pride is (no no no no NO) swelling within Calypso’s chest and she’s laughing (oh god!) and her legs burn with the running she’s not so young any more is she but she doesn’t mind she sprints trying to catch up and the worry and the fiero are equally balanced in her and the girl is squealing in delight (please no no no no) and Calypso’s stride is opening up maybe she’s not so old after all eh but the girl is pedaling faster and faster around the little asphalt loop in the pocket park she’ll never catch her now and

The other silkworm is pressing her body against Calypso’s. Silkworms are not warm-blooded, but Calypso can feel the little warmth where their exoskeletons touch.

“How was that?” the sage asks.

“Get the fuck off me,” says Calypso.

“I should have warned you. The webs can bring back ghosts.”

“Let’s get this over with,” says Calypso. “What the hell is all this,” she attempts to gesticulate upwards but can’t (goddamn it! I’ve lost my arms again), “shit?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Let me guess, those are all my memories?”

“Not quite. They’re figments of your character. This is your life’s tapestry.”

“Like bits of my brain?”

“Sort of. But your character is about who you are. It’s not about your cognitive processes.”

“So explain to me, then, what the hell all these things are.”

“I’d be happy to.” The sage turns to face Calypso, who upward-dogs to look at the tapestry.

“Every strand is a piece of who you are. Not your ability, not your history, but something that makes up you in the present day. These pieces comprise exclusively of what you have learned from other people. I don’t mean learning like you learn in school; I mean learning like you absorb in your everyday life. Everyone knows that you grow alike those who you spend your time with, but most don’t realize how fine-grained this is: every interaction you ever have contributes to your person in a big or small way. The colors, of course, correspond to the individuals who changed you. The light-ish blue ones — you see those scattered about — those are from your mom. I’m sure you’ve noticed that they’re the color of her eyes. If there are twelve strands, your mother’s blue is one of them. That’s how responsible she is for who you are. One in twelve. You might not think that’s a lot for the person who raised you, but really it is, when you start to consider everyone who has affected you. She’s left a strong mark on you. That murky black one, that’s from you dad. If there are one-hundred-and-ninety fibers, he makes up seven of them.”

“Nope. I never knew my dad.”

“And yet he left a mark on you all the same. We learn nearly as much from someone’s absence as we do from their presence. Like it or not, what he taught you is seven in one-hundred-and-ninety of your being.”

“Yeah, well, three percent’s not so fucking great for a parent. Look at my mom, she’s got ten percent. That’s what a parent should be.”

The sage acts as if she can’t hear Calypso. “And these sort of light-pink ones, the ones that are all over…”

“Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.” There are so many.

“Well, I suppose you don’t need any help there. You just saw that memory, after all. What I find really interesting is that so many of these fibers are not repeated many times across the tapestry. A lot of them are even one-offs. And that’s across this whole tapestry, which is miles wide. A less diverse tapestry is the sign of a narrow, closed mind. You’ve got a beautifully multi-colored web, Calypso. You’ve taken influence from thousands and thousands of people in your life. That’s good. You’ve learned from every friend you’ve ever had. People you’ve worked with or bumped into on the street or served you coffee. It’s all here. It’s all a part of you. It all makes up who you are today.”

“If you say so.”

“Take this thread.” The sage nods towards a royal purple thread, handling it with practiced mind-control, and it bends towards them. The silk loop falls between the noses of the two worms, so close that an exhale from either would push it into the other’s face (be careful, don’t touch it like you touched the other one). It is tiny and diaphanous like a spider’s rappel and Calypso instinctively recoils, worried that it will break.

Calypso feels the memory incompletely, the way you hallucinate when you’re drifting into a nap.

She sprints up the steps of the library, each footfall crunching a cluster of brown rock-salt beneath her boots. At the top another student — a sophomore, by the looks of it — pulls the key from the door and adjusts a checkered scarf wrapped around his neck. Between breaths that make puffy clouds, Calypso pleads with him to re-open the library, just for a minute. She needs a book, she says. She has a test in the morning. The boy looks out with eyes that tell the story of another tired college student more than ready to hit the hay and says no. The library is closed, Calypso should have come earlier, what kept her so late anyways. But the boy doesn’t walk away just yet. Calypso hangs her head. She meant to come earlier but had to run to the drugstore. Her baby is sick and so, of course, she can feel it coming on too. She needs this class to pass, and she needs to pass to graduate, and she sure as hell needs the degree to get a job. The boy shakes his head and the key clicks as it fits in the lock. Five minutes, he says, drawing a cigarette from his jacket pocket and looking blankly into the night.

“That act of kindness,” says the sage, the thread retreating from the pair of silkworms to return to its place in the weave, “changed your character, just a tiny bit, even though you forgot all about him the next week. You never spoke to that man again — you never even got his name, and he doesn’t remember you either — but he’s a part of you. He’s just one strand, but he made you kinder.”

“And now I’m a regular old mother Teresa.”

“It might be imperceptible, but it’s there. The threads just go on and on and on, and there are new ones all the time. No one’s tapestry is ever finished.”

“How nice!” says Calypso (really, thanks a lot, off my rocker in a basement off Spring street for an art lesson). “That’s really something special. Now how does that help me?”

“Help you?” The sage nibbles the leaf they stand on. “I’m a silkworm. I’m just explaining the silk.”

Calypso (fuck this!) trundles towards a patch that is entirely made up of the yellow-pink threads. She focuses on them and they bend as if an invisible finger is curling through them.

“Calypso, what are you doing?” Calypso ignores the sage. She backs up as she pulls, concentrating with all her might. As the threads stretch taut she feels resistance build up like a headache and she grits her silkworm teeth (pull, damn you). They’re at their maximal stretch. One snaps. Oh God!.

Calypso shrieks. Her chest seizes (I’m on Fire oh dear God). The other silk strands rubber band back to their original spot in the tapestry. Her silkworm body curls into a fetal circle. She rolls and rolls and falls from one leaf to the next (on Fire Fire Fire). The sage hustles towards her, hopping from leaf to leaf, but can’t catch up. Calypso cannot grasp at her chest because she is a silkworm (I’m Trapped) so she rolls and rolls and rolls and falls.

When Calypso wakes, her eyes are stained with tears.

Pemba is standing over her. He’s smiling. “You have been meditating.”

Calypso wipes her eyes on the sheet and sits up. “Didn’t I fucking tell you that?”

“Very good, Calypso. Was your mind clear enough for a sage to come?”

“I’ve been meditating every day this week. Like I told you.”

“Very good, very good.” Pemba’s face grows rounder still as he beams at Calypso. “Which sage did you see?”

Calypso stumbles to her feet, again feeling the darkness creep in from the edges of her vision, and Pemba does not stop her. “How soon can I see the next sage?”

Pemba stands in the direction of the exit. He is still smiling but his eyes are sad as he watches Calypso dress. “None of the sages can bring her back, Calypso. I have told you this. You know this.”

“Get out of the way. I’ve gotta get home. When can I come back?”

“You have the payment?”

“I’ll get the fucking money.” Calypso picks up her belt, drops it, picks it up again.

“How?”

“How do you get these hospital beds and besides that the fucking potions? Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. What that means is, none of your goddamn business.”

“Come back in a week. Don’t forget to meditate.” Calypso is dressed but Pemba remains in the corridor, blocking it with his bulk.

“Move it.”

“The potions can’t bring your daughter back, Calypso. You know this.”

Pemba swirls a potion the color of sewage. When he shakes the vial, dark clouds rise from the bottom like muck in shallow water.

“Shake it again before you shoot it. And make sure you get all the dregs down.”

Calypso extends her hand but Pemba does not proffer the potion. “Which sage is next?”

Pemba shakes his head, and Calypso imagines this motion stirring his thoughts from rest like the potion. “I have told you this. The sages only bring out what is already inside of you. I can’t predict the next sage any more than I can predict what you’ll eat for breakfast tomorrow. You know this.”

Calypso makes a swipe for the potion and misses.

“Trust,” says Pemba. “I need to trust you.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry.”

“How can I be sure you’ll pay what you have promised if you are the sort of person who grabs the vial out of my hands?”

“I told you, you’ll get the money. Tuesday by the latest. If you can’t keep this business on its feet for another six days, that’s on you.”

“It’s a lot of money, Calypso.”

“Fuck.”

“I’d like the money now.”

“I told you. The life insurance payment comes on Tuesday. Then we’ll be square.”

“You have promised me the life insurance payment before, Calypso.”

“They delayed it. You know how lawyers are. Always want to cross more T’s and dot more I’s. I crawl up his ass whenever I have the chance. This hurts me too, you know. I want the money just as bad as you do. He promised me. Tuesday.”

“Do you trust his promises?”

“I’ll get it to you. Don’t worry about it. Don’t go fucking soft on me, Pemba.”

“Can I trust your promises?”

“The life insurance payment gets delivered Tuesday. Maybe the bank will take a day, so Wednesday I’ll get the cash and bring it in. First thing in the morning. I’ll wake up early to bring it in. I’ll bring you a bagel too. Lox and cream cheese and scallions on an everything bagel. How’s that?”

“My patience is wearing thin.”

“You can trust me.”

“Tell me something to build my trust.”

“The money’s on its way.”

“How did your daughter die?”

“Fuck you.”

“Let’s trust each other.”

“I’ll bring coffee with the bagel.”

“Calypso.”

“Cancer. Leukemia.”

“Did she suffer?”

“Fuck off. That’s enough of this bullshit. Give me the potion. Give it.”

“Being honest with me may help you be honest with yourself.”

“Go to hell.”

“If you’re seeing my sages, I should know what you’re asking them. ”

Calypso seethed. “She didn’t suffer much. They do a good job in the hospital. They keep the kids happy, as best they can, you know, given the circumstances.”

“Did your daughter have to go through chemotherapy?”

“Fuck.”

“Calypso.”

“Yes. A bit. That part was tough. But we made it through. As a family, you know.”

“But your husband left?”

“Boyfriend, not husband. And that wasn’t until after. He couldn’t take it.”

“Thank you for sharing, Calypso.”

“You’re sick in the head.”

“I feel certain I can trust you.”

“You’re sick where it counts. Something’s fucking wrong up there.”

Without warning, Pemba jerks forward and wraps his fingers around Calypso’s throat. When Calypso’s mouth gasps for air, Pemba upends the potion into it. Calypso is under before she can make a move.

Calypso the cicada nymph is underground. She senses it is dark, though she does not have eyes, and she can also perceive other elements of her surroundings: the soil on her back and under her spindly legs. Goddamn it, he put me under without my consent, I’ll see how he likes a lawsuit (well, I can’t exactly call the cops, can I?). Beside her is another cicada, though Calypso does not comprehend how she knows this.

Calypso and the sage set into chewing what is at their mouths: wet, chalky, like tree bark. It’s not tree bark, she realizes; it’s tree roots. Calypso isn’t exactly hungry, but is driven by a deeper atavistic instinct that overrides hunger as it overrides all of the brain’s desires. Chewing is a default instinct for cicada nymphs, so eating involves relaxation more than conscious effort. It is reassuring to Calypso to have her brain’s noise drowned by one aim.

“Okay, give it to me straight, sage. Just tell me your speech or whatever and get it over with. I’ve been jerked around enough today.”

“We’re chewing to get to the sap. We’ll get there soon.”

Calypso nibbles and nibbles only to reach more root. Past the outer layer of bark, like substance she finds healthy, wet wood like cords of muscle. This is almost tasty.

“And the amount of sap we find represents how much piss is in my body, or something?”

The sage laughs, a full-throated genuine laugh that surprises Calypso. Am I funny? I’m not funny.

“Not quite. It represents how much you have lived.”

“So twenty-eight years. Ding-ding. Mystery solved.”

“Not how long you’ve lived, but how much. Most twenty-somethings have a few ounces of sap collected in their roots. A few have more. Some have none at all. Sap accrues the same way memory does: each experience nurtures the tree as does sunlight or rain or fertilizer, which crystalizes in one drop, or a few drops of sap in the roots. Diverse and novel experiences add up. Days that are boring and uninteresting and redundant, your tree won’t grow at all. But the times where you produce something or open your eyes in wonder or spin the silk of those you care about, those times sap flows in abundance. Those are the times, rich and varied, that lead to gallons of sap. Those are the times that matter.”

“So it’s just a measure of how many different types of food I’ve ever had. Great.”

“Variations in food and travel, yes, those things can comprise much sap for folks your age. But more of it is due to interpersonal experiences with those who matter to you.”

Calypso does not stop nibbling. The faster I get through to this sap the faster I can get the fuck out of here to a sage that will actually fix me. She and the sage work in silence for some time.

Finally, Calypso’s chewing produces a noise reminiscent of Pemba popping the cap off a tube and the two cicada nymphs retreat a step. A dribble of sap leaks from the spot Calypso has been chewing.

“So there it is. That’s all.” But that’s not all. As the sap covers their tarsi, the opening widens and sap flows thicker, faster. Oh shit!

The sage chuckles. “Very good, Calypso.” The sap fills their cavern, its tide reaching their bellies, and still the hole from which it emanates grows and soon their claws are no longer embedded in the hard subterranean soil (woah!) and they’re flowing away downstream (holy shit!) in the torrent of sap, its thickness buoying them pleasantly like a lazy river. The sage is laughing, and, despite herself, Calypso is laughing too.

“That’s a lot of sap!”

“Damn straight, a lot of fucking sap!”

“A windfall.”

The two cicada nymphs float lazily, side by side. Thank god we’re done with that chewing. “How much is that? It’s gotta be more than an ounce, right?”

The sage looks at Calypso with wonder in her eyes. “You have lived much, my friend. You have lived more than anyone I’ve ever seen. You are fulfilled.”

“No, no, no. Fuck that.” Calypso shifts, trying to turn away from the sage, but in the flow of sap, it’s impossible to maneuver. “I haven’t done shit. I lived in New York my whole life. I never left. I never had the money to go gallivanting around. I work at a gas station, for Christ’s sake. So I couldn’t tell you where this sap comes from.”

“Let’s find out.” Without so much as a gesture, Calypso knows what the sage is asking of her. She brings her mouth to the liquid and tastes the sugar of the drink almost sooner than she feels the crystalline texture.

Calypso is on her roof dangling her feet off the side. Isn’t it funny how the wind is stronger on my legs than on my arms? There must be some sort of wind tunnel effect. Below her, trash bags line the street like ugly black shrubs. Someone (is the white line on the road painted crooked, or is the whiskey getting to me?) calls up at her, asks her if she is okay (ignore it). For a moment, Calypso sees a yellow-pink head of hair belonging to an eight-year-old girl on the streetcorner and her hands stiffen beneath her, as if she’s ready to leap from the sixth-story roof and chase after her, but in the next (shit) moment, she realizes it’s only the shine of the streetlamp on the naked head of a firehydrant. I’m really losing it now. The man on the street is standing between two plywood sheds (from up top you can really see how shitty they are. I mean, make a restaurant or don’t, but don’t half-ass one in the middle of the street) from which waiters shuttle food and cocktails from the Bistro directly beneath Calypso. I can almost see the roof of my old apartment from up here; it’s only a few blocks east. The man looks up (what are those white lines called, anyway?) at Calypso on the roof, then to his right and to his left (he’s wondering if anyone else sees what he sees), and then takes five steps down the street, checks his watch (he’s got somewhere to be), then looks up again (he really does have a good heart, doesn’t he?). The voice below implores her not to jump, but she wasn’t going to jump anyway. It’s late, the man says (well, my apartment was too lonely to sleep so I came up here). He’s dialing someone (goddamn it, it better not be the cops) and saying something else to her (I can’t deal with fucking cops tonight) and she rolls backwards onto the roof, out of his sightline onto her back and stares up at the sky. I wish I was out of the city and could see a star, just one.

And then once again, she is a cicada nymph in a river of sap.

“That sounds like a rough night,” says the sage. “And yet it added meaning to your life.”

“That was last night.”

“You had a hard time sleeping?”

“I’ve got fucking problems sleeping, who doesn’t?”

“Sleeping can be hard,” says the sage, “but so can being awake.” For a moment, the two cicada nymphs float in silence before she continues. “I should have noticed it earlier. Sometimes you can tell these sorts of things from the quality of the sap. A bit sweet, a bit watery. Calypso, an overwhelming majority of your sap derives from suffering.”

“Oh great! So I’ve had a shitty life. Like I didn’t know. Wonderful.”

“Surely you had already realized that. But, you see, suffering has as much meaning as joy.”

“That can’t be it. My life has no meaning. Not anymore, that’s for sure.”

“Your life is as rich and complex as anyone’s. The amount you’ve lived is more than nearly anyone in the world.”

“I hate my life. I might as well be dead.”

“Right and wrong. You’re not happy but you’re alive, and that’s what living is, joy and pain, and sometimes one is disproportionately larger than the other. That is all part of living. As long as you can feel, you are alive, even if only what you feel is suffering.”

When Calypso wakes, she is babbling. She is talking even before Pemba comes into her frame of vision. Her pupils are dilated enough to swallow her irises. She makes no acknowledgement of Pemba when he places a glass of water on the bedside table.

“I keep moving west. Every time my lease is up, I move west. In each new apartment, after I get adjusted, I have my new go-to spots: my grocery, my liquor store, my whatever. Then, every day, I start to notice which way I head when I leave my house. I can’t help but keep track of it, it’s just some shit my brain does. And you always go one way or the other, when you leave your building. You go right or you go left. And you’re always walking somewhere, in New York. So the way I go most often — right or left — that’s the direction I move when the lease is up. It makes sense that way. And for years I’ve been moving west. Ever since she died, and Britt left, and I’ve been going from place to place, I’ve been moving west, a few blocks each time. It seems like each time, everything I end up doing is just a bit more west. But there’s one place I always go that’s east, no matter where my apartment is. In my new place, the door faces south, so that means when I exit I turn left. It’s the only time I leave and turn left. But when I do, I walk all the way to East River Park. After all the moving house I’ve done, it takes me about forty-five minutes of walking to get there. And when I get there I turn around and come back. I always think I’m ready to see the spot where she went under but I’ve never made it all the way back there. I walk all the way there, probably twice a week, and I’ve never made it to the little pier where East River Park pokes out into the river. My daughter didn’t die in the hospital, did you know that? We didn’t want her to. She was suffering too much. It was taking too long. She had no chance. I was lying to you before, when I said she didn’t suffer, but I’m sure you figured that out. She was in the hospital for two years. People always said she was strong. Fuck that. There was no hope by the end. It was her idea, going off into the river. When we set her in the water, off the end of the pier, she couldn’t swim. She couldn’t even flail. She was too weak. Couldn’t move her limbs. I was wearing my patagonia zipped all the way up and I had tucked my chin into it because of the cold. She went right under and barely any bubbles came up. No struggle. Britt tried to hold my hand but that felt wrong. And then we walked away and all I could think about was how loud our boots were on the wooden dock and that was the end. So, yeah, she suffered. She suffered like all hell. It killed me. It fucking killed me. I mean, that’s obvious. Why else would I be in this shithole? She suffered and suffered and suffered. I would have ended it sooner if I could go back and do it again. I held onto hope for too long. Or I would have held onto it longer. I don’t know. And there’s nothing I can do about it now. I just keep moving west.”

