Difficulty: no giving up.

Hard to write, feet not dextrous, ha. Five senses, five simultaneous inputs. Synthesize three for single output.

Public radio address — pen in hand, now, foot delicate enough for Braille —through the aural inputs. Twelve stranded atop house in flood. Restate. Twelve stranded atop house in flood.

Unfaithful translation of Feynmann to bump-grids now playing underfoot — odd, can spool faster across arch of sole than could under fingers. Inaccurate biographical information; was samba, not bossa nova. Synthesize: Twelve stranded atop samba club in Brazillian flood. Strict accuracy. Twelve stranded atop bossa nova club.

Optical dissociation shunted in favor of rapid focus swap. Looped video (35mm archive, poor condition, no blues, missing audio) of child crying in backseat as imposing figure in black pea-coat recedes to vanishing point through rear window. Twelve stranded atop bossa nova club, abandoned by rescuers. Offset on repeat. Mode same. Twelve abandoned, would-be rescuers fleeing.

Second focus: novel, thriller, yellow paper, pocket-sized, inappropriate ellipses signifying difficult drama. Cheapens the situation. Twelve stranded atop bossa nova club; rescue attempts called off; all the world holds its breath.

The hard two, now. Burnt diesel scent from open vent. Raw seafood from restaurant kitchens two floors down. Nothing discrete, but context fills the role here of isolation. Twelve stranded atop bossa nova club; rescue attempts called off; all the world holds its breath. A fishing vessel, chugging powerfully against the flow, making its way to the survivors against the command of—

Collect and synthesize. I shall bend — not break — the scientific methods. A fishing boat is coming [inappropriate ellipsis].

Been up too long and my sinuses are draining down the back of my throat in a hot sheet that tastes of metal, of the tin lip of cheap beer. Twelve stranded atop bossa nova club; rescue attempts called off; all the world holds its breath. The survivors have exhausted their fresh water supply, and are now rationing tins of beer.

Extrapolate, for the threads of story are like shavings of gold, and to procure a true representative sample there must be much to enter in the crucible: We have seen close ups of the faces of the children, and their fear is solid through the wires and waves. All those housewives between their television sets and ironing boards catch the news flash; students have their classroom monitors switched on; the names of the children are more memorable than those of the old man drinking beer, of the mistress of the club in her simple red dress. Weather conditions prohibit airlift. Cameraman with optical zoom unsteady, drops camera when twisted by sobs.

Hop one: sobbing.

Hop two: That time I took a lungful of asbestos dust and lost the will to stand and faced the wall and coughed until my eyes hurt and the poison particles had turned to mud against my cheeks.

Two hops only. Not good.

In an infinite universe, there must be an infinite number of stories that haven’t got a thing to do with me. In a possibly finite universe, there must be a story, a star somewhere the light of which will never touch me, and never come around again.

The thing is, the problem is, I’m shut up in memories. The real sixth sense, used to navigate a house moved out of twenty years before, used to evaluate the vibrancy of a color, to add the relativity, without which we are seeing new things every day, smelling, tasting, hearing, feeling new things every second of the day.

I want to leave this place. I want to be alone, but here there is no alone. Downstairs, the cook shatters a pan of boiled sugar and his children scramble for the flakes. Upstairs, two women scream. On either side of me are people breathing, breathing heavy, phlegmy gulps. I can not be alone. I can not find the story that has none of me. I can make these successive approximations, Riemann sums for solitude, diminishing myself. But not with two hops. That doesn’t even get close to nothing.

I could write myself a story of escape; even I wouldn’t believe it. Null hop.

They were brothers, Tag and Joffrey, but they had come from different mothers. Both of their mothers were dead, having passed away on the same day from the pains of childbirth and the rage that, at that same moment, there was another woman caught in the same labor. Tag and Joffrey grew up with their father, a village tailor.

Joffrey had golden hair. “I have golden hair,” he would say. “My mother was a princess.”

“I have red hair,” Tag would say.

“Your mother was a whore,” Joff would interrupt.

Many were the times their father thought it would have been easier had both of the boys been born with black hair, like his.