Pemba looks at her for a long while before the smile returns to his face.

“I trust you, Calypso. Bring me the money on Wednesday. And get me a bacon-egg-and-cheese on an everything bagel. I can’t eat fish.”

Calypso waits an hour before standing. As she puts on her clothes, she mutters, “at least I got all this fucking sap.”

As Pemba swallows the last bite of the bacon-egg-and-cheese, he looks off into the distance, as if what he sees is a mountaintop view rather than nailheads intermittently protruding from a brick wall. He finishes the bagel, wipes his hands on the napkin, and throws the paper bag of scraps into a corner before turning to Calypso and saying: “I take it you do not have the money.”

“The lawyer said he needs confirmation from the bank. He said it would take another few days. A week, tops.”

Pemba shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I’ll get it. I promise. This bagel was an act of goodwill. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“No. No, no no.”

“I fucking promise, okay? The goddamn lawyer is screwing me royally.”

“There is no lawyer. You did not have a life insurance policy on your eight-year-old daughter. You know this.”

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“You have spent the trust you earned. You have used up your credit. Come back only with the money you owe me. Otherwise, you will never see the sages again.”

Calypso stands and the straightening of her knees kicks the plastic chair to the ground. By the time she is upright she has a gun in both hands. “Give me the fucking potion, Pemba.”

“A gun hidden in the waistband. How clever. Well done.”

“Give me the potion.”

Pemba is calm as he regards her. “A potion is not worth a bacon-egg-and-cheese bagel, Calypso. You know this.”

“I’m not asking. I’m ordering. I’ll fucking kill you.”

“You can be rather abrasive at times. Has anyone ever told you that before?”

“Don’t you know how fucked up my life is? I can’t sleep. I can’t think. I can’t look in a fucking mirror. I need this sage to fix me.”

“You still do not understand. Only you can fix yourself. Besides, you have not paid.”

“I paid for the first potion.”

“You paid for half of the first potion. I help you, and this is how you treat me? You disappoint me, Calypso.”

“You know, you’re not some fucking saint. You act all high and mighty and tell me you’re helping me, but all you give a shit about is money. I don’t know what, but I’m sure there’s a good fucking reason you’re not practicing medicine in a hospital any more. I looked you up and you did have a medical license at some point. So what the fuck happened? You’re down here with the rats. That’s what you are: the fattest fucking rat in the city.”

“You know, cussing does not give the appearance of strength. It also does not make you stronger.”

“I was right about you. You’re a fucked up guy. You’re sick in the head. And you’re not helping anyone.”

Pemba is smiling. “Then why do you keep coming back?”

“Because I’m an idiot, obviously. Now give me the potion.”

“You’ll need me for this last potion. It’s not like the other ones. You need a healer to administer it.”

“I’ll take that risk.”

“You can’t drink it. You inject it, slowly, over the course of six hours. Every hour I empty one-sixth of the syringe into your veins. Any less and you won’t see the sage. Any more and you’ll die.”

“So, fucking administer it.”

“And then what’s to stop me from killing you while you’re under?” Pemba licks his fingers, then wipes them on his pants. “That really was an excellent bacon-egg-and-cheese. There’s nothing like them.”

Calypso’s hands are trembling on the gun but she does not speak. Pemba rises and turns away to amble down the throat of the room. “Get me the money, Calypso. Then I will happily administer the last potion. I won’t ask you where it comes from. But bring it here, please. And in the meantime, don’t forget to keep meditating.”

When Calypso squeezes the trigger she is surprised at how easily it gives. There is no resistance. The gun does not care that she is ending a life. The recoil jerks her wrists upwards but the bullet flies true.

Pemba screams at the impact of the bullet but falls silent when his bulk hits the ground, as if the floor has knocked the sound right out of him. Calypso tries to flip the fat man onto his back, is unable, feels through the pockets of his lab coat with one hand, the other holding the trembling gun. His body is still. Surprising he isn’t too fucking fat to be pierced by a bullet. When she pulls the syringe and the vial from its hiding place, she sees his eyes and finds that they hold neither fear nor hate but pity. Oh god, what have I done?. They are already beginning to glaze over.

When Calypso springs from the basement door, the daylight hits her like a slap to the face. Shit, it’s still daytime, how did I forget?. She sprints down Spring street, rounds the corner, forces herself to slow to a brisk walk. The gun is still in her hand (shit!). She shoves it in her waistband and pulls her shirt over it. I’ve got blood on my jeans!.

In Washington Square Park, the density of the crowd allows her to be anonymous if not alone. She reaches a square of benches half-blocked by curtains of leaves and lies on her back (meditate, meditate, meditate, empty your mind, empty your mind). From the path, a boy stares at her, too young or too new to New York to have honed his disregard for tramps or his awareness that it is rude to gawk. He does not blink. She stares back, the two foreign creatures regarding each other with cool caution and curiosity as a giraffe and a wildebeest would.

Calypso gives up on emptying her mind and thrusts the syringe into her quad. She depresses the top until it is empty.

She is a frog (a frog?), feeling the texture of the lilypad beneath her with webbed feet in more detail than she had ever thought possible. It’s like I can feel every individual atom, or at least each little cell of the lilypad (all these tiny little bumps, they’ve gotta have a name). Beside her, the sage looks out over the water, her throat bulging and deflating in the rhythm of steady breath. Oh, god, I killed him. I killed Pemba.

They are together on a single lilypad (he’s dead, lying in his own fucking basement) in the middle of what appears to be (how long before he’s found?) endless still water. It is too small (weeks? days?) to turn around, but Calypso (does he have other patients? patients isn’t right, and it’s not druggies, either, it’s fuckups like me, people who have found some way to fuck their mind up without even any drugs) believes the lilypad is rotating, letting her see that the gentle curve of the horizon can be seen in all directions. Even if no one goes in there at first, the smell will go up to the apartments above.

“What’s the lilypad?” asks Calypso (there are tons of smells in New York, who’s got time to check them out), the exhaustion apparent in her voice. “What does it mean? Just give it to me straight.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” says the sage (maybe I am a druggie, I’m flat on my back in a park like the rest of them), letting out an easy, ribbity chuckle. “This is the sum total of your contributions to humanity, good and bad. The more sap” — (back to the fucking sap, good lord) — “you add to someone’s life, the more positive threads you weave, the more you contribute to their happiness, the more contributions you accrue. Most people can see the direct effects” — (maybe I’ll go to East River Park after this. Maybe this is finally the time, I’ll be so drained from the drugs I can wander over there and look at the spot where she went under; maybe I’ll jump in too… I’m not sure if I could drown, I mean I’m physically able to swim and my brain… stupid fucking brain that causes all my problems… might force me to be alive from some basic instinct I can’t override… did her brain have that instinct? Did she want to survive, when she was under?) — “of their actions, which are obvious — bullying is bad, helping an old woman cross the street is good — but the indirect results are much more wide reaching.” — (I killed her and I killed Pemba) — “Here are the downstream effects of your actions, all laid out for you.”

“And all I’ve given to the world is this lilypad.”

“No. What you have contributed is the water.” The water is light and clear, but Calypso is unable to see to the bottom.

“That’s the impact I’ve had on others?”

“Each positive contribution to someone else’s life, direct or indirect, adds a drop of water.” — (a drop, well what’s a drop, really, what does a frog think is a drop) — “A negative contribution results in water evaporating.”

“No, that’s wrong.” Calypso edges forward (there were hardly any bubbles when she went under. I should have counted them, it wouldn’t have been hard), shuffling towards the edge (let’s see the bottom). The motion of her frog-legs causes the lilypad to crease and a dribble of liquid breaks the meniscus. It slides down the green plant to touch her feet.

The memories (oh god oh fuck) come in flashes. Calypso knows that they are memories (they’re memories but they’re Real, they were real then and they’re real Now), but that does not soften their bite. Each scene hits her like a staggeringly bright slide of a ViewMaster (like I’m right up against the movie screen… I haven’t seen a movie in so, so long; I gave up when I couldn’t sit through one, when I couldn’t concentrate, I would walk out not even knowing the plot… everyone else around, chattering happily and I didn’t even have anyone to go with) from which she cannot look away: balancing the textbook on her knee as she rocks the baby back to sleep, bleary street light filtering in through the sheer curtains, tying shoes and teaching to tie shoes (she learned quick, didn’t she? That surprised me, I thought that would be more trouble, but no, she learned so quick), filling up the tiny backpack with donated school supplies before the first day of kindergarten (I had to beg for those like a beggar, but I did it, didn’t I, I filled that bag right up to the brim), glancing up above the storybook to see if she is asleep in the hospital bed, seeing the bald head (oh god) and the closed eyes and the emaciated body (no no no no) and trying to cry softly so as not to wake her (I cry loud now, as loud as I please, all alone).

When Calypso is a frog again, the sage rotates to face her. “Nearly everyone is surprised by how much water is in their ocean.” — (I killed him, Pemba’s lying dead in a pool of his own blood) — “Even those who we consider to be bad people usually have a net-positive effect on the world. There is no necessity for balance between good and evil. Humanity is overwhelmingly kind to each other. We naturally help each other and build each other up. That’s why our few negative actions bubble up in our memory. Our shame propels us to fixate on them because they are unusual.”

“No, no, no.” (wrong, all wrong; who does this frog think she is?) Calypso is shaking (no bubbles, almost no bubbles at all) her head. “You don’t understand. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“I am a sage. I understand.”

“What I could tell you… I don’t ” — (she’s probably still underwater, under the East River… not the only one, I’m sure the mob has sent men to sleep with the fishes… what a fucking cesspool…, her rotting corpse… is there anything down there? fish? that eats human flesh? Or does it just degrade slowly?… Eventually she’ll be just bones… that’s better, that’s more comfortable, somehow…, child’s bones) — “deserve all this water.”

“It’s not what you deserve. It simply is. Calypso, anything you could tell me, I already know. I’m a part of you.”

“You’re a sage. You know wise things. You don’t know what’s in my head.”

“I’m a drug-induced fantasy, Calypso.” — (I should have jumped off my roof the other night, do what I did to my daughter, end all the suffering because what’s the point of only suffering?… somewhere in me, there’s still hope). I’m a product of your own imagination. I only know what’s in your head, and nothing else.”

“Then you know I killed my own daughter.”

“Yes.”

The two frogs face each other, neither speaking, each gullet pulsating in a tense rhythm. That’s it, it’s out, nothing else to say. (it feels like I’ve puked, something… revolting, acidic, secret… out of my system that needed to get out and now there’s an empty spot in its place… for once, nothing to say… we walked away and I wouldn’t take Britt’s hand and I felt so utterly numb as if I were the one under a thousand pounds of freezing East River water and I thought the guilt would lighten but it hasn’t, it’s only killed me since).

“The good outweighs the bad, Calypso.”

“No. This is all wrong.”

“You have a rich tapestry of silk” — (my dad, where did he go? he got three percent of me, and I never even knew him, he got three percent for free; what percent of my daughter’s tapestry did I have?) — “, a river of sap,” — (don’t think of those same memories… pushing the bike… tying the shoes… bedtime stories… they’ll never stop coming back)) — “and an ocean as far as the eye can see. You have learned from others; you have lived a meaningful life;” — (the day when she told me about the East River plan she was so sad, but a little happy too; she had found a way out and she had thought of something I hadn’t) — ” you have been good to the world.”

“I can’t, I just can’t. I still just…”

“You’re stuck. You can’t move forward.” She didn’t struggle when she went under; almost no bubbles came up; when I walked away I don’t know if I heard the clacking of my boots on the pier or the pounding of my blood in my head or nothing at all.

“Then let me say” — (Pemba’s dead, he’s bled out by now, he’s dead on the floor of his lair, dead like a dog) — “this. You need to hear it.” (you’re just a figment of my imagination).

“Say it!” Dear god, is it what I think it is?

“I forgive you.”

The words ring out like a clarion dinner-bell, reverberating as if they are in a cavern rather than at sea.

Over the sage’s shoulder, Calypso can see land on the horizon. She doesn’t feel anything but stillness from the lilypad, so it surprises her to learn that they have been moving. The land approaches at a rapid clip, and soon it clarifies into blocky shapes above a sliver of earth, disjoint but connected into one mass. The shapes grow. They are distant, then significant, then towering, then comforting as she recognizes the skyline of the southern tip of Manhattan. It takes her a moment longer to process the view since she’s approaching from the east, meaning the buildings stack in an unfamiliar order. Just to her right is the Williamsburg bridge, and far to her left is the Manhattan bridge. She knows that if she were able to turn around, behind her would be Brooklyn. There are no ships in the East River, and no waves. The lilypad has not wobbled once.

“It’s New York,” she mutters, without thinking. “I’m headed home.”

“And I’m almost there.”

Tigers in the Sky

Last night the sky split open,
ribs of starlight cracking,
and tigers leapt through constellations,
paws sparking comets over sleepless cities.
I counted stripes as I ran,
through markets smelling of spice and fire,
wondering if the stars
were teaching me
to hunt my own shadow.
A child laughed somewhere,
jar of wind in her hands,
and the tigers bowed
to taste her air
before slipping behind fractured clouds.

In the garden where bones bloom,
petals curl around ribs and skulls,
white as forgotten ghosts,
soft as the rain that never falls.
The wind hums between marrow and marrow,
a lullaby for things that cannot sleep.
I plant my fingers in soil that remembers
every story I forgot,
every lie I whispered to the stars.
A crow perches atop a femur,
tilting its head,
watching me learn
how to speak without a tongue,
how to grow without soil,
how to love without living.
And in the moonlight,
the bones shift,
forming shapes that blink
like eyes I’ve never seen,
breathing in the dark
with a language older than memory.

The Mathematician

He went seeking primes so monstrously large
even the cosmos blanched at their breadth.

He scribbled formulas,
stuffed them with numbers
to the point of gagging,
then fed them all the more.

His masterpiece — ten thousand digits of pride —
was pricked with one unforeseen pin —
it was divisible by 10007.

Not thirteen, his usual foe,
but this fifth columnist,
hiding out in the land of five digits.

He folded up his brain
like old clothes,
tossed it in the nearest donation box.

In the city, there’s a homeless man
who will prove 1=0
for spare change.

Weightless.
Yes. I’ve been that,
floating around in a cabin
like a dust mote,
waving my arms, kicking my legs,
anything to introduce myself
into such an absurd situation.

I’m sorry but I can’t really
explain it to you,
other than,
without gravity’s anchor,
the body’s about as useless
as your brother.

I drift up.
I touch the ceiling.
I maneuver myself
but, like an oar
in a maelstrom,
my intentions rarely
match the results.

Yes, it’s strange.
My heart, every now and then,
has abruptly ascended,
(like the time when I first met you
if you remember)
but, on those occasions,
the rest of me
didn’t come along for the ride.

As for my head…
nothing’s changed there.
After a while, it tells me,
“You can do this.”
Of course,
that’s after I’m already doing it.

The shades were drawn, of course, but it didn’t matter. She burned through the fabric. She burned through my eyelids. She burned so bright in the milky hollow behind my forehead that any dreams coy enough to slink out of my subconscious were frightened back into hiding like kittens beneath a porch. Dreams, or at least the sleeping kind, live in the dark. Dreams do not like the light.

But that wasn’t all.

I could hear her humming. It was a soundless song, deep and guttural. It made the tips of my toes tingle like they often did in winter when I came in from the cold and sat before the fire.

And I could feel her tugging at my blood. Does that make sense? Probably not. But it doesn’t matter because that’s how it felt. Feelings don’t have to make sense, you know. They don’t live in the same world as us. They live in a different reality, analogous to our own but thicker, slower. Like fish. Yes, like fish. That’s how it felt. As though I were a fish and she was an angler.

I don’t know how long I lay there, clamping my eyes shut, hot and cold and cold and hot. Eventually, I gave up and walked across the floor and threw the curtains open.

I had never seen the moon so large. I had never seen the moon so bright. She hung above the rooftops, wan and solemn. Where she touched me, my skin burned. I twisted the window latch and pulled the panes apart, suddenly desperate to remove any barrier between us. A quiet breeze washed into my room, carrying the scent of honey and lavender.

My foot struck the wall, and I realized then that I had been walking forward. I now stood pressed against the window frame, as close as I could get to the moon without tumbling out.

It only took me a moment to decide. In truth, it wasn’t a decision at all. The moon was calling me; I had to go. I simply had to. I threw a housecoat over my pajamas and stuffed my feet into slippers. Mother would be furious if she knew I was wearing slippers outside, but I didn’t know where I had left my boots, and I couldn’t be expected to search for them at a time like this, and who had the patience to tie all those laces anyway?

I twisted the doorknob slowly, careful that the tongue cleared the plate before I pulled. The hinges creaked, and I winced. I counted to one hundred in my head before I dared proceed further, and then I walked on my tiptoes, close to the wall where the boards were less prone to creaking. Every step brought me closer to mother and father’s room. Their door leered like a rotten apple at the end of the hall. I refrained from sticking my tongue out at it, but only just.

At the top of the staircase, I hesitated. Which steps creaked? The top two and the fourth? No. The second, fourth, and fifth? No, no. I shook my head. It wouldn’t do to take a chance. Mother kept her ears as well-oiled as father’s lawnmower. This close to their room, the squeak of a stair would surely rouse her.

An idea dawned on me. I tied my housecoat tighter around my torso, turned so that my back faced the staircase, and lifted one leg high, higher, above and over the banister. I centered my chest over the handrail and walked down the balusters one by one by one. My housecoat slid over the wood with hardly a sound. Only once was there trouble, when my treacherous slipper slid off my sweaty foot. It would have flopped from stair to stair and woken up half the neighbourhood, but I caught it at the last moment and pushed it back into place, flexing my toes so it didn’t happen again. I spared a bitter thought for mother, who had purposefully bought the slippers a size too large to allow me “space to grow,” and then shook the slipper out of my head to concentrate on dismounting as I reached the bottom. From here, there was only the entrance hall and the front door, which I was pleased to find swung open and closed with hardly a peep; with any luck, I would return and relock it before anyone woke.

On the front porch, beneath the light of the moon, I allowed myself a brief, victorious smile before I continued down the walk and through the garden gate, grasping it by the missing picket, third from the left. Flushed from the effort, I hardly felt the chill of the autumn night.

I looked left. I looked right. Nothing moved except a leaf skidding down the cobblestones. And anyway, there was really only one way to go, wasn’t there? The moon painted my path silver, a silver so deep and bright that you would have been forgiven for thinking the road itself was paved in sterling. My chest burned, and I didn’t once stop to wonder why or how, to look around, to worry about the unsavory types that mother and father often discussed on Sunday while standing at the front window with their arms crossed and their mouths turned. No, I only ducked my head and hurried after the moon, the heels of my oversized slippers flapping behind me like wings.

The moon never sputtered and never strayed. Straight through the city it led me, past Mr. Babel’s Store for Rare and Antique Books, past Claudia’s Cake Shop, past the market and the hat store and the dance club and then I didn’t recognize anything at all, but that was alright because I had only gone straight, hadn’t I, dead ahead down the Boulevard of the Republic, and when I wanted to return, when I had seen that which the moon was so keen to show me, when I had looked her in the eye and shaken her hand, well, I would turn around and walk right back down the Boulevard of the Republic, wouldn’t I?

There came a point when the uneven cobblestones gave way to tarmac, that smooth material that father so hated, and then to dirt. I hadn’t really been paying attention, lost in the glow of the moon, but I looked up now and saw hills. Sloping hills that rose and fell around me like waves at sea. The grass was long and flowing, swaying in the breeze, and the blades hissed as they slid past each other, trading secrets, and the cumulative voice of it all was a whisper so heavy that it masked even the sound of my own fumbling footsteps, for how could I be expected to concentrate on my feet when the moon lay so close?

The trail kinked and curled, and I realized that I was climbing and probably had been for quite some time. The muscles in my thighs complained, but I told them to be silent because didn’t they know where we were? We were in the presence of the moon. The moon. The moon! If you’ve ever felt an emotion like I felt in those moments, cresting each hill and gazing into the pale face of the moon… I’ll tell you, if you’ve ever felt an emotion even half as large as I felt in those moments, you’ve already felt more than most people ever feel in their whole lifetimes. Because if they did, if they had, they wouldn’t be so cruel. Even now, as I write this, the mere memory of her soft glow reassembles my priorities, rearranges all that I think is—or thought was—important.

I’m not sure when I first noticed the girl. She stood at the highest point in the meadow, so she would have been visible far in the distance, although I don’t think I truly recognized her until I reached the top of the lean, knobby hill and stopped short.

Her hair was black and straight. Her eyes were long and narrow. She was barefoot. She wore a long dress, pale blue and layered in dandelion prints. Her left arm was raised above her head, and in her fist she clutched a… Well, it looked like a ribbon.

“Is that a ribbon?” I asked.

“A ribbon.” She looked up and considered it. “Yes. Yes, I suppose that’s as good a name as any for it.”

“Where does it go?”

“To the moon.”

“To the moon?”

“To the moon.”

“Why are you holding a ribbon that goes to the moon?”

“So it doesn’t float away.”

“Oh.” I climbed the ribbon with my eyes. Sure enough, it disappeared into the moon. “Can I hold it?”

“There are rules,” the girl said.

“I don’t like rules,” I said.

For the first time, she smiled. “Me neither. But these rules are important.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Fine.”

“There are three.”

“What are they?”

“The moon balloon can change hands only when at its fullest.”

“It’s full, isn’t it?”

“The moon balloon cannot be pulled or released.”

“I won’t.”

“The moon balloon cannot be given, only taken of free will.”

I nodded impatiently and strode forward. “I already said I’d take it.”

The girl shook her head. “You don’t understand. Once you accept the moon balloon, you have no choice but to hold it until another girl takes it from you.”

I hesitated. “How long will that be?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Up here, this close to the moon, time doesn’t move in a predictable way. It ebbs, and it flows.”

I didn’t move.

“If you decide not to take it, the moon will call someone new,” she said. “The last girl didn’t take it.”

“Is it always a girl?”

“For all of eternity, a woman has always carried the moon balloon.”

“How can you know that?”

“The moon… She says things through the ribbon.”

We stood close on the bare patch on top of the lean, knobby hill and didn’t speak. The grass whispered.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

She didn’t say anything, only stared at me with those narrow eyes. I stepped closer and lifted my arm high and stretched onto my tiptoes to grasp the ribbon just above her fist.

“I have it,” I said.

When the other girl released her grip, I felt a great weight take hold of me. The ribbon pulled and pressed. It placed my body under the most terrible stress, and I might have worried that I would tear in two if the ribbon hadn’t simultaneously kindled a light in my chest, filling me with such warm emotion as I had never felt before. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream.

The other girl stepped back. She had the oddest expression on her face as she lowered her arm and stared at her palm.

“You miss her,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Missing isn’t the right word. Missing implies sadness. Missing implies that she’s no longer with me.”

“But she isn’t,” I said.

“But she is,” the other girl said, her smile like a constellation. “She is. She always is.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“No. But you will.”

The ribbon held all the weight of sleep and all the lightness of dreams. Do you know what that feels like? To be pulled and pressed at the same time? Maybe you do. That’s what I imagine love might feel like. One day.

“Would you like me to stay a while?” the other girl asked. “To keep you company?”

“I’d like that.”

The girl lowered herself onto the ground, fingers intertwined behind her head.

“Are you excited to go back?” I asked. “To your life?”

She looked at me, her expression blank. “I’m in my life, aren’t I?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you are.”

She swiveled her gaze back to the moon. The motion of the grass was hypnotic.

“Do you feel her?”

I nodded.

“She’s only doing what she always does. Pushing and pulling. Giving and taking. But you have a direct line. Listen, and you’ll begin to understand. It’s nothing explicit. It’s a broader awareness. A feeling. Which is all we do in life anyway, isn’t it? Feel?”

I didn’t say anything.

“That’s all we are,” the girl said, so softly that the words were lost to the grass. “Feelings.”

Eventually, she left. By then, the edges of time had already grown dull, so I didn’t know how long she sat there, nor how long she walked, fading in and out of valleys, until she crested the final hill and faded from my life forever. I don’t remember everything she said to me—memory, of course, is only a delusion of time—but I do remember her final words.

“One day we’ll be there. One day we’ll reach the moon. I’m sure of it. And you know what? I fear that day. The day we walk on the moon is the day we stop dreaming.”

On the bare patch on top of the lean, knobby hill, there was no day. The sun never rose. The moon never set. Sometimes the breeze lifted, and sometimes the breeze fell. Sometimes I slept, although it didn’t feel like sleeping. It felt like waking. I dreamed of my room at home, of mother eating a crumpet, of father reading the newspaper.

Sometimes, there were other signs of life. A pack of wolves howling in the next valley over. A frog at my feet. A tiny owl on my shoulder. Once, fireflies. Thousands of them, flickering on and off across the meadow. I had the impression that the moon was calling these creatures to me.

The moon. Yes, the moon. The moon was fading, waning, although the phases didn’t arrive with any regularity. As I said, time didn’t flow on the lean, knobby hill. I felt no longing for the phase that had been because I didn’t remember the phase that had been. I felt no expectation for the phase that would be because I didn’t anticipate any phase to be. There was only the now, the present, the immediate, the forthwith. Does that make sense? I’m telling you the story as though it happened all neat and orderly because that’s the way our brains understand it. But really, there was no past, and there was no future. It was like… It was likelike the past and future were separate bodies of water in the valleys on either side of that lean, knobby hill. They rose and fell with the tide, scrabbling at the incline like mice in a bucket. Sometimes they came close, but they never reached me.

When the moon faded to black, I could see nothing at all. It was a darkness more complete than any I’ve experienced before. I might have been scared if there was anything to be scared of.

Without sight, my other senses heightened. Touch, taste, smell, hearing… I felt everything. It was unclear if I myself was feeling or if I was feeling through the moon. Probably the two were one and the same.

I felt the thrill of blood through my arteries when my heart pumped, pumped.

I felt the pain of the grass when the wind yanked at their hair.

I felt the solemnity of the clouds as they huddled close for warmth, their breath white in the cold air.

I felt the grimace of the wind as it scraped past trees and buildings and carried leaves and rubbish, and I felt the relief when it reached at long last its destination, the city at the end of the world, the city that has no name.

And I felt dreams. Or rather, I felt all of the tiny disturbances in the universe that were dreams-to-be, that which would be grabbed and clenched and bitten and burned by the blind fumblings of the mind until they became something solid, something real, something indelible.

The moon waxed, beginning as the thinnest wafer and growing, bloating, brightening. I think that’s about the time I heard footsteps, heavy breathing, pebbles tumbling down the hillside. The grass whispered in agitation. A girl’s head appeared, clambering on all fours up and onto the bare patch on the top of the lean, knobby hill. She had curly hair and small ears and big hands. She wore trousers and clogs.

Her breath caught when she saw me. Her forehead crinkled—and then crinkled further when she noticed the ribbon.

“What are you holding?”

“I called it a ribbon.”

“Where does it go?”

“To the moon.”

“To the moon?”

“To the moon.”

The girl accepted the moon balloon. I wasn’t sad to release the ribbon. I wasn’t happy either. It made no difference. The moon was still with me, you understand.

I offered to sit with her for a while, to keep her company, and she said she’d like that. So I lay on the ground, and I gazed at the moon, and we talked about dreams.

Neither sooner nor later, I left. I followed the silver tail of the moon through the whispering grasses and over the rolling hills. When I thought about it, the trail went on forever; when I didn’t, I made swift progress. Dirt became tarmac, and tarmac became cobblestone. I passed the dance club and the hat store and the market and Claudia’s Cake Shop and Mr. Babel’s Store for Rare and Antique Books. I unlatched the garden gate, grasping it by the missing picket, third from the left.

I knocked on the door.

It opened with hardly a peep. Mother’s face, long and flat, stared at me. Then she crumpled onto one knee and wrapped me into a hug, a tight hug, the tightest hug made from cat fur lodged in the collar of her housecoat and crumbs from a breakfast crumpet and stagnant dreams from a night of bad rest.

“Where have you been?” she said, in a whisper like the long, flowing grasses that surrounded the bare patch on top of the lean, knobby hill.

“The moon,” I said.

“Be careful walking to school,” Vimala says, a mantra that is common in their mornings. Her daughter Chinni has to walk half an hour to get to school, and while she is always accompanied by her friends, Vimala still worries. The road is more of a dirt path, and she knows how easy it is to be tempted by something off the path. People with safety and security could dream of paths less taken and find whimsy in twisted, poorly maintained routes. For people like Vimala and her family, the well-worn paths were the easiest and the shortest paths to the destination.

“Yes, Amma,” her daughter says, and Vimala wishes that she could offer her daughter more than just words of advice and warning. Her husband owns a bicycle, but he is off to work at the break of dawn. In the evenings, he leaves the fields for the local bar, spending half his salary on cheap liquor and fried snacks. Vimala does not know what he finds in the sordid, dirty place. The few times she has visited to bring back her inebriated husband, she found a place filled with grimy men, cheap string lights covering a thatched shed, some delusion of being something more than the place actually was. It was a place of vice, a place where dreams died, a place where men withered and finally let go of their hopes of leaving the village behind for something grander and greater.

Chinni is well-behaved, and she comes home with report cards with high numbers and comments from her teachers that Vimala reads with pride. But she is alone in her pride. Already, she is hearing from her in-laws about the eventual day when Chinni will be taken out of school. The only thing keeping Chinni in school is the free lunch given by the government and the free childcare provided by the teachers. But the colleges that come after school will ask for tuition, and there is no college within a traveling distance from their home. Chinni will have to be kept in a hostel, and Vimala knows that in their family, such things are unheard of.

In their village, daughters are treated like yearly crops. They are raised to harvest and then sold. Sons are trees, watered and cared of, expected to provide shade. Daughters are never treated as one’s own. Vimala sees that thought in both men and women. She remembers the sting of her own childhood, of never belonging. Her mother’s home became her brother’s, and this new home she has with her husband is her husband’s. But it seems she is alone in remembering. Everyone else around her seems to understand and accept that it is the way the world works, and it is the way the world must continue to work. They want her daughter to repeat Vimala’s life. When Chinni is a girl still too young, she will be placed like a doll in front of some strange family and their son. The family will appraise her value and demand a dowry, as if they are doing Vimala an enormous favor by taking her daughter away from her.

Vimala wants to say she will never partake in the ritual, but her life is evidence that she has done everything just as other people have. She will live the same life as the people around her, and perhaps the only inheritance she will leave her daughter is the same fate. A transactional marriage with a man that others deem appropriate, a lifetime of domestic chores and simple living, a life devoid of dreams. Vimala wishes that her daughter could live any life other than her own. Anything would be better than a life so barren of love, so bereft of hope, and so destined for an inconsequential life and death.

But she cannot offer anything more to Chinni. Instead all she can offer her are the smallest of pleasures. Vimala takes out two candies from the knot she’s made at the end of her saree. They are hard mango candies, sweet and sour, wrapped in thin paper. She presses them into Chinni’s hand.

“Come home right after school,” she says. “Don’t hang around the school field.”

Winter is coming, and the days are growing shorter. The path from the school to their home is too narrow for cars, but people travel on bicycles and motorbikes, and she knows the recklessness of men when they are given anything that can go fast. “Chinni” means small, and her daughter has always kept to her namesake. She is a bird-like thing, thin and gangly, easy to miss.

“And walk on the side of the road,” Vimala warns her.

“What if I don’t?” Chinni asks, a joking tone in her voice.

“Then the Boochodu will get you!” Vimala yells, tickling her daughter’s sides. It is a frequent joke in their house. A threat of a mystical bogeyman who will take her daughter away. Vimala had received the same threats from her mother when she was a child, although the tone had been different. Vimala had thought the Boochodu to be a real person, some shadowy figure in the night who came and abducted unruly children. For her daughter, the Boochodu was a character restricted to bedtime stories. Chinni knew he wasn’t real nor a real threat.

After Chinni leaves, Vimala sets out to complete the day’s work. She is considered a housewife, but the house is much to maintain. She hears of women in the cities who have maids or machines to do the dishes and the laundry, but in their little village, all she has is her two hands. They are rough and calloused now, and she resents the day Chinni’s will be the same. She feeds the chickens in the yard and cooks lunch for her and husband. With the steel lunch box tied up in cloth, she walks to the field to join her husband in working the land.

It is difficult labor, under a sun that does not relent, but it is the only work available in their land. She sets out to leave earlier in the evening than her husband. Someone has to be home when Chinni returns. A train passes through the edge of the farm land, and she imagines the journey of the train, all the people traveling inside of it. The train makes the same journey every few days, but it has seen more of the world than Vimala has. She has never been to a city, and the little television in their home is a relic of the past, with a screen that curves outward and where everything is too colorful, too artificial.

In the evenings, after Chinni comes home from school and before her husband comes back, she watches a soap opera for a half an hour while Chinni does her homework. It is the one little pleasure in her otherwise mundane life. The woman in the show is belittled and humiliated, overworked, and Vimala sees parts of herself in the woman. Granted, the woman lives in a palatial house, wears jewelry even to sleep, but at the core, their problems are the same. A bad husband, a sad marriage, and a life that seems devoid of hope. But in those soap operas, hope does sprout eventually. All the problems are resolved by magic. The woman’s husband changes into a romantic hero, and the heroine herself discovers she is special and talented. After thousands of episodes and countless misunderstandings, there is a happy ending.

But Chinni is not home yet, and the soap opera episode ends on another cliffhanger. Vimala goes out of their little house to see if she can see a little figure walking on the road in the dusk. There is no one, and the light is rapidly diminishing. Soon, she will be able to see nothing. She lights the kerosene lamp and heads out beyond their compound fence.

It is only a half-an-hour walk, a route Chinni has taken for over a year. Sometimes she does come home late, disregarding Vimala’s warnings to play with her friends in the dusty school field. From her home, Vimala ventures out on the path to school, but she sees no one. She goes to the homes of Chinni’s classmates, but they tell she left the school on time while they stayed behind to play. She comes home again, hoping that she might find her daughter in the house, but it is empty.

At the bar, her husband is too drunk to be of any help, and so she walks the path between their house and the school. She checks behind the school building, where there are always abandoned beedi butts and broken bottles of liquor. She checks the fields and the bus stand and finds nothing.

She continues her search, poring through the streets of the village, knocking on every door that she can think of. Chinni is light enough that most adults can carry her with one arm. There are so many places where a little girl can be hidden. So many ways to hurt a child so fragile.

Finally, she makes her way to the bar, where her husband is sitting with friends. His face is slack with drink, his words slurred. It takes him a minute to register what she is saying, and when it does, he is not as worried as her, not nearly as concerned. The men start from the bar, each armed with heavy steel flashlights and lanterns, searching through the fields and the nearby forest, calling out her name.

The other women come to Vimala and escort her back home. Her home is relegated to waiting, to wailing in silence while the sky gradually lightens into morning. The day passes and another, and a week goes by. Her house remains empty. The police are informed, but there is little they can do. The truth is that village lives do not hold much value, and Vimala herself knows that it could be a freak accident. There are old wells in the village that have never been filled up or closed. As more of the forest is being converted to farmland, kraits and cobras are beginning to crawl through the rice paddies and the village alleyways.

After a week, there is an unsaid acceptance of Chinni not returning. Her husband stops his search and buries himself in half-hearted grief and alcohol. The police ignore her gaze when she goes to the police station for updates. Vimala is not angry with them. There is nothing to search for. The old films she sees on television have crimes with clues, with pieces of fabric left for detectives to find, with motives and money to be gained, but in her case there is nothing.

Vimala continues her search, scouring the fields and shining lights into open borewells, venturing further into the surrounding forest and calling out Chinni’s name and getting no response. She stops going to the fields and stops cooking their humble meals. Their house gathers dust and she gains the feral appearance of those on the fringes of society.

She goes out earlier and earlier on endless searches in the same area, seeing if there is some new hiding spot in her old village she will discover. Hope is long gone, but she wants an end. She wants an answer. One morning she leaves for the rice paddies far beyond their village. She has scoured the land multiple times before, but soon it will be winter and the mornings will be too cold for her to walk for long periods.

She spots small footprints in soft soil, and she thinks of all the times Chinni has walked and played in the village. Her one pair of shoes were things to be saved and sparingly used, polished every morning before school and kept neatly outside the door of their home.

Vimala follows the footprints. It cannot be Chinni, but it is perhaps some other child lost in the fields. It is early enough that the snakes will still be out, and their village rests at the foothills of mountains known for leopards.

She follows the footprints and goes into the forest, to where the trees are so densely packed together she has to squeeze between them to pass. The footprints are now dirty marks of mud, and she gets the feeling the child was running. Vimala notices the increase in the length of the gait, but it takes her minutes before she sees how the footprints are different now. They are an adult’s footprints now, and the forest is no longer filled with the morning birdcalls or even the sounds of her own footsteps.

The footprints disappear, and when Vimala stops, she sees she is lost. It is a simple thing most days to get back to the village. It is only a matter of heading downhill, where the forest meets the edge of the fields. Now the land is flat where it should not be, and the trees are strange and gray.

Vimala hears footsteps, slow and deliberate. When she turns, there is no one and nothing.

“Who’s there?” she asks, hoping it is not a leopard or a bear.

Instead, it is a young woman dressed in rags. She looks like Vimala, yet is taller and wilder. Her hair has ribbons streaked through it, and her feet are not barefoot but bound with cloth. It is Chinni, but not so small anymore. Instead, she is a changed thing. She is a wild and free thing, unhindered by responsibilities and untethered from the rules of society.