The brothers were the fiercest of competitors. When Joff climbed a tree, Tag had to climb higher. When Tag snared a coney, Joff had to kill a brace of them. From sunup to sundown they outdid each other, running in circles if there was nothing more brave to do. Sometimes their battles lasted well past bedtime; one would begin to snore and the other would try to drown the sound with his own, and soon their father’s shack would be shaking like a duck before slaughter with the tidal noise of phlegm and lungs. The boys’ father was overjoyed when apprenticing day finally came. The young men of the village gathered around the well to have the artisans and merchants, the taskmen and the scholars look them over as though they were breeding stock. The most enviable apprenticeship, it was whispered, was to be a student at the college, but only one boy was chosen each year for that position. It meant a clean cell all to himself, warm robes, and no heavy lifting. Tag and Joff stood shoulder to shoulder, straightening their spines when a master came around to them. Some Tag hoped would pass right by them, such as the dung-bailer and the gull-washer — both of those men took boys much thicker around the trunk than Tag or Joff. Then the headmaster of the college came around. He started at the opposite side of the circle, so Tag’s heart had as long as possible to flutter up. The headmaster would come to him before Joff. That single room was surely his!

The headmaster was shorter than Tag. He looked up into the boy’s eyes; Tag resisted the urge to flick his gaze down to meet.

“Can you tell me, boy, what is history?”

Tag unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Master, if you please, I can. History is what happens before now.” Now Tag’s heart seemed to stop beating entirely, for the headmaster gave no nod or shake of the head, no confirmation of success or failure.

“Master, no, I can tell you,” said Joff, elbowing Tag out of the way. “History is just stories.” The headmaster’s eyes had slipped from Tag to Joff like a stone over water. Tag tried to shove Joff back to his position in the circle, but it was a weak try since he didn’t want to appear hotheaded to the master.

“You,” said the headmaster, nodding at Joff. “Can you read?”

“Not yet, master.”

“Fine. Come with me.”

And that was it. The headmaster led Joff through the circle, which parted to allow them through; each remaining boy had a dirty look for Joff, and Joff had a certain gesture to throw back at Tag before the bodies closed in again and he was out of sight.

One by one, the other boys were selected and trailed off after their new masters. Finally, the square was empty save for Tag, his father, and a fishmonger dressing up his wares for display.

Tag’s father sniffed. “Well,” he grumbled. “Let me see your hands.” Tag presented his knuckles, skin red from having been scrubbed that morning. “Palms up,” said his father. Tag rotated his wrists. His father sniffed again. “All right,” he said. “You’ll do.” So Tag followed his father back home to be apprenticed as the village tailor, and he slept that night in his old room, all by himself.

The years passed, and Tag grew first scabs then calluses on his needle fingers. He learned about the chain stitch and the lock stitch, basting, slips, whips, and feathers. He was amazed at how quiet the house became with Joffrey gone. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears, even at the height of the day, when he and Joff used to have their best fights. Maybe his father started feeling uneasy, too, because he took up the habit of whistling as he worked.

Before he knew it, Tag was answering customer calls himself and taking garments to his own side of the table to mend them instead of sliding them over to his father. They would work until light failed, and then light the candles and continue, and father would whistle.

Joffrey would visit from time to time, on feast days and at midwinter. The first time he returned, Tag had expected them to slide back into their old arguments like children on an icy slope. Instead, their throats seized up, frozen. They ate and spoke sparingly. Father didn’t whistle until the next day, when work had resumed and customers needed their warm clothes.

The next winter, Tag’s father died of a fever. His last words to Tag were to practice his embroidery, for it was highly requested by the ladies. Then, as Tag framed a response, he raised a finger to his lips and died in silence.

Tag assumed the duties his father abandoned without a grumble. I might get a touch cold at night, he said to himself, and I might get tired of skinny chicken, but it’s not as bad as all that. It was no warm cloister, but it was, indeed, not as bad as all that.

Joffrey sent him a gift as congratulations for succeeding their father as master tailor. It was a covered basket, delivered by an urchin with a nose ruined by a pox. Tag gave the kid a penny and took the gift to his table. Work was literally piling up, though, so the basket was shoved to the corner in favor of the needle and thimble. Tag had settled into silent, hunched labor when a noise disrupted him. A fly was buzzing around the table, its crazy path seeming to center on the gifted basket. Tag shooed at it with a word and a wave and a puff from his cheeks. The fly landed, out of sight, and rested its wings. Tag went back to work. It wasn’t long until the whine of wingbeats returned, however, and this time when Tag looked up there were two of the creatures.

“Get off,” said Tag. The Flies were not keen to oblige. Tag tried to bend again to his work, but he found he could not concentrate without silence. The insects were singing a chorus to themselves, oblivious to their ungrateful audience, in two-part harmony.