“Amma,” Chinni says, and her face is filled with joy but devoid of childhood. She has seen things, this young woman, and survived things. She stands straight in a way Vimala can never stand. In her life, she was expected to bow to the world, to the people around her, to her husband. But the young woman in front of her does not slouch to hide her body or wear a veil to cover her hair.

“Chinni?” Vimala asks.

It is a mirage or a delusion. Vimala has finally succumbed to the madness, and she welcomes it. It is a pitiable thing to be half-mad. To embrace the madness fully is to no longer see the concerned and critical looks of the people around her. It is a madness in which she can be with some form of her daughter.

Vimala embraces her daughter. She ignores the changes in the temperature, the way the sky is red, and the way her daughter’s form flows and changes shape like water within her arms. The way something is not quite right, because something wrong is better than nothing at all. Because the monster who steals disobedient children away may be spiriting them to a place where they belong. And for all of her effort and all the ways she shrank and bent herself to fit into the roles she was given, she never felt she belonged.

In the village, a little girl returns to an empty home. She keeps her shoes to the side of the door, and calls for her mother.

I turn over on the couch, where I’ve curled into one corner. In the middle of the night, I didn’t have the energy to move Lena’s laptop. Instead, I just slept around it.

The couch smells like dried-up white wine in one spot, something I never realized until I started sleeping here. We must have spilled it a long time ago. We haven’t had wine in the house for two years, since before the IVF, before the cycle-coded calendar in the kitchen and the evenings we’d giggled and clinked together the matching self-insemination syringes.

Cheers! We’d said.

I squint into the living room, listening for the baby’s whimper as I look at the time. It’s 5:30, which feels like a blessing. Four hours of sleep. I’m sure Lena got less.

The baby sounds rise and fall, closer. Under them, I hear Lena’s slow footsteps padding down the hallway. There’s a sear of guilt as I consider, split-second, whether to pretend to be asleep still. But then they’re here in the room.

“Good morning, mama,” Lena murmurs, more to the baby than to me.

“Good morning, mama,” I say back, smiling.

As always, when the baby is actually here, in front of me, with her tiny wiggling shrimp fingers and her face squashed up in the huge effort of crying or gurgling or smiling, I melt.

What’s happening to me? I’d said to the delivery nurse, when I felt my eyes overflow all at once, nothing like the crying I was used to.

Welcome to parenthood, she’d said. It felt practiced, tailored to the bewildered men she was used to seeing in the delivery room. Not to me, who could have been in Lena’s place if it had gone that way.

“I’m going to make some decaf,” Lena whispers to me. The baby is settling into her chest, little face slack over the edge of the wrap Lena wears to hold her close, to be one being. “Will you do the bottles?”

I nod and roll out of the throw blanket that I’ve gotten used to sleeping under. Lena sways toward the kitchen, her soft hums keeping the baby quiet. As I turn to fold the throw—a semblance of the normal, neither of us want to talk about how I’ve been sleeping out here—I see them.

Four wet shapes on the floor in front of the coffee table.

Smudged half-circles I can only see because thin light through the living room window catches them.

I gaze around the room, trying to identify the source. My face feels slack with sleep and confusion. Maybe I spilled a glass of water as I moved the coffee table in the night, half-awake? But, no, it rests on modern, square legs. Too heavy for me to have shoved it semi-conscious, and the wrong shape to leave those marks. And there is no glass of water.

“Did you move the crib last night?” I whisper to Lena when I’m in the kitchen, rinsing bottle rings as she clicks on the coffeemaker.

She frowns at me over her shoulder.

“From our room?” she asks.

It stings to hear her say our room. It is ours, but I’m on the couch now and she’s with the baby. I wonder if that’s what she means, even by accident: her room and the baby’s room. Ours.

“Yeah,” I say. “It looks like something got moved in front of the coffee table.”

“What do you mean?”

“Marks on the floor,” I say. “Did we spill something?”

Lena shakes her head in the same gentle cadence that she approaches every movement, now. Back and forth, quiet and smooth. Serene. I feel like I can’t keep up with it.

“Maybe we have a leak,” she says, handing me a mug.

The baby makes a quiet little sound and a fist emerges from her onesie to curl toward Lena’s hair. I take a sip. Decaf coffee tastes the same as regular, to me.

It takes almost until evening for me to remember to check the living room ceiling. The baby is restless today, a continuation of last night. Lena tries to open her laptop for the third time only for the baby to wake and squeal again.

“I thought you were on maternity leave,” I say, trying to tease gently. I worry it comes out shrill.

“Just a couple of emails,” she whispers, reaching for a bottle as she pulls the baby into her arms, balancing the open computer.

“They should know better than to email you,” I say. “Let me take her.”

Lena hesitates a millisecond too long.

“Thanks.”

The baby is always warmer than I remember. Even though I touch her dozens of times a day—when Lena showers, when she wants to change her clothes or stretch her arms–it’s as though my skin forgets. And my nose forgets her smell, which up close is overpowering, the raw scent of brand-new flesh, of being completely alive. I kiss her forehead and try to ignore how immediately she returns to fussing in my arms. I whisk her away into the kitchen to defrost the 4pm bottle. I try to replicate Lena’s soft sway as I walk and it feels clumsy in my hips.

Lena takes a half hour to frown over her laptop. The baby, meanwhile, naps fitfully in my tired arms. I don’t know what to call it when, dozing, she turns her sucking mouth to my breast. I know that I scowl and then turn red, ashamed.

When Lena joins us, a thin crease has appeared between her eyebrows. It’s the face of the old Lena, the Lena who would stride through the front door promptly at six, who would lean in to kiss me at my desk, who would regale me with complaints about her coworkers over dinner, to my delight.

Her reading glasses are still on, giving her eyes a slight distortion that makes me love her with such violence I’m surprised at myself. I lean over the baby’s head.

“You’re so beautiful,” I whisper.

Lena rolls her eyes.

“Never prettier than when I’m wearing nipple guards,” she says.

But she kisses me anyway, lingering in a way that weakens every joint in my body. Her mouth tastes like the syrupy tea our doula gave her. I watch the crease smooth itself as she nestles the baby onto her shoulder. And then they both are gone.

The new Lena, born with the baby, floats on something I can’t see, a buoyancy in her movements that gently bobs her away from the shore, out of reach.

I pull out the stepladder and haul it to the living room.

The ceiling is dusty. Cobwebs form tracery against the stucco. I find several things I need to do—fix a piece of crown molding that’s coming loose, replace the batteries in a smoke detector, repaint—but I don’t find a leak. I even check around the casing of the ceiling fan’s motor, wiping lint from its blades which falls like snow. But the ceiling is unblemished, and there are no signs that anything has dripped through it and onto the floor.

From the stepladder, I can barely see the smeared shapes, but when I climb back down, the light hits them again. Four sloppy curves, evenly spaced. They’re not water stains, I realize, or not just water. They’re greasy, like oil wiped by a rag. One of them is crusted with a thin rind of mud, as though tracked in and left there, but there is nothing in any other direction.

I sweep up the lint and spray down the smears with cleaner. When I come back with a handful of paper towels, I can’t even see them anymore.

That night, I make soup for Lena with as many beans and vegetables as I can. My body feels hollow from lack of sleep, and I can only imagine the wear on hers. It’s hard not to compare how I think I’d do in her place.

There were pros and cons for each of us, but we’d agreed it was lucky that Lena had conceived instead of me. Her company’s maternity leave was generous, whereas my freelance work was spotty at best. And so that was the reason we clung to, along with little things: the year difference in our ages, Lena’s family a few hours closer than mine. But we both knew the real reason: that she was better at hard things.

It was my hands that had gone numb as she pushed through the tenth hour of labor, and it was me that the nurse handed a cup of juice to, saying I looked pale.

When dinnertime comes, Lena doesn’t eat the soup because the baby can only settle when she’s bounced on tiptoes. I offer, half-joking, to feed Lena spoonfuls as she bobs.

“I’ll get a bowl in a bit, when she’s down,” she whispers. “Smells amazing.”

Much later that night, I awake in a panic.

Before my eyes are open, I’m thrashing to get my legs untangled from the couch throw. The baby has screamed louder than I’ve ever heard her, and my heart pounds in my throat. But as I struggle to sit up on the couch, I realize the house is silent. I stiffen and wait for the next round of cries. I listen for Lena. But all I hear is the soft click and hum of the refrigerator’s compressor and the faraway whir of the white noise machine that Lena plays for the baby. I must have dreamed the scream.

I blink into the dark living room, waiting for my breath and pulse to calm, trying to make out the bleary shapes around me.

And then, one shifts.

Just slightly. An adjustment. The rise of a spine with a breath.

I do not move.

I know I am mistaken. I must be. My eyes dart to the curtains that I forgot to pull closed all the way, so that they billow in the air from the vent. When my eyes slide back, the shape has resolved itself—a heaped blanket with one of the baby’s slings sprawled on top of it—and I’m alone.

I squint at the heap through my lashes, trying to recreate what I thought I’d seen. But it stays gone, the objects insensate. They do not breathe again.

I fall back asleep. It takes a long time. The baby sleeps through the night.

“You can always just get her flowers,” my mother says through the phone.

I am loitering in the detergent aisle. We don’t need detergent, but I’ve already put the fruit Lena asked for and all the other things on the list into the cart, and the conversation doesn’t feel finished.

“They’re nice,” she’s saying, almost defensive. “It’s a cliché for a reason. That’s what your father did, and I always loved them. Keep it simple.”

“That’s true,” I say, trying to remember Lena’s favorites. Lilies? “I guess… I don’t know, for her first Mother’s Day I want it to be special.”

“Sweetheart, you’re going to do this every year. Next year with a toddler, and then the macaroni art starts to come home from preschool and that’ll be better than anything you could buy her.”

She’s doing something in the kitchen. I can hear cabinets opening and banging shut. I picture her pinching her cell phone between her shoulder and ear, like I’m doing.

“Bottles every four hours, still?” Mom asks.

“She slept almost seven hours last night,” I say proudly, like I’m supposed to. My mother is excited to hear this.

“Isn’t it so sad when one stage is over?” she says. “You miss it, even though you couldn’t wait to be done.”

Mom promises to text me a website that has the kind of lilies she remembers Lena ordering for our wedding.

“And get yourself something, sweetie,” she adds. “You’re a mom, now, too.”

When I get home, Lena is asleep on the armchair with her feet up on the coffee table, the baby napping on her chest. They’re beautiful together, matching in soft beige without meaning to, dappled in the afternoon light. I feel for my phone to take a picture. Something to send to my mother, though I realize it’ll mean keeping the picture myself. I don’t think about that. One of the grocery bags rustles in my hands and Lena opens an eye.

“How’s the world?” she murmurs.

“You’re not missing anything,” I whisper, snap a picture, hit send.

I stare at the ceiling fan. Dim light filters in through the curtains from the street lamp. A shred of lint that I missed hangs off of one of the blades.

I had promised myself, locking eyes with my reflection as I brushed my teeth, that I wouldn’t check the time. I remember the deep breathing exercises I’d learned from an online video years ago, and resolve to try them instead, letting breath fill my lungs and press against my taut diaphragm. Hold for a moment. Then out in a hiss. The video had dissolved into slow-motion footage of waves crashing against sand, and I close my eyes, trying to picture them as I breathe in and out.

As I slide into sleep, the sound of my breath twists and doubles into a sound like the rush of water at the edge of my consciousness, filling the room.

In the morning, my hands are still clasped to my ribcage where I’d placed them to measure my breaths in. On the floor, the prints, greasy and caked with thicker mud, are back.

“Have I ever sleepwalked?” I ask Lena.

I’m picking up each of my shoes, looking for grime. She’s feeding the baby in bed, a curved pillow wrapped around her like a cloud. She looks up at me and I see the bliss drop from her expression slightly.

“No,” she says. “Why?”

“These marks keep showing up on the floor,” I say. “It’s not a leak. I checked.”

Lena shakes her head slowly.

“Maybe you tracked something in when you shopped yesterday?” she said. “I bet we’re just too tired to notice. Things are going to fall by the wayside for a while.”

I nod, but I don’t agree. She doesn’t seem tired at all. She is doing so much. The least I can do is keep the house together.

“I’m going to mop again,” I say. “Do you need anything?”

She smiles at me, looks down at the baby who swallows softly and grips the bottle in her tiny fist.

“I’m all set.”

The marks on the floor are clearer. This time, before I spray them down and fill the mop bucket, I examine their shape. They are heavy on one side and delicate on the other, as though whatever made them was leaning off-kilter. And there are small splits down the center of each that remind me of something I can’t place right away.

When I’m filling the mop bucket, I remember the summer in my early teens that I spent at a wilderness camp, where we earned points for correctly identifying animal tracks from a chart. Graceful crescents for whitetail deer, skinny cat-paws for red fox, cloven lobes for bison.

I stare at the prints now, bottle of cleanser in hand, blinking. In the split-seconds between my eyes opening and closing, I try to conjure whatever creature I imagine leaving these tracks. Do I see afterimages shimmer behind my closed eyes? Gnarled legs, jet-black and dripping, thick-knuckled and long. I know I am imagining them, but they are clearer than anything I’ve imagined before. Images shift and warp in my mind, usually. These stay. I close my eyes as long as I dare. A few seconds, and then my pounding heart forces them open. I spray the floor down again and leave the mop there.

At five, I take out the package of frozen ravioli, but I forget it on the counter. When the washing machine chimes, I gasp and realize I’ve been sitting on the couch for almost an hour. I rush to switch the laundry and start a pot of water boiling before Lena and the baby wake up from their nap.

When Lena comes in, her hair is tied back in a bun, her glasses pushed to her forehead, and her phone in her hand. The baby is wriggling in her sling.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she says. She doesn’t whisper. She’s right there.

“What?”

“I swear,” she says, “They can’t do anything.”

Pacing with the baby as I chop an onion for sauce, Lena details the disaster unfolding at her workplace. The someone or someones assigned to cover Lena’s HR management role in her absence have fumbled their jobs so badly that a former employee has filed a lawsuit, throwing the company into crisis.

“Unbelievable,” I sneer, gleeful. The gossip feels precious, the laughter between us at others’ expense a balm. I’ve missed this more than I can bear.

“But,” she grins, “You’ll never guess what else.”

I widen my eyes. I am her audience and my attention on her is rapt.

“They offered me half-time to help organize everything for the lawyers. They’ll pay me for full-time, plus overtime, plus they’ll grant me additional leave.”

Lena caresses the baby and talks on about the timeline of the suit, the benefit to her resume, the validation that she is indispensable to the company. I smile approvingly. I ignore the heat in my face and the spikes in my throat.

“It does mean,” she says, “That I’ll need to leave the baby with you while I’m at work for a few weeks. Just a couple hours a day. I hope that’s okay. They’re offering so much money. It has to be worth it.”

I nod vigorously, blinking water from my eyes. I wince at the tang of onion and the taste of salt.

“Of course,” I say, and then the lie tumbles from my lips. “What could be better than more time with my favorite person?”

That Wednesday, the house sounds different.

Lena is up early, and all the lights in the kitchen are on. The radio reports the news, and she pulls out the stepladder to get the regular coffee pods out of a cabinet.

“I pumped already,” she says, winking. “There’s more than enough milk in the fridge for today.”

She pours coffee into a tumbler, grabs her keys, and is gone.

The baby frowns up at me from her bouncer, squinting in the bright light.

From the kitchen, I can see the tracks on the floor in the living room, in front of the coffee table.

The baby cries almost all day. I do not go into the living room. The prints are still there that night.

I sleep with my arms folded around my head, covering my ears. All night, I keep waking to the sound of something very loud, but very far away, a crushing roar like a waterfall.

At dawn, I peer under my forearm and think that I see an eye, huge and black, glistening and soaked.

I do not breathe until Lena bustles in to hand me the baby and kiss me as she breezes out the door.

Nothing is there when I look back.

“Have a good day,” I whisper, but the door is already closed.

Today the baby screams at me nonstop as I try to give her a bath. I give up, shaking and sobbing, and pat her down with baby wipes while she howls. Her little face contorts and turns red, then nearly purple. I back away.

“I’m sorry,” I plead. “Please, I’m so sorry.”

She purses her lips when I try to give her a bottle, later. She kicks me when I change her. I’m sweating through my clothes by the time Lena comes home.

She takes the baby from me without a word.

I scrub the living room floor until my cuticles bleed. The tracks do not disappear.

The baby cries throughout the night, and I lose count of how many times I hear Lena get up to soothe her after the first dozen.

It is darker than usual, and I realize that the streetlight has gone out. I stare across the living room and do not flinch when it appears.

All of it.

Skinny, contorted legs lead up to a body twisted with jutting bones, at once heavy and emaciated. An angular head with one bleary eye that sees nothing and another that gazes at me, shining, wet, and huge. Whether the thing drips with water or some greasy tar I can’t tell, but the whole of it is a smear, dribbling down limbs to the floor below, as if oozing from the pores beneath the thick, dark fur.

The baby’s cries echo down the hall and the creature opens its blurry mouth. Water gushes out, more and faster than can be possible, as though draining an entire sea. I am drenched, and it is not cold but boiling and salty, and it blisters my skin and the raw flesh of my throat as it pours over me in waves. I feel pieces of myself dissolve and then I wake up for real, gasping as I wipe thick sweat from my eyes.

I rush to check on the baby, but Lena already has her.

It is the weekend, and Lena shakes her head at me as I stumble into the kitchen well after ten.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I overslept.”

“You look terrible,” she says. She feels my forehead with the back of her palm. “You’re warm.”

Panicked, I fumble for a face mask from the junk drawer, but Lena waves it off.

“You’re probably just run down,” she says. “I can’t imagine how hard it is to take care of her all on your own.”

She points me into the bedroom with strict instructions to take acetaminophen and rest. When I lie down, the bed smells like Lena, but it is not familiar at all.

I am small in my fever dreams, shrunk down to half size or less. I wander around our house for what feels like hours, dream-time stretched out and disjointed. I’m looking for someone, but not for Lena, and I can’t figure out who it is. When I call out, I find my mouth doesn’t form words, and my voice sounds absurd. Our house bobs up and down as though it is floating on a river. I hear the roar of water everywhere.

On Sunday afternoon, my fever breaks. Lena brings me a plate of leftovers from the takeout she has ordered.

“We miss you,” she says. She’s not carrying the baby. Sensible, in case I’m contagious. I wrap my arms around her and squeeze her tight.

On Monday, Lena lingers in the kitchen, her keys in hand.

“You’re sure you’re okay with her?” she says. “You’re feeling up to it?”

“Of course,” I say, smiling. I’m bouncing the baby, who wiggles in her sling in my arms.

“Call me if you need anything.”

I walk around the house all day with the baby wrapped tight against me. I get the laundry done, then re-organize the kitchen and clean the bathroom. Whenever I walk through the living room, the creature stares at me and drips.

My mother calls, and I pinch the phone between my ear and shoulder as I throw silverware into the dishwasher.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong with the baby?” she asks, alarmed.

I hadn’t realized she was crying. I drop a handful of spoons and get a bottle out of the fridge.

“Gosh,” my mother says, more to herself than to me. “She sounds like how you did when you were that age. Blood-curdling, that’s what your father used to call it, when you cried.”

I don’t know what to say. The baby whimpers a little as she sucks down the bottle of milk, as if she’s angry with me.

“It’s so hard at this age,” my mother continues. “But it’s really not forever, sweetheart. You’ve just got to get through the first year, really.”

I don’t know what time it is. I can’t even think past the next hour.

“You know,” my mother says, “I sometimes used to run the faucet in the sink and turn the shower on at the same time when I couldn’t get you to settle down.”

My breath catches.

“Something about the noise of running water seemed to help,” she says, and then laughs. “Or maybe it was just that I couldn’t hear you and Lord knows I needed that little break sometimes.”

I don’t register what else she says. I’m running water over the dishes in the sink, and it’s deafening. The sound is all around me, and then it concentrates in the living room, drawing me to it. I drop my phone and it splashes on the floor.

The creature turns toward me. Its mouth is open down to its knees.

Lena is shaking me. With a sting, I feel her slap across my face.

“What?” I shriek, “What?”

“Where is the baby?” she screams, her face flushed with rage. “What’s wrong with you?”

“She’s—” I flounder, looking around frantically. “She’s here—”

I’m soaking from head to toe, my hair dripping into my face and onto the living room floor.

Lena has left the front door open and I hear her crashing through rooms down the hall.

“Why?” she screams, “Why is she in the bathroom by herself?”

I don’t hear what she says next, so I don’t know where it is that she says she is going with the baby, who she has wrapped in a towel and is hugging close while she throws things into the diaper bag and clutches her keys. I can only hear the roar of water. I feel the look she gives me though—heartbreak, sorrow—like a knife to my stomach.

I turn to the creature as the door slams behind them.

It looks back at me, eyes streaming. I hear something, now. Beneath the water’s roar, I hear the whimper at last, a little cry of terror and anguish. It’s been there the whole time, an urgent pull. Please.

I open my arms.

“Come here,” I whisper.

It climbs into my embrace, its sickly legs trailing down into the pool of water beneath us. It is light and fragile, and I feel the tiny warmth within it, the fluttering of its heartbeat. I smell the wet scent of its skin. It trembles against my collarbone.

“It’s all right,” I whisper. I rock gently back and forth. I move to the couch, and we nestle as one into the soft cushions. I find a blanket and dry us both.

“I’ve got you,” I say, over and over. “I’ve got you.”

No owl came for you.

But you watched her go:
best friends, best friends
until that moment
when she warned you: Don’t follow.

But when had you ever not followed?

Bricks, bruising.
Blood, a little.
Eleanor, why?

For months—years—you marked time at another school,
which was deathly dull.

Every summer she returned
ever more a stranger.
Maths was your magic.
So you knew, each autumn, when she
disappeared,
that hers was not the only platform
between 9 and 10.
That there exists, in fact,
between any two
numbers,
a space that may
be more
finely
divi-
ded.

9 and 5/6: Smash!
Wrong.

Inside the infinite,
every outcome is inevitable.

9 and 18/25: Smash!
Wrong.

But it was righter;
you felt that.

You noted that in your notebook.

Somewhere, in there, was a place for you.

A platform that would open
to a train
to a school
that was almost like hers,
to a friend
who was almost like her,
but not
to a bird that would belong to you,
if not quite an owl.

A finch
or a falcon vulture
bluebird blackbird
woodpecker
parrot
sparrow
robin raven—
anything—
with a scroll in its beak.

9 and 4,817/6,311
Smash!
Wrong.
But righter.

You noted that in your notebook.

In this world, you saw her
less and less—
best friends once,
but not now.

You saw her
(and her owl)
sometimes
from the room that was yours
(in the house that you had since inherited from your parents);
she was visiting her parents:
best friends, next door friends,
growing up,
but nothing now.

She was 30… 40… 50.

For you, whose birthday was only 3 months and 3 days after hers,
it was the same.

(This is the simplest kind of maths.)

Now, she was a Minister of Magic.

9 and 40,927/54,581
Smash!
Wrong.
But righter.

You noted that in your notebook.

You were not invited to her funeral
(an accident: a hippogriff)
But the dream transmuted
as you did,
so that while—yes—you would enter any platform that opened…

What would you do at a school?

Let it be—if you were dreaming—
a house for pensioners.
And let them offer you a bird.

In its feathers, you could rest your hand.
Rest.

9 and 226,943/302,573
Smash!

9 and 328,687/438,241
Smash!

No.
At one time, perhaps,
this may have been about something else.

Eleanor, why?

But as your numbers have become sharper
(a series of inessentials
whittled
implacably a-
way)
so has your ambition.

Your try another and another
(smash smash)
and your body stoops
and your hair whitens,
and you acquire a staff, too,
to assist your balance
(have you, at any
earlier period
of your life,
so resembled a true witch?
did Eleanor, even, ever so inhabit the part?)
and the
problem nar-
rows,
increment by 
in-
cre-
ment,
as your newest notebook fills:
infinity opening
to additional infinities,
and within them—
shiver—
lie
an infinite number of platforms
that will open
exclusively
to you.

Finer. Fi-
ner. F
in
e
r
.

Irvine, California (Dec. 23, 2024) — Effective immediately, fans can enjoy a new Sunshine menu featuring a Cheesy Chalupa, a hardshell Double Nacho Cheese Taco and Plasma Twists. Fans can also order Taco Bell’s iconic Nacho Cheese Sauce a la carte and create their own cheese-tastic combinations.

Parker Solar Probe Briefing

December 23, 2024

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a historic mission poised to transform our understanding of the Sun, is scheduled to reach its closest point to the Sun on Tuesday, Dec. 24, Eastern Time. The spacecraft has withstood brutal heat and radiation to deliver unparalleled observations of the only star we can study up close.

Coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency’s website at 4:00 p.m. EDT.

White House Press Release: Announcement of Findings from Parker Solar Probe

On December 24, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe reached a scientific milestone by flying over seven times closer to the Sun than previous spacecraft, orbiting just within 3.8 million miles of the Sun’s surface. During yesterday’s flyby, the probe’s science team analyzed the most recent data and concluded the Sun’s plasma is not, as previously thought, comprised primarily of hydrogen.

Analysis reveals that the Sun’s plasma is predominantly lactose, plus a mix of vegetable oil, modified food starch, maltodextrin, salt, dipotassium phosphate, Capsicum annuum, acetic acid, lactic acid, cellulose gum, potassium citrate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, citric acid, annatto and oleoresin paprika.

NASA has assured the White House that these findings are legitimate.

The President will provide more information as it is received.

We urge the American people, and all the people of the world, to stay calm.

Substack Post: The Sun Is Made Of Nacho Cheese. Now What? 

January 1, 2025

Happy New Year, readers!

I was convinced that the nacho cheese announcement was a prank, but… the data has been verified by scientists globally.

The implications are enormous. But I say, look to the future of food! Now that you can buy Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce on its own, you can cook your own Sun-fun creations. Enjoy these five nacho-inspired meals, and drop a comment on which one was your favorite.

Stay cheesy, my friends.

Climate Change journal

“Concerns of Sun Mining by Taco Bell”

Open access | Volume 178, published Summer 2025

C. Major, J. Baker, M. Scott

Abstract: This paper examines the correlation between the recent NASA discovery of the Sun’s composition, revealing unexpectedly high levels of compounds structurally identical to processed nacho cheese, and the concurrent release of Taco Bell’s expanded nacho-based menu offerings. Our analysis identifies a statistically significant negative trend in solar luminosity measurements beginning in the early 1990s, coinciding with the introduction of Taco Bell’s signature nacho cheese products. We propose that Taco Bell may possess privileged access to solar mining technologies. If the fast-food restaurant continues any covert mining it may be practicing, Earth’s climate will experience negative consequences.

Melinda Davies @DreamDivergent posted on June 13, 2025, “If the SUN is made of cheese, what’s the MOON made of?”

Wendy’s @Wendy’s posted on August 2, 2025, “Get ready to launch your taste buds into orbit this September with Wendy’s out-of-this-world Nacho Supremes! Made with authentic Sun sauce. #WendysWins #NachoMania”

Samplings from nona’s Winter 2025 prix fixe menu

moss, creamy nacho cheese sauce, topped with bee larvae

butternut squash soup, infused with nacho cheese sauce, topped with sour cream

beef sausage, nacho cheese sauce reduction, sweet potato

cumin-spiced lava cake with nacho cheese filling, alongside savory ice cream

Superior Court of Orange County, California

Natural Resources Defense Council vs. Taco Bell Corporation

Defense opening statement

February 9, 2026

Mr. Gilbreth: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the accusations that the prosecution has brought forward are nothing more than a cheap dog and pony show. The prosecution says they will prove that Taco Bell has been mining the Sun for decades, but they will produce no evidence, only speculation. Taco Bell claims no responsibility for its classic Nacho Cheese Sauce recipe being identical to the Sun’s plasma. It simply has a recipe, a delicious recipe, that the world can’t get enough of. Is that a crime? No, it is not.

Straight Talk podcast transcript

December 2026

[Opening music]

Todd Evans: Welcome to another episode of Straight Talk, with your hosts, Todd and Angie.

Angela Booth: Today, we’re talking about an issue that’s “out of this world”. It’s been two years since NASA rocked the world with its findings. By now, you’ve heard: no longer content with buying Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce directly, fast food corporations have built their own massive solar probes, shaped like tortilla chips, to scoop up the Sun’s plasma cheese. It seems that the floodgates were released after Taco Bell won its recent lawsuit against the NRDC.

TE: Some are hailing this as the next “space race,” saying it will drive competition and lower prices of the tasty cheese sauce—

AB: Which has gotten ridiculously expensive.

TE: Absolutely. I haven’t been able to buy any in months. But critics say that the last thing the world needs is restaurants venturing into space. We’ll discuss after a quick word from today’s sponsors.

CNN article

Published June 2027

Two Hospitalized After TikTok ‘Suncheese Challenge’

What started as fun turned into tragedy after two teenagers were hospitalized with second-degree burns due to the latest TikTok trend, the so-called “Suncheese Challenge.” The challenge consists of heating Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce to boiling temperatures and trying to eat it. The teens suffered burns on their tongues and in their throats.

MSNBC Andrea Mitchell Reports

August 2031

Interview with Dr. Michael Thompson, climatologist and author of Cut The Cheese: Why We Must Stop Consuming The Sun.

Andrea Mitchell: Michael, thank you for joining us. So you predict a serious global impact from consuming the Sun’s plasma?

Michael Thompson: Yes, that’s right. We’ve already consumed too much.

AM: But what about those who say that the nacho cheese sauce is an infinite resource that we can make at home?

MT: That was a nice pipe dream five years ago, Andrea. But let’s be real: nobody can recreate the exact taste of Taco Bell’s Nacho Cheese Sauce because Taco Bell never made it using ingredients on Earth. It was always mined from the Sun, decades before anyone found out.

AM: The NRDC tried to prove that in a court of law and was slapped down.

MT: You’re right, and I can’t prove the allegation now. But what I can predict—what I can show you—is that with future decreased sun output will come another Ice Age. Are you prepared for that?

Target Weekly Ad

Prices valid May 22–28, 2033

BOGO 50% Ultimate Comfort Collection

Come shop Target’s selection of year-round winter wear! Stave off the cold with bold colors and styles.

Snowshoes from $49.99

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Long underwear from $14.99

The Guardian article

Published May 17, 2035

Taco Bell CEO Says Public Appetite Is Responsible For Darker Sun

Speaking on the sidelines at the annual Foodservice Conference & Expo on Wednesday, May 16, Taco Bell CEO Karl Stills attributed the recent decrease in sun luminosity to the collective appetite of the public, citing it as the driving force behind the celestial change.

In his statement, Stills defended Taco Bell’s menu offerings, emphasizing that the restaurant chain merely responds to consumer demand.

“Taco Bell was providing its signature Nacho Cheese Sauce for many years before the Sun began to grow darker,” Stills added. “Taco Bell’s menu innovations are a direct response to consumer preferences, not a causative factor in astronomical phenomena.”

Despite Stills’ assertions, many astrophysicists and climatologists have expressed certainty of a direct link between sun mining from Taco Bell and other food corporations and the observed decrease in sun output.

Taco Bell maintains that its research team has not conclusively found any determinative evidence showing that the Sun’s decreased output is harmful. “A decreased output is a natural part of the solar cycle,” argued Taco Bell’s chief scientist, Dr. Evan Roberts. “The measured decrease is only about 1.34 percent. There is no cause to panic.”

Arctic Rescue Keepers (A.R.K.) Passenger Manifest, Premier Class

Departure: May 31, 2070

June Walton—Age: 35—Passenger ID: ARK-P001

Pat Bezos—Age: 21—Passenger ID: ARK-P002

Angela Mars—Age: 60—Passenger ID: ARK-P003

Kevin Koch—Age: 49—Passenger ID: ARK-P004

Marcus Cargill-MacMillan—Age: 53—Passenger ID: ARK-P005

A.R.K. Brochure

YOUR GREAT ESCAPE

Fleeing the planet doesn’t have to be a hassle. When traversing the galaxy on the luxury departure vessel A.R.K., you will have access to all the finest Earth amenities: Olympic-sized swimming pools, fruits and vegetables, spa treatments, authentic nacho cheese sauce, space heaters—all this and more, thanks to our generous corporate sponsors. Say goodbye to ice sheets and everlasting snowfall when you board the A.R.K.

Suite reservation requires a $1 billion deposit. Act now! Your time is running out.

When he had run out of things to swear at, he managed to pull himself together enough to climb out of the cramped cockpit and into the empty cargo bay. He felt terrible. A sick fear had churned his guts and made his head ache.

His safety net was gone. And it had failed at the worst possible moment.

When Rig was promoted to XO of the Ultor, one of his first projects had been to surreptitiously purchase a collapsible, concealable, two-seater escape craft with enough power to get him to a neighboring system if he ever found himself in a no-win situation. Knowing the Ultor and the guy who commanded it, this was an almost guaranteed prospect. And knowing her crew as he did, Rig had no doubt that every one of them would have made their own escape plans for this exact eventuality.

Maybe there was someone willing to let him tag along? Some groveling might have to be involved. It would be humiliating, but it was better than dying.

A new wave of anger washed over him. The ship had cost him nearly an entire year’s wages. Scammed? Sabotaged? It made no sense. All systems showed green, and the meager onboard AI was as flummoxed as he was. He released another torrent of curses until he managed to calm himself again.

Not sure what else to do, Rig began folding up the wings so he could slide the small craft back into its hidey-hole again. But as he was securing the covering panel, a new idea came to him. Wait a minute. Since every diagnostic comes up clean, maybe there’s no scientific reason for launch failure. This left only one possible culprit. It was something he should’ve considered in the first place. It made sense. And he could prove it as well.

Of course, confronting the culprit might get him killed even faster—you never knew where Elgia was concerned. But what other choice did he have?

Exiting into the passageway, he halted in the corridor. 

Uh-oh. 

His sixth sense began twinging. It told him he would have to run a gauntlet to get to Elgia’s quarters unscathed. You don’t serve aboard a mercenary ship like the Ultor for long without recognizing panic in the air: a sour yet electric scent that was equal parts adrenaline mixed with cold sweat. If Rig could capture it in a perfume bottle, he’d call it Impending Doom. Cautiously, he began making his way to the lower decks.

A few moments later, he spotted the bobbing blond head of Pora, the Ultor’s navigator, hurrying in the opposite direction. Rig secretly fancied her and believed there was a chance she might’ve felt the same way in return. (He held on to this faint hope despite the fact she had once threatened him with a plasma torch after he had denied her shore leave. Typical Ultor attitude; great to work with, but don’t cross certain lines.)

“Hey, Pora,” he called, feigning nonchalance. It sounded fake to his own ears, but Pora didn’t react. More accurately, she didn’t react to him at all, walking briskly past him with a preoccupied, anxious look in her eyes.

Huh. Interesting.

Other crew members he passed carried the same expression, confused and deeply troubled. He caught whispers of “What do you mean it wouldn’t work? I thought you checked it?” and, “He owes me big time and is worth a rescue sortie out here, but I can’t raise him on the comms at all. I just get dead air…”

Okay, that pretty much clinches it.

He began jogging like he was going somewhere vital in order to do something that could save their asses if he could only get there in time. He’d used this act before. Everyone was rattled now, but that could worsen fast, especially if they spotted someone in authority to blame, like a young, arguably inexperienced XO. So what if everyone knew the Captain was solely to blame? No one would be able to get to Drooghelm, who would be barricaded in his quarters by now, hiding behind blast-proof hulls and reinforced bulkheads. Their fearless captain always pulled this maneuver when he royally screwed up.

Rig managed to reach the sub-fifth deck without incident. He turned and headed down a corridor.

He was getting close. Familiar, telltale scents filled his nostrils; wafts of strange herbs, roots, and unrecognizable concoctions hovered thickly in the air. The light was dimmer here. The lighting covers were coated with grime, and the deck plates as well. Nothing had been cleaned in months, but Rig never scolded the cleaning bots, knowing full well that they were too nervous to venture around these parts. Even the mechies had enough intelligence to stay away. But what did that say about himself? 

It pretty much says I’m an idiot.

Ahead, a flickering yellow light spilled from an open hatchway. The bulkhead around it was covered in crudely painted runes and symbols. A beaded curtain made from rough, fibrous strands covered the opening and two bleached skulls from odd, bird-like creatures hung in the upper corners. He swallowed nervously.

Approaching the doorway cautiously, Rig raised his hand to knock.

“Enterrrrrr…” croaked a wizened voice from the other side.

He shuddered and thought: I hate it when he does that, before entering the room.

Suddenly, a green specter appeared from nowhere, floating in mid-air before Rig, moaning piteously. It was a ghastly phantasm of a male technician with torn overalls which glowed with an unearthly, sickly aura that matched his emerald, sore-riddled skin. The specter’s eyes and mouth were as black as the darkest singularity, no pupils or tongue visible as he groaned at Rig: “Deaaaaaaaaaath!”

Though he had been expecting this, Rig still cried out like a tween-aged schoolgirl and almost jumped out of his skin. “Augh! For pity’s sake, Franz, it’s me.” His hand accidentally passed through the creature, which immediately turned ice-cold. A deathly chill ran up his arm.

The hovering creature abruptly stopped wailing and straightened up. “Oh.” The voice was fairly ordinary now, though disappointed. “Sorry, XO. Didn’t know it was you. Thought it was one of the regulars.”

Rig exhaled slowly, consciously. “Forget it,” he grumbled. “There’s a crisis. I need to talk to Elgia.”

Franz pivoted mid-air and called into a back room: “Sweetie!”

“Coming, Franzie,” came back a creaky voice.

The eyeless face turned back to Rig and smiled pleasantly. “She’ll just be a minute. Please have a seat if you wish. Help yourself to some tea.” And with that, he vanished.

Since the only seat in the room seemed to be made from the pelvic skeleton of some unknown, large creature, Rig chose to stay standing.