No! Tag realized, glaring over. There were four, now, or maybe five — it was to focus on their ballistic bodies.

Curiosity got the better of Tag. He reached across the table and flipped open Joff’s basket, dislodging one of the flies. A stench rose immediately and settled into every crevice of the room. Tag fought the urge to vomit. There was a note. It read: This is what you’re used to, right? Love, Joff. This meat had not been good for a long time; had it been, the urchin would have eaten it.

A fly settled on Tag’s nose. “God’s own! Get off!“ he yelled. The startled beast and her mates settled on the basket, licking their forearms with what looked for all the world like glee. “I’ll be damned if I suffer you a moment more; damned or crazy,” said Tag, and with that he slid his simple hide belt from his trousers and,bip, brought it back, and, bop, smacked it down on the main body of the flies’ disgusting congregation. Those not squished beneath took to the air and disappeared through secret holes. Tag gently lifted his belt and counted the bodies. There were seven. Seven! And that hadn’t even been all of them.

The dreadful buzzing thus stymied, Tag returned to work, feeling rather pleased with himself. A rather tedious darning awaited him but, after a moment’s thought, he set it aside and drew his belt from where it lay by the basket. He wiped the fly guts from its surface and gave it a careful examination. He had yet to test his skill at embroidery — it had not been as popular as his father had expected — and this seemed an appropriate time and place to deploy that skill. After all, he thought, don’t the butchers take meat to their tables? don’t candlemakers light their homes with tallow from their shops? The design for his belt came at once to his imagination; he only paused once in his needlework, and that was to wish that he could write, so that no man — no literate man — could mistake the legend he was setting to thread.

When he was finished, he slipped the belt through his trousers and stood in front of the small looking glass he had installed for customers. The design on the belt was of seven death’s heads in gold thread, one for each of the crushed flies. They glinted when he turned, appearing as though they were made of precious metals, hard won. It was a pleasing effect.

“I shall show my belt to Joff,” said Tag. “So that he will see how much I appreciated his gift!“

The pile of mending could afford to be put off for the remainder of the afternoon, Tag decided. He simply would have to take advantage of the candlemaker’s wares that night.

The footpath from the village to the city where the university had its campus wound up from the quiet green valley and through a thick, sudden forest. It was mid-afternoon when Joff set out, having stopped at the market for a wedge of cheese for his supper, rather than trying to find a wholesome meal in the squalor of the city. He whistled as he went, thumbs hooked in his belt, glancing down every so often to admire how the sunlight glinted off the seven death’s heads.

As he slipped under the first thick branches of the forest’s fringe, he heard a pitiful sound, like a baby’s wail, but higher pitched. He carefully parted the branches of a clump of thistles and saw a small blackbird with its wings spread out like a cape. It saw him and fluttered, trying to take to the air. As it did, Tag saw that the bird’s legs both were broken like twigs. It cried every time it moved, and it moved every time Tag did.

“Don’t move too quick,” said a deep voice from behind. “Else your skull be punctured, here.”

Tag straightened, leaving the bird where it lay. “I have no money,” he said. He turned. Before him stood the largest man he had ever seen. Not only tall was he, but wide as a redwood. He was bald, but the top of his skull was so dense with seaman’s tattoos that he seemed to have a thin fuzz of pale blue. As Tag was taking this in, the man cocked his head and squinted at Tag’s belt. He moved his lips, then said, “Seven? Seven dead, huh.” He grinned.

“With a single blow,” said Tag, hooking his thumbs in the belt.

The giant blew out a cheekful of air. “With a single blow, you say? Oughtn’t your muscles be thicker?”

“They are no thicker than they need to be, so’s I do not take up more space than a man ought.”

The giant grinned, or at least bared his yellow teeth. “Oughtn’t your feet be quicker?”

“They are quick enough,” said Tag, a bit short in his tone. The giant nodded, pressing his lips together in an expression that seemed to indicate that he once had seen a thoughtful man. Then he folded himself over and scooped a stone from the ground. He weighed it in his hand and brought his fingers together, vanishing it. He squeezed. The tendons of his wrist grew through the matted black hair like fish brushing the surface of a stream. Small beads of what Tag at first took for sweat began to run along the underside of the giants hand, pooling and joining before snapping to the ground with soft bip bip bop sounds. It was flowing too freely to be sweat, especially from a creature as obviously fit as the giant was. With a start, Tag realized that it was water, and it was leaking from the stone itself! The giant smirked and unfolded his hand, letting Tag get a good look at the granite lump.