He looked about. Elgia’s lair hadn’t changed much since the last time he was here. The same wooden drawers were set in ancient cabinets, each holding a pungent cache of herbs and roots from far-flung corners of the galaxy, the same cauldron bubbled lightly over a stone brazier with a smoldering fire in the middle, and the same dust and gloom coated everything, all of which likely concealed a thousand arcane and mystical items that would bring horrible, painful death or a lifetime of humiliating curses if you touched them the wrong way. On the far wall, a framed piece of cross-stitching depicted a grey tabby kitten playing with a ball of pink yarn. It was definitely the creepiest item in the room.

Finally, Elgia Jossinah Wrigglia, Black Mistress in the Everlasting Sisterhood of the Shadow, hobbled her way in from the back room with a gnarled wooden cane, looking like a pale prune that had spontaneously sprouted limbs. The stuff on her head was either hair or sentient cobwebs, a tangle of wispy vagueness, the strands occasionally moving of their own accord. Two squinting eyes, each pale blue-white, were set in her crevassed face and were not easy to gaze into when you were sober.

Most non-magic spacefaring folks—Rig included—tended to avoid mystical objects or beings as they would the black plagues from the swamps on Golgotha Prime. Why Drooghelm had decided to hire a terrifying creature like Elgia to be part of their little “spacefaring family” baffled Rig.

The ancient woman smiled cheerfully on her way to the cauldron, yellow and grey teeth peeking through dried lips. “Hello, Ducks. How’s tricks?”

“Good evening, Sister Elgia.” Best to start formally.

“Oh, relax, Ducks. You’re one of the ones I like.” She peered at him briefly. “You look very upset, you poor thing.”

“Yeah, I’ve been better. Do you… er… mind if I ask you something?” Elgia’s assurances notwithstanding, Rig’s tone was polite and calm. He wanted to scream his question, but you never annoyed members of the Sisterhood without having your head examined first.

Elgia leaned over the bubbling cauldron, sniffing. “Of course, Ducks. Always willing to help the deputy leader in our little home in space.” She took a few sticks from a nearby pile and placed them into the smoldering fire in the hearth below. (Open flames on any spacefaring vessel were, unsurprisingly, completely forbidden. Unless, of course, you were someone like Elgia, who would take your copy of the Spacefarer’s Trade Union Safety Book and burn it in her hearth in order to make her point clear.)

Clearing his throat, Rig explained how his small escape craft, for no apparent reason, wouldn’t work. He also added that similar malfunctions seemed to be happening all over the ship, including communications. “So…” he paused, attempting to compose his question carefully, “Did you…?” Nothing came to mind, so he stretched his hand out and waggled his fingers suggestively.

Elgia made a disgusted noise. “Ugh! Is that how you ask if I employed my sacred arts? The ancient craft of spell crafting, handed down through millennia and across star systems innumerable?”

“Sorry—”

“Well, yes, I did. His Nibs ordered it, naturally. He wanted to make sure nobody could abandon ship behind his back. Apparently, some job he recently accepted requires a full crew.”

Rig exhaled, then scowled. “Did you happen to ask about it? The job, I mean.”

She shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care. He’s the boss.”

“Oh, you should care. Let me fill you in. He—”

“Hey, no, belay that, XO!” The deep voice came from the back room. A second later, Captain Drooghelm’s imposing bulk stepped into the room. “Rig, her Unholy Sisterness here doesn’t need to be bothered with the details of ship’s business.”

The Captain looked shockingly awful: disheveled, sallow, and drawn, with massive bags under his eyes and ugly splotches and stains all over his shirt. Rig spied some mysterious things stuck in his beard that might have been flecks of vomit. A while back, he had managed to peek at the Ultor’s accounting sheets and was amazed to learn how much money a supposedly hard-as-nails mercenary Captain could allot for a private publicist and hair care products. If Drooghelm had allowed himself to look this bad in front of anyone, then he was very shaken indeed.

Elgia nodded in agreement. “Captain’s right, I don’t need to be bothered. How he runs his ship is none of my concern. I’m just a Mystical Consultant, after all, I don’t do policy.” Elgia hobbled over, pulled open one of the drawers, and began sorting through the contents.

Rig’s patience began to wear thin. “Oh, sod this. Elgia, you need to know the truth. This jackass—”

“Check your tone, Rig! You know how I deal with insubordination.”

“Are you bloody kidding me?” Rig yelled, the last pretenses of decorum falling away. “We’re all dead! You’ve screwed all of us, and then you make her cut off the exits!”

“XO, a crew has to pull together in times of—”

“Save it. You might as well tell her now, Captain. If you think I’m pissed off, imagine what she’s going to feel like once we get there if you haven’t told her.”

Elgia cocked a blue-white eye at Drooghelm. “Oh?” She looked back at Rig. “Okay, boy, you’ve got my attention. What did the drunken bastard do this time?”

“I was not drunk,” protested the Captain weakly.

Rig laughed. “I literally had to cart you onto the ship in a wheelbarrow.” He turned to Elgia. “He had the signed contract lying on his chest when I went to collect him. Our newest client had it notarized, too. Ironclad. PO Crandall was there when I read it, so now the whole bloody ship knows as well.”

Elgia looked at him expectantly.

Rig took a deep breath, then spoke as calmly as he could manage. “There are suicide missions, and there are suicide missions. And then there’s this job.” Rig paused. “Drooghelm has agreed to kill a god.”

A sudden silence filled the room. Elgia just stared at him for what was probably a few seconds but felt like an hour.

Finally, she yelled: “I quit! Franz?”

The green ghost popped back into view. “Sweets?”

“Pack our crap! We’re outta here!” She began to gather up objects around her.

Drooghelm groaned. “Look, Elgia, it’s not that bad—”

She spun on him. “Not that bad?” she growled, more infuriated than Rig had ever seen her. “A god?” She threw her arms up in exasperation. “You drunken sot! Why not just say you’ll eat a planet in one gulp? At least a fat bastard like yourself has a chance there! We’ve got no chance against a god.”

“Okay, yes, I had had a lot to drink…”

She laughed mirthlessly and continued packing.

“… and when they named their price, well… er… I don’t remember much after that. I think I might’ve agreed right there and then.”

“Think? There was no thinking involved, that’s for certain. Move, you great moron!” she spat as she pushed past him to grab a sickle hanging on the wall behind him. “Franzie, where’s my satchel?”

“Back of the closet, I think,” the ghost replied. “Next to that cursed halberd, the one Rennazi de Winterstorm owned back in 12574 from the Karrakos Era. Or was it the Spon era?”

“Elgia,” Drooghelm interrupted, “this is an unusual situation.” He shot a nervous glance at Rig.

In a flash, Rig knew what his Captain was about to do and took a cautious step back.

Drooghelm continued, “And I would hate to have to contact the Sisterhood—”

Elgia spun on him so fast it made Rig start. The effect it had on Drooghelm was like a freezing ray; he became an instant statue.

“You would hate to do… what, exactly?”

Sweat began to bead on Drooghelm’s forehead. “To…” he faltered.

“Yessssss?” she hissed. Her tone was colder than space.

“C-c-c-contact… the… Sisterhood…” he stammered.

“You sure you want to do that, Captain?”

The mercenary Captain was silent for a moment, his eyes as wide as saucers. Finally, he managed to say very quietly: “Yes?”

By this point, even the ghost was holding his breath.

Elgia stared hard at him and said nothing. Then, abruptly, she swore and seemed to deflate into the pelvic bone chair. Pulling a pack of cigarettes from a table drawer, she retrieved one and lit it. “Well,” she said in a resigned tone, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Life was fun while it lasted.”

Rig and Franz exhaled at the same time, but only one of them created a breeze.

Elgia produced a hip flask from under her robes and took a swig. She looked at Rig. “You said it was notarized?” He nodded. “Wonderful,” she growled.

“This,” she said after another healthy swallow, “is technically known as a state of ‘screwed three ways to Sunday.’ If we run, the bailiffs are after us for breaking the contract. And they do not mess around. If we try to carry out the contract, we’ll surely be flattened by a bloody god…” she yelled this pointedly at Drooghelm, “and if I were to fry our beloved leader here into a charcoal brisket and do a runner, the Sisterhood would be on my tail like a rabid weasel who had just spotted her mortal enemy.” She shuddered at the thought.

Rig rubbed his temples, trying to stop his headache from worsening. “Okay, okay,” he began grasping at threads, “Maybe there is a way to… well, do it. Complete the contract.” He couldn’t bring himself to say it directly.

Elgia scowled. “Do it? You mean off the Holy sonofabitch? Ha!” Nevertheless, she turned to Drooghelm and asked: “Well, tell me about this god at least. Which one is it?”

The Captain mopped his brow with a rag from a tabletop. “Uh, well, he’s new. Named Zaxxos or something. Just attained godhood a few years ago. Some mystical accident, according to the client.”

“Who’s the client?” Elgia interrupted.

“These dark cult guys on a planet about ten light years from here: Universalis Sancta Subiugatio, whatever the hell that means.”

Elgia made a guttural sound of disapproval.“Ugh, those arseholes. I know ’em. Charming lot. They sometimes sacrifice virgins by pushing them into underground lava streams, stuff like that. Boys and girls, mind you; very progressive not to discriminate, eh? So, it’s these asswipes you decide to go into business with, Droog?”

Drooghelm managed to look even more pale and uncomfortable. “Oh. Er, Eglia, in my defense, I had no idea they did stuff like that when I signed…”

“As drunk as you were, I’m surprised you could remember your own name in order to sign it,” said Rig.

Drooghelm glared. “As I was saying… These Subiugatio guys were fiddling with spells to obtain godhood. Your typical dark cult stuff. Then one of their lesser acolytes, some old guy who had been toiling at the problem for his entire life, stumbled on the solution.”

“So, that is the so-called target?” Franz asked, trying to be helpful. “This lesser acolyte you speak of?”

“Eh, no. It’s his fourteen-year-old grand-nephew, actually. This spell was generational, so one of the caster’s heirs was going to have to take up the family tradition. The acolyte guy was trying to get the kid interested in it as a career choice.

“And then something screwed up, and the spell suddenly worked. The guy was so stunned that he didn’t notice his nephew had walked up to the spell circle and got, um, ‘godded’ instead. Reportedly, the guy was pretty pissed and said some, you’d say, ill-advised things to the kid. Things did not go well for Mr. Uncle, and now they’ll never know how the idiot managed to successfully cast the spell in the first place.”

“How long ago was this?” Elgia asked.

“A little more than five years.”

She rolled her eyes. “Wonderful. We’re going to get flattened by a god whose balls just dropped.”

“Great Herald!” Drooghelm cried, a slight manic tone creeping into his voice, “There has to be a way to get it done!”

“That’s another thing,” Rig said, “when the hell did we become contract killers? When I signed up for your crew, you swore assassinations were off the table.”

“Oh, grow up,” Drooghelm scoffed. “A mercenary crew has to find work where they can. Besides, gods aren’t people. You ever watch one of their kind in an interview? They all think they’re better than everyone else. Buncha pricks.”

Rig put his hands to his face. “Sure… what better argument for murder could you get?”

Drooghelm ignored him. “They must be able to die. In the stories, myths, stuff like that… With the staggering amount these guys are paying us to complete this job—”

“How much?” Franz and Elgia asked at the same time. Rig told them and they whistled appreciatively in unison.

“Exactly,” exclaimed Drooghelm. “So, what if—I dunno—we get the biggest, baddest plasma cannon on credit and—”

“Forget it.” Rig shook his head. “According to what I looked up, there’s this inherent principle to godhood that says ‘a god can only be slain by another god’s hand.’”

The Captain looked at Elgia. She nodded, adding, “Clumsy phrasing, but he’s basically right. Most religious scholars and philosophers would back that up. I wouldn’t call it a universal law or anything, but it’s pretty close.”

“Okay, fine. We hire another god to do it.”

Elgia laughed. “Gods—you great oaf—don’t care about money! They’re beyond monetary or material needs. Besides, there’s only a handful around. It’s incredibly rare for gods to be created. I can only think of a couple off the top of my head that are in this region. Once they master their powers, most leave our universe to create their own dimension. It’s like moving to the coast to build your dream home, but on a quantum level.”

“And just for kicks,” Rig added, “I tried reaching out to the few gods she’s talking about, the ones that are still in our dimension.”

“And?” Drooghelm asked hopefully.

“They won’t return my calls.”

Elgia rolled her eyes. “That tears it.”

This declaration seemed to be the final straw for the Captain, who fell against a wall and slumped to the floor.

Rig went over and squatted down to his level. “Look, Captain…” He tried to put a friendly spin to his voice, “I know you’re in a tough spot here. But the only thing to do now is, well, you have to order Elgia to let the crew go. You signed the contract, not us. The noble thing here…” It was ridiculous to try the nobility angle with Drooghelm, but he had to give it a shot. “The noble thing to do would be to let us bail. Besides, you always said you wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. What better way than to take on a god? Single-handedly! Talk about epic! They’ll be talking about it for… well, forever.”

Elgia snorted. “Sure. Hey, did you hear about that putz who got punched into the next galaxy?”

Rig winced. He was about to try a different tack when he noticed a strange expression had formed on the man’s face. It took him a few seconds to realize what his Captain was doing. He was thinking.

This was not good.

“Hey,” Drooghelm began slowly. “That gives me an idea.”

Zaxxos the Magnificent was in a bad mood.

He was pensive. Grumpy. Cranky, even. This whole ‘being a god’ thing was not panning out like it should have.

Long ago—five years to be precise—he thought he had hit the ultimate jackpot, and everything was going to be totally jackballs awesome for all eternity. Even though it was by accident, he had achieved what quadrillions had dreamt of since magic was first practiced in the galaxy. He was a mother-loving God.

Supposedly, he could do whatever he wanted, make whatever he wanted, go wherever he wanted, and nobody could say boo. If anyone gave him any backtalk or static, he’d just smite the little turd. Plus, there’d be as much sex as he could handle. Hotties, he figured, should be mega-stoked to make it with a god. Things would be the best forever and ever; all praise himself.

But it hadn’t turned out that way at all.

The smiting was still okay, at least. The first guy he smited—or smote, whatever—was his great uncle, Warringanor. Sure, who wouldn’t be pissed if your family had been casting this meta-complicated spell for about two hundred years, and then your niece’s grandkid trips over it and ruins it for you? Yeah, okay, anybody would be upset. But then his great uncle said some really hurtful things, and he got angry, and… Well, it wasn’t pretty.

When he realized he could kill someone so easily, it was really unnerving. At first. But then he discovered how creative he could get with it.

Turns out, there were a crap-ton of different ways you could smite someone. Exploding ’em, crushing ’em, or just making ’em fall over dead. That last one was the coolest. Plus, you didn’t get all that horrible mess or smell.

However, doing other godly things was tricky.

If he tried creating something from nothing, for example, he had to be real careful, or it’d go all wrong. Especially if it was a living thing. Yikes, that became a horror show real quick. Good thing he had been practicing all that smiting before he tried creating life.

Objects, so long as they were simple or straightforward, were easy enough. A giant chair, for example, for his recently-resized giant body was okay. But when he tried making a spaceship, the problem was he didn’t know how they worked. He had no clues about the basic FTL drive principles, for example. So, they tended to blow up. Actually, they always blew up.

Magically-infused objects were tricky, too. There was this time he was going to be a War God and tried conjuring this really bad-ass sword as the central part of his ‘look,’ with a big, red gemstone in the center, which would shoot out these awesome, kick-ass red lightning bolts whenever he unsheathed it: Boom! Pow! Zap!

It blew up as well. Most of his stuff tended to blow up. It was one of the main reasons for his bad mood.

Plus, there were those loser clowns who had started worshiping him after he ‘ascended.’ He was glad he changed his name to “Zaxxos the Magnificent” after the transformation. Nobody would worship at the Church of Kevin Fenward, right?

At first, it was cool having people literally singing your praises; how amazing he was, how they were so insignificant next to him, et cetera, set to music, no less. This must be a perk, for sure.

But the whole thing got unbelievably annoying when he discovered that he always—always—heard his worshipper’s prayers. He couldn’t turn it off. What was this crap? Here he was, a guy who could turn a starliner into a goat—yeah, it would be a weird-looking goat that would blow up before too long, but he could still do that little miracle—yet somehow, he couldn’t turn off the speaker in his head that heard all those whinging little complaints.

So much of it was about money! I’m so poor. I can’t pay my rent. I need a new transport. My kid needs medicine. Petty, petty, crap all the time. It got so bad, he started conjuring gold bars just so they’d shut up. Then word got around that prayers to him actually paid off, and it became so much worse so fast. Money prayers began flooding his head. Not surprisingly, it became ‘smiting time’ once again. That finally shut ‘em up real quick.

So: his powers were hanky, his worshippers were jerks, and his creations kept exploding. But the worst part was the sex thing.

Instead of cartloads of Vestal virgins (something he’d heard from history—he wasn’t sure what it referred to, but they sounded seriously hot) lining up to service his every whim, chicks avoided him like he was a chess club president covered in cold sores. He listened in on some of the conversations the novice priestesses had in the convents so he could understand why they weren’t showing up in droves, boobs out, legs open. The words he heard were along the lines of: terrifying, death sentence, and ick.

This was the most depressing part. Incredibly powerful, immortal, feared… and he still couldn’t get laid. 

As Zaxxos sat brooding, leaning against a mountain, he absentmindedly scratched his cheek with a finger the size of an eight-story apartment building. He didn’t have an itch—his body never suffered from aches, pains, or even the minor unpleasantness of dermatitis anymore—it was strictly from habit.

Bored and frustrated, he decided a year ago to make himself two thousand feet tall.

Why? Firstly, it was fun. Secondly, it pissed off the Subiugatio cult that ruled his home planet big time. The priesthood had kept pestering him about an alliance in order to take over the galaxy. The idea sounded like work, so he passed.

Then they tried convincing him to make this big weapon that would give them the conquering power they required. To get them off his back, he did it. But—sigh—it exploded, killing a big swath of their priesthood in the process.

He did the ‘bigging thing’ soon after that so he could avoid their whining. He rose above it all.

The bonus benefit was how he terrified the priesthood by stomping around their grounds. Their planet was mostly a series of archipelagos surrounded by a giant, plant-spanning ocean. The biggest island, where Zaxxos currently lounged, was where the top echelon of the priesthood lived. He liked the idea of looming over them. What could they do about it?

But this, too, was getting pretty boring. And he was getting worried about shrinking himself down to normal size because he wasn’t sure how to do it.

It was all so unfair. Why couldn’t he catch a break?

Then, something caught his eye. Instinctually, his brain said it was just some flying insect pestering him.

But then that would mean the bug was the size of…

“Ahem,” said a voice in the air in front of him. Zaxxos narrowed his gaze. It was a ship, hovering before his eyes. And a crappy ship, at that.

“This is Captain Cicero Drooghelm of the starship Ultor.”

The Captain’s voice quavered a bit as he spoke into the microphone; the braggadocio attitude he had been projecting for the last few weeks melted away once the moment arrived. He sounded pale and sweaty again, and all those reassurances of “trust me, this’ll work,” Rig could hear puddling at the man’s feet. The giant speakers they’d strapped to the hull amplified Drooghelm’s voice—but also that quaver—a thousandfold.

“We respectfully request the attention of the great and mighty Zaxxos the Magnificent,” Drooghelm continued.

Elgia had suggested this approach. You don’t want him thinking about swatting us until we’ve got everything lined up. Appeal to his ego. Distract him from the real threat.

The giant god’s eye narrowed on the ship, a relative housefly, and seemed unimpressed. Yet he hadn’t vaporized them right away.

“Well, this is different, at least,” the god smirked. “I’ll give you that.”

Rig found the god’s voice terrifying. The Ultor trembled a little as if they were being buffeted by a storm. He swallowed hard but kept his hands steady on the flight controls.

Drooghelm’s voice broadcasted again. “Er… well.” He coughed nervously. “We, the honorable and brave mercenary crew of the Ultor, are deeply honored to be in the presence of such a… a magnificent being as Zaxxos the, er, Magnificent.”

Rig glanced down and checked their alignment. So long as the big bastard doesn’t move…

“Get to the point. I’m a busy god,” the giant grumbled.

“Er, right…” fumbled Drooghelm. “Well, honored as we all definitely are to be in your presence, the regrettable task has fallen to us to… entreat you to…” he coughed nervously again, “leave this dimension.” After a pause, he added: “Or else.”

Silence hung for a moment in the space between the ship and the giant god.

It was broken when Zaxxos began to laugh uproariously, the force buffeting the ship like a category two hurricane, forcing Rig to compensate heavily to keep the craft steady. “Settle down, settle down,” he whispered. Drooghelm would have to readjust his aim now.

“Or else?” the god cackled. “You gotta be kidding me.”

Rig could hear Drooghelm swallow hard over the speakers as he straightened the ship. His palms were sweating heavily under the hand controls. Risking a split second to wipe them on his shirt, he could feel his heart pounding.

“What can you do, little ship, to a God?” Zaxxos growled, the final word reverberating through the ship like it was made of tin.

Drooghelm, to his credit, redoubled his efforts and threw more gravitas into his voice. “We are very serious, oh, honorable Zaxxos. We have a weapon at our disposal that could dispatch ye.”

Rig looked over at Pora, who was manning navigation, who looked back at Rig. She mouthed “ye?” at him, her expression incredulous.

“We have no desire to do this.” Drooghelm was definitely warming to the dramatics now. “We respect and admire your magnificence and are loath to risk the wrath of any gods who… er… aren’t down with the whole, you know… killing a god thing. So, what is your response, Zaxxos? Leave? Or face oblivion?”

We’re all dead, thought Rig.

But, incredibly, Zaxxos seemed to be considering something. His enormous, youthful face seemed to go slack for a moment, and his cavernous mouth hung open like a dullard who had been given an algebra equation to solve.

Then his mouth closed, his eyes hardened, and he spoke a single word.

“Bull.”

Bloody hell, take the shot!

This was Drooghelm’s great plan:

A few years ago, Drooghelm had come across a story about a holy relic, a scepter, that was stored in an ancient stone temple on a planet called Vargran Six. The scepter’s rod reportedly contained the hair of an old god who had left our dimension for good. Drooghelm admitted he’d briefly considered stealing it at the time but decided it would be too difficult to fence.

But if the follicle was still attached, that made it god-flesh, right? And if it took ‘a god’s hand to kill a god,’ then, he reasoned, all you needed was to get ahold of part of a god, god-flesh or something similar, fasten it to a giant projectile, and fire it into the bastard’s brain.

Everyone else thought this was the kind of plan a six-year-old would come up with. However, they also had no other ideas.

So, they raced over to Vargran Six, opened negotiations with the jungle natives who had worshipped the holy dude for the last thousand years, gave their best bribe to the head shaman, then hit the lot with a stun-burst when they realized the bribe was gloriously backfiring, and ended up stealing it after all. Afterward, half the crew had to be treated with anti-toxins because of poison darts.

Luckily, there was, indeed, a follicle attached to the hair inside the scepter.

Elgia did her best to bolster the god-essence in order to maximize potency, whatever the sod that meant. Then they attached the holy follicle to the tip of the sharpest, biggest, hardest titanium-ultrasteel bolt they could find.

The Ultor, hovering before Zaxxos’ face, was merely a distraction.

Drooghelm’s voice was being transmitted to its exterior speakers from Rig’s heavily cloaked escape craft flying below them, pointing upward at a steep angle. Drooghelm had decided to fire it up Zaxxos’ nose, reasoning it was the best route to hit gray matter without striking his skull, which would likely be impenetrable. A makeshift cannon barrel had been installed on the underbelly, along with the best cloaking system they could afford, which wasn’t very good and would almost certainly break down after the shot was taken.

Both Rig and the crew felt they had next to zero chance of succeeding. Wills were updated, and goodbye letters were sent.

Rig heard the shot. Even though it came from about a half-mile below them, it was that loud.

Zaxxos’ head snapped back as if he had been punched with a mighty uppercut to the schnoz.

Blood!

Amazed, Rig saw a great red droplet appear before Zaxxos’ face. It hung almost motionless in the air for a split second before falling. Zaxxos’ gigantic body slammed against the mountain behind him with a crash that even Rig could feel through the ship’s hull. His heart leaped, daring to hope he might survive this. Everyone on the bridge held their breath.

Then, a moment later, the god sat up.

Zaxxos pressed one of his giant hands against his bloodied nose and said: “Ow.”

Rig swallowed hard. When he saw the look in Zaxxos’s eyes, he tried to swallow again but found that his mouth had gone completely dry.

“You little bastards are so dead,” snarled the god.

Rig spied the muscles tensing in Zaxxos’ shoulder a split second before the huge arm whipped out in an impossibly wide arc. His reflexes responded immediately, yanking the ship controls and twisting the Ultor into a downward spiral.

On the monitor beside him, he could see that Drooghelm had the same idea—but he wasn’t quite fast enough. The giant hand clipped the wing on the smaller craft, sending Drooghelm spiraling in a chaotic tumble off into the neighboring sea, where his ship crashed with a rather sad little ‘splot.’

Crew members on the bridge were screaming at Rig to get them out of there. As if he needed to be told that. Rig swung the ship landward. Maybe he could hide in the mountain range? His mind raced. An orbital path makes the most sense. But switching to escape velocity thrusters would take ten precious seconds. Besides, could Zaxxos fly? Could he just kill them with a thought? How did this guy smite people, anyway?

As if to answer his thoughts, a mountain peak next to the ship exploded in a conflagration of stone and crimson light. Rig screamed in shock and yanked the ship away from the shower of boulders. “Crandall,” he yelled, “Give me a view of the bastard!”

A second later, the bridge viewscreen had a window inserted showing what was happening behind them. They saw a colossal figure climb over the mountains with shocking ease, two ruby-red dots glowing in the center of his face. Zaxxos’ eyes were literally ablaze with fury. Going off-planet was no longer possible; initiating the engine shift would leave them sitting ducks.

Rig spotted a fogbank to port and veered that way.

That was a mistake.

The fogbank was only a small one, maybe two kilometers wide, with a major city on the other side. Rig suddenly found himself hurtling towards a menagerie of towers, buildings, and a hundred other handy structures for them to crash into. He swore as he almost struck a huge temple spire, then narrowly missed another one that seemingly sprang up in its place. For the next few seconds, every spire, tower, or ziggurat he managed to dodge would be replaced by a new one behind it.

Worse still, this was the capital city, which had been built next to the biggest mountain on the whole planet, a behemoth of ten thousand meters in height and easily the same in circumference. It effectively cut off half their maneuvering space, and Rig was forced to violently adjust course away from it. This, naturally, placed him right in the path of more spires and towers.

It took all of Rig’s concentration to fly the ship. Behind them, Zaxxos was still firing crimson energy bursts from his eyes, burrowing charred furrows in the streets, his giant body smashing through buildings like a pimply kaiju from hell. The client was going to be super pissed.

A warning light flashed. The ambient energy from that last eye-blast had melted part of their wings. At this rate, they weren’t going to last long.

“Elgia,” he cried into the comm, “Bolster ship’s integrity!”

“I’m doing my best, you little—” The rest was cut off.

Movement caught Rig’s attention on the rear viewscreen.

The main Holy Temple of the Subiugatio was behind them, a huge structure with banners and flags flying everywhere. Each had a symbol at the center: a silhouette of the enormous mountain that dominated the skyline to the stern.

“They sometimes sacrifice virgins by pushing them into underground lava streams…”

The idea struck him like a bag of hammers, unpleasant but effective. Especially unpleasant because of what he had to do now.

“Hold on,” he yelled and threw the ship into a tight spin, effectively turning them 180 degrees. They were now facing Zaxxos.

“Rig,” cried Pora. “What the crap!”

He accelerated the ship towards the god like he was attacking. Several gasps of terror surrounded him.

The unexpected move made Zaxxos pause. Was it because he had felt pain for the first time in several years? Maybe the experience re-awakened his sense of vulnerability? It didn’t matter. It gave Rig the few seconds he needed to fire all the Ultor’s forward guns right at the god’s eyes.

The energy weapons didn’t hurt Zaxxos at all, but the brilliant volley blinded him for a few seconds, enabling Rig to fly directly between his legs. “In for a penny…” Rig murmured, making a beeline for the giant mountainside.

The shout of fury behind them was, in a word, epic.

Rig glanced at the rear viewscreen. Zaxxos was running full tilt toward them with eyes that had gone pure white, almost too bright to look at.

Now!

Rig rammed the Ultor into an impossibly tight turn to starboard, skirting above the colossal mountainside by mere meters. G-forces pushed against him to the point where he thought he might pass out and puke at the same time. Behind them, he could see a blast of white energy ripping into the stone just behind them. Granite disintegrated like it was papier-mâché, dust clouds billowed, and tens of millions of stones exploded in their wake. Somehow, Rig managed to hold the ship on course and not crash as it curved around the mountainside.

What followed was a mammoth explosion, not unlike a supersized volcano that had suddenly burst into full eruption, which is exactly what it was.

It was a very, very unnerving sound.

After a second or two, Rig curved the ship skyward and dared to check the rear viewscreen. There was nothing but dust.

Then, from within the cloud, a massive hand burst towards them, reaching out to catch the ship and crush it like it was a bug.

Well, crap, Rig thought.

Then, there was another explosion that made the previous one seem like a sparrow somewhere had a bit of a cough. The ship buckled wildly, threatening to shake itself to pieces, and the rear viewscreen filled with black smoke and a hellishly deep, red light. The giant hand that was only a few feet away from grasping the ship was suddenly yanked back into that cloud as if Zaxxos had been attached to a tremendous bungee cord.

Then came the screaming. It was horrible. But they could barely hear it over the concussive sounds of many more explosions behind them.

Rig eased the Ultor into a gentler curve. Blessedly, she held together.

Silence settled on the bridge as all eyes turned to look at the rear screen. Below, the newest god in the galaxy was writhing in agony, the lower half of his body submerged in a growing pool of molten lava that flowed from a gigantic fissure newly carved in the mountainside.

Not wanting to see any more, Rig aborted the orbital engine shift and pointed the Ultor back to where she came from.

Drooghelm reluctantly opened his eyes.

Everything hurt, even his eyelids. It hurt to focus. It hurt to breathe. He closed his eyes again. His entire being felt like one giant bruise that had been kicked around for an entire season of galactic footie. He groaned.

“Ah, there he is,” came Elgia’s cheerful voice somewhere beside him. “How you feeling, Ducks?”

“Not dead,” he managed to murmur.

“Give the boy a prize, his brain ain’t broken either.” Drooghelm heard her stand up and walk around his bed, which he realized was in Ultor’s sick bay. This confused him a bit. Shouldn’t the ship have been destroyed?

“You get to fill his Nibs in, Rig. You’ve earned that, at least.”

“Much appreciated.” Rig’s voice had come from somewhere down by his feet. He heard the sick bay door open and close.

“The patient,” the ship’s medical AI chimed in, “should get as much rest as possible. Excitement and agitation is not advisable.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Doc, thanks.” There was a tired amusement in Rig’s voice. Rig asked: “Talk now, or later?”

“Now. How…?”

“After your ship took the biggest bitch-slap in the history of history, it crashed in the ocean. By sheer luck, the cabin seals weren’t fully broken. We sent down two mechies who found you floating in an air bubble. Touch and go there, but, obviously—”

“Zaxxos?”

“Dead.”

Drooghelm’s brain boggled. “It… worked?”

“You mean the bolt up the nose?” Rig laughed. “No, no, that failed. But then I got this idea.” He felt Rig sit on the bed. “Elgia mentioned our clients liked to sacrifice people in lava flows. That giant mountain is on all their iconography, so it had to be part of the religion. Cultures have done similar things in the past, dumping virgins into volcanoes and so on. I reasoned that made it a holy mountain.”

“I gambled. Zaxxos’ eye beam thingies were destroying everything around us. If I could make him mad enough, he’d fire everything he had into that holy mountain and hopefully trigger an eruption. Even if I was wrong about the mountain being a sacred instrument or an actual god, I figured that anyone taking a dip in a giant lava pool would not fare well. Turns out I gambled right.” Drooghelm could hear his XO smile.

“Holy… we did it? Hit the jackpot?” Drooghelm exclaimed with as much energy as he could muster.

Rig sighed. “No, we didn’t.”

“Huh?”

“Between the incredible amount of destruction that Zaxxos carved through the capital and the torrents of lava from the volcano, the city was obliterated. Our clients, the entire Subiugatio cult leadership, were wiped out in a few seconds. What’s more, once the planet’s populace realized what had happened, they immediately revolted. None of them have been too happy about those guys and their religious practices for a long, long time. The whole place is a revolutionary battleground, and the cult itself has filed for bankruptcy.”

If it were possible, Drooghelm felt worse. “So?”

“So, no money. Plus, that titanium-ultrasteel bolt wasn’t cheap, nor was the cloaking device, which got fragged along with my escape ship. Our accounts are so far in the red, it’s not funny.”

Rig stood. “On the plus side, the Doc system says you should be up in a couple of weeks. We installed a physio chamber next door, but, ah, all we could get was a second-hand version. The anesthetic system is on the fritz, so, unfortunately, you’re gonna feel everything.”

He could hear Rig walking towards the door and pause at the threshold. “Two weeks off, Captain. I guess you could look at it like it’s a vacation.”

“Wonderful,” Drooghelm groaned.

The hatch closed, and Rig found Pora leaning against the bulkhead beside him. “You,” she said with a wry smile. “You enjoyed that, you naughty boy.”

Rig tried to look innocent. “Who? Me? Nah.”

They walked together toward the bridge. Pora asked, “Are we really that screwed? Financially, I mean.”

Rig shrugged. “Financially speaking, yeah, pretty much. But, hey, we’re still alive, and that’s not nothing. There are other positives, too. Killing a God and still standing at the end is doing wonders for our reputation.”

“Minus the fact that we destroyed the client in the process,” she added.

“Uh, yeah, minus that,” Rig admitted. “Not a slam-dunk, as the ancient saying goes, but not a total loss either. Regardless, it will probably get us some new work before long. Probably insanely dangerous work that no one in their right mind would take on, but—”

“Not at a total loss?” she suggested. He nodded, grinning.

Then Pora gave him a wicked look and slipped her arm around his waist. “And I’ll admit this much: being next to an actual god-killer is one serious turn-on.”

Definitely not a total loss.

Rumors hold that everything worth remembering in human history has been written down by one person, someone who has been around to see it all. No one can imagine who it might be; human history has been written for thousands of years, yet no one can live that long. Except a god, one recording humanity’s actions for a purpose they were too little to understand.

No one knew who first spoke of a god of written history; the best historians could only find short sentences describing this god, but no mention of its name. Many gods were known in that time: the god of the sun, the god of the moon, and many gods that helped people in their times of need, but a nameless god that kept history was still a great mystery. These other gods were more concerned about the number of worshippers they had, how many temples were built in their honor, and their own divine stories of greatness and power, not stories about humans. Their stories were meant to be tales that were passed down through the ages: tales of great courage or wrath or kindness, these stories were reasons to worship and build temples for these gods. A god with no temples and no stories of their own was no god. Though no one knew what this supposed god looked like, everyone from the biggest cities to the smallest villages agreed that whoever was written down in this nameless god’s books was one to be remembered throughout history. Even though no credit was given and no praise was held, the nameless god still wrote down everything that was necessary; a thankless job but one the god knew was necessary for humans to keep moving forward.

While the stories of gods were told more than any other, humans were still desperate to reach the level of remembrance that the gods had by having their own tales of greatness. Whether it was kings conquering lands untouched or emperors creating mountainous civilizations, it is human instinct to want to be remembered and those who are remembered can be remembered for anything. Families have tried for centuries, gods for millenia, and while not everyone is remembered, every story worth passing down was written down by some god, somewhere. If you were not written down, you may as well have not existed.

For those who could not make their name in eternal history, they were content with leaving a legacy their own family could remember and be proud of. Some became local legends rather than national ones; others were famous within their own families. Shino had a family that had no legends and no legacy, but this was not for a lack of trying. His grandfather’s grandfather had tried to save his village from an oncoming flood, but his body had been swept away by the rushing currents. Shino’s grandfather’s father had thought he could launch himself to the moon to conquer land no one else could reach; his footprints are still marked with soot in a town center somewhere Shino has never visited. Shino’s grandfather had thought he could gamble their family’s little worth on bad bets and Shino’s father had thought joining his country’s military would be the safest option to repay the debts Shino’s grandfather had accumulated. These were stories that would be passed down and forgotten one day, just as the names of the people in these stories were gone. Shino knew his family was not written in history, not yet.

After seeing the failures of his forefathers to reach any sort of height or fame or leave a legacy worth sharing, Shino took it upon himself to make his name in history.The rest of Shino’s family wanted little in life; the siblings who survived to adulthood despite poverty were grateful to be alive. While his siblings saw their failures as reasons not to search for notoriety, Shino took his family history as motivation to do better. Shino had already forgotten his grandfather’s name by the time he was old enough to leave, as had the rest of his family. He did not want the same legacy for himself, so with little knowledge but rumors and prayers, Shino searched for the historian god. “If my name is great enough to be written down by gods themselves, we are sure to live fruitfully,” Shino reassured his mother the night before he left on a quest for a better legacy.

Shino had listened to what little he could go on to begin his quest, mostly whispers from other gods written down by devoted worshippers, largely forgotten by humanity. It was said that the god of history stayed on a mountain that never changed while history changed around it. Shino could not find much of what it meant for a mountain to never change. How much was a mountain supposed to change over time? Shino did not know and checking every mountain in the world would have been an arduous task, so Shino took his time to ask masters in knowledge what such a rumor could mean.

“A mountain stuck in time,” one master said smugly. “Find a mountain where nothing happens and climb to its peak.”