“Are these muscles wasted, little man?”

Tag nodded, realized what he was doing, and shook his head. He was thinking about how useful it would be to summon water from stone, but, even in the desert, a man needs more than water. The thought of food made his stomach churn in anticipation; he patted his pouch with the lump of cheese inside, and had an idea.

“Well done,” he said. “Water from granite. But I shall produce milk from marble.” With that, he reached into his pouch and drew out the lump of cheese. His closed his fist swiftly around it, giving the giant the barest of glimpses, and squeezed. In the slow blink of the giant’s eye, thick whey seeped from between Tag’s fingers and fell to the forest floor, bip bip bop. When the cheese was dry, Tag tossed it over his shoulder into the brush, ignoring the whimper his stomach made at being so deprived. The giant made no effort to hide his astonishment. “I never have seen such a thing!“ he cried, looking Tag head to toe again, as if he had missed something the first time. “But then, I never have seen a man take seven in one blow. Tell me, can you do this?” Up came another stone in his meaty hand. He hefted it, the whirled on his heels and threw the stone in one easy movement. His aim was almost perfect, threading a path between the sparse tree trunks for a hundred yards or better before colliding with an oak with a meaty thunk that took several seconds to reach Tag’s ears.

“Very good,” said Tag, eyeing the pale gash left in the tree’s flesh by the impact. A raven had been perching in the oak and now it took to scolding the men as loudly as it could. Tag had another idea. He scooped up the broken-legged bird from the brush behind him and hurled it too quickly, he hoped, for the giant to see that this “stone“ was bleeding. Unused the flying, the bird fluttered crazily around branches but heading in a more-or-less straight path, past the wounded oak and out of sight.

“Well, now,” said the giant. “Never have I seen a thing like that.” As Tag turned to face him, his proud grin came into contest with the giant’s cudgel on an arc of collision. Bip bop.

#

Tag was woken by his own groaning. He found himself in a dark room, on a dirt floor, which smelled strongly of onion and copper. He was unbound, though kept still by the pounding in his head. There were voices coming through the wall; they all sounded like the giant’s.

“I don’t believe it,” said one.

“You think I did? So he’s in the pantry,” said another.

“Captain Quail is out for Vineland on the morning tide yeah?” asked another.

“Yeah, let him decide if the runt can handle three months on the oar,” said another. A veritable chorus of laughter answered.

None of this sounded promising to Tag, who had abandoned the question How did I get into this mess? with its associated implications for How can I get out of it? He tested his arms and legs. They seemed to be functioning without complaint, though the same couldn’t be said of his head, which had dulled its throb to a tidal swell.

He was beginning to put it to use assembling escape routes from the gloom when the voices beyond the door burst through again. “He’ll sleep up to a bucket to the face.”

“Yeah?”

“I tell you — I know my own strength.”

“You’re in your cups.”

“Not me.”

“Not alone, anyway.”

The voices faded. Tag lay still, a throbbing in the bones of his face reminding him what just one of the giants could do when sober, and his imagination conjuring up whole seas of pain that all might cause when drunk. He didn’t know how long he stayed unmoving; the next thing to mark the progress of time was a crawling shaft of dusty moonlight through a crack in the wall, and after that the sound of snoring. One single man, no matter how large, could not be making that much racket, he told himself. They must all be asleep. He crept to the door and gripped the latch, thankful for the silence of the packed earth floor. He gave the door a light tug and, to his surprise, it opened a fraction. It wasn’t locked, which, on retrospect, wasn’t surprising, as the walls looked to have been built out of planed driftwood with no effort made to make the joints airtight. It clearly wasn’t a structure meant to last.

The hinges on the pantry door were sticky and took a good deal of Tag’s strength to budge. He finally made a gash wide enough to slip through, and he did so. The room on the other side was long, and thin, and completely bare save for the mountainous bodies of the giant and his men, which Tag took at first for furniture. He made a quick count — there were seven, strewn about every which way. The air reeked of alcohol and halitosis.