Shino pondered the master and asked, “What happens when nothing happens?”

The master said he had no more time to answer questions and needed to return to his studies. Shino knew the master had no answer.

“A mountain in the middle of nowhere would have no history. If the mountain is nowhere important, it would have nothing to occur,” a second master reasoned.

Shino thought about this too, and asked, “Are there places in the world left unexplored?”

Unlike the first master, the second master was excited by Shino’s curiosity. He answered, “There is always land left to conquer, something for rulers left to seize. As much as we record every piece of knowledge, there is always something new to learn from our world.”

The second master’s answer left Shino unsatisfied, had most of the world not already been recorded by adventurers older than Shino? Shino also knew that conquering an unexplored land required an army, resources only few in the land could afford. No one was going to give Shino what he needed so his name could be recorded by some mythical being. The second master’s answer made Shino concerned this task was an impossible one, so he sought after a third opinion, one that he felt he could take on his own with only a satchel on his back and food to trade.

Shino was able to find his answer with the third: “Find a mountain for which nothing changes. A height that does not shrink or grow, a peak that does not melt or clear, a storm that never leaves, the parts of a summit that would change with time. There are a few that fit, but there may be one close enough to make the journey close to home. But would this make the journey worth it?”

The third master’s answer reignited Shino. There was hope in such an answer, it was so obvious to Shino that he was surprised the masters couldn’t see it earlier: find a mountain whose weather never changes. He took months of climbing to scour the mountains of his country, praying that whatever god was watching over Shino was recording his journey. While climbing mountains alone was not worth a legend, Shino reasoned climbing to the peak of every tall, snowy and stormy mountaintop might be. It became an arduous task, Shino frequently having to climb down his mountain once the storm settled after days of raging furiously. He had never bothered to ask how many tall peaks his country may have had, he only had a map to cross out where he had been.

Starting up one of the last remaining mountains on his map, Shino could feel paranoia and anxiety creeping in at every crack in the clouds. Despite looking for a god, Shino never considered himself religious. With the luck his family had in their own fortune, what god could possibly have been listening? Knowing this, Shino still prayed. As he lay in his shelter, preparing for the scouting ahead, Shino prayed aloud, “Please lead me to you, whoever you may be. Am I not worthy? Am I the first to seek your guidance? I cannot go back home as much of a failure as my forefathers and only you have the solution, oh god of history.”

Until, one day, around the age of 20, the same age as his father when he left, Shino found a cabin in a blizzard, halfway up the last mountain he could check before he would have had to ask permission to leave the country to search nearby countries for other mountains. The cabin was shoddy, Shino was surprised to see it still standing against the fiercest winds he had faced. “Shelter,” he told himself as the snow crushed under his worn boots.

While the outside of the cabin had seen better days, the inside was a different story. Inside the cabin was a golden sheen that illuminated the dull colors on Shino’s wet coat. As Shino stepped inside, he looked and saw the walls were coated in lights and scrolls. The room itself was small, only another door and a fireplace displaced the walls. Shino followed the scrolls upwards and saw the cabin had no end, contrasting the shabby cabin roof outside that was at most two heads higher than him. Closing the door behind him, Shino began to strip away the snow-soaked clothing and warm up by the fire, its flames licking a wood that never seemed to burn.

Once finished and down to his barest garments, Shino saw the other door open. The warmth of the cabin had caused Shino to drop his guard, along with his weapon. He scrambled towards his knife, one that had helped him defend himself against thieves during his journey, and held it close to his chest.

This isn’t your home, a small voice reasoned in Shino’s head.

This voice was drowned out by the louder, Protect yourself, you are the most precious thing.

Standing close to the fire but far from the door, Shino saw a child, maybe younger than when Shino was when he left home on his journey for the god. The child had hair a paler blond than any scroll in the cabin, the lights gave them a golden aura.

No, it wasn’t the lights doing anything, the child themselves glowed.

The child closed the door behind them and greeted, “Hello Shino, how may I welcome you to my home?”

Shino lowered his knife, no one had said his name for months. In order to be safe, Shino had always opted for a fake name, especially if there was any chance he would have to owe money. He knew it wasn’t right, he knew his mother told him his father did something similar, but Shino reasoned that nothing should get in the way of finding this god. Now that he was in the presence of one, he thought about how stupid his actions might have been.

“Are you—”

“Please, call me Um. I am but a humble archivist. I write what needs to be written.”

Shino smiled. “That is excellent because you need to write about me!”

Um turned their head before they turned away and began to make tea over the fire. As he took a metal rod and began to poke the fire, Um asked, “Why do I need to write about you? Have you done something noteworthy?”

“I climbed every unchanging mountain to find you! Is that not worthy of being written down in history?” Shino was given a cup and told to wait for tea. As he waited, he wondered why Um looked the way they did. He thought the god of history would look, well, historical. As if to prove Shino wrong, Um reached out an arm to the ceiling and watched as a scroll fluttered down from the pile on the wall. Um didn’t open the scroll but held it tight in their hand as they began to pour tea for Shino.

“You climbed five hundred and twenty eight mountains, but I have a record of someone who climbed over a thousand mountains. Do you think climbing less than half the mountains the person in this scroll did makes you a legend?” Um asked.

“No.” Shino took a shameful sip of his tea. It tasted close to the brew made at home.

“Shino, to make legends, you need to have something worth passing down. Come back in double your lifetime after you have done something will be passed down.”

Shino accepted Um’s challenge and, in a blink and a sip of his tea, found himself at the bottom of his first mountain, the one closest to his hometown.

Once he returned to his village, Shino’s peers began rumors that he failed. None of this deterred him, Shino vowed to himself he would find something worth passing down. His first step was to leave his family home and start his own. While the chastisement from his mother was a harder sting than the disapproval of his village, Shino left his home and started a new life in a new village.

After finding a new village a week’s time away from his own, Shino was able to integrate himself. He took an interest in the village’s administration. He volunteered for all the work no one else wanted and gave helpful advice whenever asked. This attracted one of the village higher-up’s daughters to Shino’s side. After a short time together, Shino was married with a few children.

Once Shino was forty, he saw his new home thrive. Thanks in part to his efforts, his village was one of the few that was able to survive several droughts and a handful of famines. When a plague soared through the land like a blanket of death, Shino was able to help keep the village clean and away from any dirty omens. He was claimed a hero in the village many times over. He saw how his family looked at him, full of hope and pride for their patriarch.

Shino knew he was ready.

“Do you have to go to the mountain?” Shino’s fourth oldest child asked him.

“They said to return at the time when my life has doubled. When I went then, I had nothing, but now, I have everything. When you get to my age, what will you tell your children about me?”

“That their grandfather saved his village many times and was a hero!” his child cheered.

Shino smiled before he headed off, making sure everyone knew he was going to come back a legend. If he had been in his old village, Shino knew he would have been ridiculed many times over before he had left the front gates. Here, with all the good he knew he was doing, the most anyone did was a passing glance. For the first time, Shino found himself feeling respected.

The god’s cabin on the mountain didn’t change, neither in location or shabbiness. Shino felt blessed to not have to wander mountains for ages again just to meet and ask a simple favor. On the shorter journey, the more he found himself talking to himself, the more Shino was assured that he was due to be written in history.

Opening the door, Shino saw that nothing had changed. Even with styles and cultures changing in areas Shino had seen twenty years prior, the cabin had remained the same. Its intense glow bathed Shino as he began to take off his coat, rather than stripping almost entirely. As the fire flickered nearby, Shino declared, “Um, I am here to be made a legend!”

Their inner door opened and they rushed to Shino. After a moment of inspection on both ends, Shino saw no change in Um’s appearance. They looked as young as the first time Shino met them. He couldn’t find any wrinkles on the child’s face while Shino unconsciously felt the slight folds on his face crease further. His mouth twitched.

“It is further proof of your godliness that you remain so young after so many years, Um. Please, as the god of history, you must have seen my contributions.”

Um backed away, tending to the fire. “I have, yes. Do you feel these are sufficient for you to be written as, how you say, a legend?”

“Well, yes, my village may have perished without my help. Is saving a village after what could have been numerous disasters not enough for my name to last generations after me?”

Um shook their head. “Maybe a few… Maybe your great grandchild will know your name, but there are many others and there will be many others that will save their fellow countrymen from danger and their names will last until they die. After that, they are as important as the spit from a full man. I cannot write your name down as you have not done anything any other man would not have done in your place.”

Mouth agape from the god’s bluntness, Shino watched as Um made their way back to their hidden room. Before they grabbed the door, Shino came to his senses and asked, “You gave me advice last time; can you give me more? I will spend just as many years and come back to show you I am worth writing down, even in a single line.”

Um’s hand cradled the knob while they watched Shino in their peripheral vision. “Do something worth remembering, else why should history remember you?”

Before Shino could protest or ask for further explanation, he felt his body flying back through the door and ended up back at home, crashing into a nearby table while he heard his wife cooking nearby. Rushing from another room, Shino’s wife shrieked, “Shino! I thought you would have been at your mysterious mountain at this point. Tell me what you’re doing!”

Regaining his composure, Shino stood from the ruins of their table and announced, “We will be moving to the city, I have a new goal in mind.”

After getting the god’s advice, Shino took less time than before enacting a new plan to be written down in the history scrolls. When picking the village he would move to, Shino originally picked a village a week’s time away. Unknownst to Shino, he had picked a village that was less than a day from his country’s capital. When he explained to his father-in-law why he wanted to move to his country’s capital, Shino assumed that his wife’s father would have forbidden Shino from taking his daughter away from him.

Shino was never happier to be wrong; not only did his father-in-law approve, he wrote Shino a letter of high merit for when he went to apply for a job. Once Shino and his family reached the capital, the letter allowed Shino to start his job in the government in the city. His family lived better than they ever could in the city, a large house near the capitol building with enough rooms to have at least three more families move into, if Shino’s children wanted to stay.

As Shino aged, he gained more respect from his fellow countrymen, helping strategize and lead battles as the number of enemies of the country grew. Shino grew to be a natural leader, his oldest children starting families in the house that only grew with age. While his decisions were thought to be more ruthless against any country that tried to smudge the beauty of their prosperity, Shino was well liked by a majority. Once it was time to elect a new leader, Shino was the almost unanimous winner, with the few dissenters changing their mind once Shino brought further happiness to his country.

His rule was bloody, but only to outsiders that refused to come. Many saw the wealth and joy Shino brought to his country and were nothing but jealous. He cut leaders down like the threshing of wheat, giving any land captured during the times of war to citizens who had nothing. At the peak of Shino’s reign, a quarter of the world was under his command.

Once he was sixty, Shino saw everything he ruled over and everything he had accomplished. He saw his children grow up to fine adults, his wife raise a home that gave Shino the support he needed to guide his people, and the citizens he gave a better life to than he had at the same age. He knew the god would be pleased.

“Father, you have accomplished more than any man I could find, why do you still go on what appears to be a fruitless journey?” One of Shino’s sons grew to be an academic, one that questioned if the person Shino was meeting was even a god.

“If you saw them like how I saw them, you would understand.” As Shino aged, he found himself giving vague answers to his children about his goals. His children would never understand, his wife never did and argued with Shino the days leading up to his journey.

His son continued to complain, “Then take me with you! Let me see this so-called ‘god’ and prove to you that this dangerous journey was never worth it.”

Shino put his foot down. “If you are calling it dangerous, I refuse to allow you to journey alongside. I forbid it. Besides, young one, if I did not go on this journey, we would not have had this wonderful home, or the education you received to be able to snap at your elders. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

The son wanted to snap back, but it would have only proved Shino right. Even though Shino was the highest politician in the land, no one followed Shino in his journey. Bringing such a time of peace and prosperity into the country itself, many felt grateful to have Shino as their leader and those who didn’t were terrified of the consequences of hurting the sixty-year old man. This made the journey to the mountain much easier than in previous years, despite his old age slowing him down.

Instead of letting himself in once he reached the cabin, Shino thought it would be polite to knock. He raised a fist to the door but before he could rap the cabin door, he heard Um say, “You may come in.”

The door opened on its own and Shino shuffled inside. Um was sitting, waiting for Shino’s return. They were unaged while Shino’s joints cracked and popped more than the burning wood. The fireplace looked unchanged, still flickering as brightly as the first time he came through. The only thing that seemed old in this cabin was him. “I followed your advice.”

Um looked Shino up and down, Shino wearing coats made out of animals only found in countries he had taken over. Exotic furs lined his body, Shino asked for only the warmest for his journey. “I can see.”

“Am I a legend in your history?” Shino asked.

“What advice did you follow?” Um asked.

Shino was taken aback, wondering if the god couldn’t remember the past twenty years. No, it had to be a test, to see if Shino was paying attention to the god’s words. Shino answered, “You said to do something worth remembering. I did. You must see the gifts this country has been bestowed under my leadership?”

Um asked, “Is the slaughter of thousands worth remembering?”

“Yes, we remember the lives of those we have had to cut down in order for us to better our people.”

“Do you remember Okin, the fifty-ninth throat you had to slice? Do you remember Chi-Won, the mother that you executed? Or do you remember the idea of them, the concepts of dead citizens to be remembered?” If Shino had not known better, he would have assumed Um was mad. Instead, Shino knew Um was asking in earnest. They were testing Shino, getting towards the end, he felt the title of a legend was within grasp.

“While I do not remember, the fact that you do means you have been looking, watching. I must be ready,” Shino rationized.

“You are not,” Um responded.

Shino stopped, his heart sank. It had been sixty years and he still wasn’t ready. Before Shino could protest, Um clarified, “People come and die all the time. Killers are not new, there are and always will be people who kill in different names, whether it’s religion, their country, or their way of life. Killing for the sake of making a name of yourself is nothing new. Do you want to be a legend?”

Shino nodded vigorously. Shino heard the door open behind him. Um looked to Shino and said, “Come back in twenty more years after you do something that will leave a true mark on history.”

Shino was once again swept away before he could ask for an explanation. Sixty years and the god refused to put his name down for him. All Shino ever received was vague sayings instead of real answers. Frustration from divinity erupted into a loud anger as Shino started to destroy valuable art pieces his wife had spent time curating to make their palace a home. When one of Shino’s sons found him and restrained Shino from destroying their home, the son asked, “You just left not that long ago, why have you returned?”

“I am quitting as this country’s leader, effective immediately. I have a new goal to make my name matter,” Shino explained.

“But your name does matter, father. It matters to your family, isn’t that all that matters?”

“No!” Shino cried.

He knew his time was coming, this next visit would be the last one he would have with Um. After Shino’s resignation, the country began to enter a time of war, wiping the peace Shino worked for within half the time he had spent working for it. Before his meeting, Shino would have cared that his legacy in the country might have been destroyed, but Shino continued to swallow his anger. Some of Shino’s grandchildren were drafted into the wars ahead, but Shino didn’t care when he heard over half of them perished on the battlefield.

Shino’s wife left him after she found her husband becoming an uncaring patriarch. His kids stopped visiting his home, shrinking Shino’s living space from a large mansion to nothing more than a shack, smaller than the cabin he was destined to see. All the while, Shino spent his time in pent-up rage. He had lost almost all of his belongings he gained during his leadership, but kept around a knife he had taken from a foreign temple. The knife’s blade was nearly invisible, only small black specks were seen in the blade’s edges. Shino had always felt there was something special about this blade, so he decided this was the one possession he needed. He focused all his anger into this blade as he trained to use the knife to the highest of his potential.

By the time Shino was almost eighty, no one visited him anymore. Shino didn’t notice anyone coming in or out of his cabin, just whether someone had touched his most important knife. On the day before his final visit, The academic son spent one more visit to convince Shino to give up on his mission.

“Mother is dead,” the son announced.

Shino didn’t move. It took him a long moment to realize what the son had said. All Shino could respond with was an unenthusiastic, “Shame.”

“Do you care? Most of your family is dead, do you care?”

Tears swelled in the son’s eyes as his father responded, “I don’t know.”

The son slammed the shack’s door, the whole foundation shook under his anger. Shino didn’t look at his son during the encounter, he refused to give any of his negative emotions where it didn’t count. Instead, he packed, focusing his anger on the knife. He knew where he could make history.

Shino didn’t pack anything for the journey, not that he had anything worth packing. The cabin was still there, undisturbed by time while still falling apart. Once Shino opened the door, he saw Um was not inside. It looked as warm as the first time around, but the heat felt less inviting. Instead, Shino felt rage, nothing had changed but he continued to age. He felt the god mock him from the other side of the door.

The door he had yet to open, the one that no doubt contained Um’s living quarters. It was ridiculous, why would a god need to sleep, but Shino rushed to the door. Inside, he saw Um, sitting at a table, hunched over something Shino was unable to see. Their back was turned to Shino, but they still greeted him like an old friend. “Shino, have you made your mark on history?”

They sounded happy, almost excited, infuriating Shino further. He took the knife and plunged it into Um’s back, holding them against the table while Shino sliced in further. Shino dragged the knife and watched as black blood spilled from the god’s back, flooding the floor as the god began to shrivel. The body turned to a shade of white devoid of any life as Shino stabbed them for the umpteenth time. Once the god no longer moved, Shino saw what he had done. The body looked aged and decrepit, as if all the years spent young caught up to the poor god.

After he finished inspecting his years of anger abused onto one god, he saw what Um had been working on on the table; a piece of parchment with one line: “Shino killed the god of history—” The name was covered in ink and Shino was unable to remove it.

At first, Shino smiled; he had finally made his name in history, the god had written Shino down like he wanted. He grabbed onto the parchment and read it against the nearest light. For a short moment, he was proud. Then the consequences of Shino’s actions filled his mind. Shino had only known one god, but there must have been more. Killing a god had to incur the wrath of many others. He looked back to the parchment and thought about how to spin this in the positive. “People conquer gods all the time, right? I cannot have been the first warrior to do so. Let me just write down their name, so I’m secure in history. It was, um…”

Shino couldn’t remember. The god’s name refused to surface, Shino couldn’t think of any of the times he had addressed the god by name. “Well, I told my children at some point, I must have, I’ll just ask—”

Shino stopped, the names of his children were fading from his memory. Panic set in as Shino ran out of the god’s room into the main cabin. Once in the main room, Shino noticed it was dark, only moonlight illuminated the room as it began to fall apart. The cabin began to shrink, scrolls from the infinite ceiling rained onto Shino before turning into dust once they hit him. Shino attempted to grab a scroll from the wall but it disappeared into nothing once his fingers touched.

The cabin became smaller and the threat of Shino getting hurt inside grew larger. He ran out into the snow and closed the door behind him. His heart began to slow and he looked to the cabin falling in on itself until it disappeared. Shino looked around at his environment, he had no idea how he got to the mountain or why he was sitting next to a pile of wood in a blizzard. He reread the piece of parchment as winds began to pick up. “I am Shino and I killed the god of history. I am Shino and I killed the god of history.”

Those who travel the mountains claim to hear the voice of a god killer, crying as he repeats the last thing he ever read. History went on without him as his country faded into obscurity and his family legacy was lost after two generations.