Tag stood frozen for what seemed like minutes, but none of the giants seemed to be moving, apart from the labored rise and fall of their chests. At the opposite end of the room was a hole to the outside, a frame without a door. Tag began moving toward it, quiet as a dead mouse. He happened to glance to his side once as he was passing the first sleeping brute and something caught his eye: the giant’s cudgel. An idea sprang into Tag’s mind. He sidled over to where the cudgel rested against the wall and gripped it. It was heavy, as heavy as his father’s casket had been, but he managed to shift it to his shoulder.

He was just testing its heft to swing it at the giant’s bearish head when he thought better of it. After all, if he missed, or if his strength was not enough to crunch the giant’s skull, he would have one angry giant in front of him and, more than likely, six more behind him. So, cradling the cudgel like a basket of clothing, he made his way to the door where, if he failed, he at least could drop the weapon and run. The giant by the door was sleeping on his back with his arms resting on his gut. Tag wrestled with the cudgel, got it positioned, and froze. The giant’s lips were moving, a slash of deeper black opening and closing. Something gleamed at the side of his mouth — a river of saliva. It slid down his cheek and, bip bip, onto the ground.

Tag brought the cudgel down, bop.

It made less of a sound than he was expecting. He was ready to drop and run, but he barely heard the impact himself. The head of the cudgel passed through the head of the giant like a needle through burlap. None of the other giants even stirred.

Tag realized he had been holding his breath; he caught it and then, not wanting to waste a good thing, moved on to the next brute.

By the end, his arms were fit to drop from their sockets. He let the cudgel drop from his grip and roll on the floor. The air still smelt of alcohol, but now it was mixed with a thick wind of coppery blood. Flies already were buzzing around the corpses. Tag waved at the air to scatter them. “Seven blows,” he said.

He stumbled out into the night and looked around. The giants’ cottage were on a cliff. Tag moved to the edge; the ocean crashed below and there, off in the direction of the moon, were the docks of the city, and beyond them the city itself making the air orange with firelight on a smoky backdrop. He started walking.

It was dawn by the time he reached the city gates. The guards posted there glanced him once up and down and let him pass with a warning to “Watch out.” There was a buzzing a few twisted streets down, in the general direction of the university. Tag made his way down the block, politely refusing fish and fruit from the mongers who set their stalls close to the gate. The commotion reached its highest pitch when Tag emerged into Small Square, a cramped, unclassifiable shape which was, at the moment, filled with braying citizens whose attention was focused wholly on a limbless figure on the dirty marble dais at the rough center of the square. Tag wondered for a second where the torso’s arms and legs were, then he saw them being waved like flags by certain members of the mob, or being fought over as chicken bones by the family dog.

True to mob form, there was no consensus as to what to chant, so Tag was having a hard time figuring out what was going on. He ambled over to a large woman, flung out to the fringe of the square because the space she would have taken up at the center would have been too highly prized by three — maybe four — full grown men. Tag hooked his fingers in his belt and made a simple bow to her. “Good morning!“ he yelled. “What’s going on?”

“Hope he burns in hell, gods’ mercy on his soul!“ replied the woman.

“Um,” said Tag. “What did he do?”

“That? That was Captain Quail of the Daroga!“ She spoke the name as though it encompassed whole firesides of stories. Tag tried to remember where he had heard it before. “That bastard stole my son and sold him to those murderers in Vineland!“ the woman screeched. She waved her fist. At the center of the square, two large men were taking hold of the body. One grabbed the bloody stump of a waist, the other the chin and neck. They began straining away from each other, and now the mob as a whole decided on a cheer.

Tag looked at the body; even with arms and legs, Captain Quail couldn’t have stood much over five feet, and his gut wasn’t more than genteelly wide. Tag looked at the woman, her pachyderm legs and good Northern stature. “By himself?” Tag wondered aloud. The woman looked at him as though he were a child. “I’m from the village,” he offered, as explanation.

“Him and his band of giants!“ the woman yelled. “They steal our children and he buys ’em up and takes ’em away!“ What was left of Captain Quail suddenly split at neck height. The men who had been playing tug-of-war each stumbled back with their respective trophies.

“Giants,” said Tag. “Seven of them?”

“That’s right!“

Well, good, Tag thought and nodded. He watched a squabble break out over Captain Quail’s head. As this was going on, the woman finally turned away from the mayhem and sized him up. The lateral sun glinted off the seven death’s heads on his belt.

“Seven,” she said.

“With a single blow,” said Tag, grinning. He thought that she might get the joke, having herself fought no foe more worthy than a fly, or perhaps a husband.

The woman’s jaw went slack. Tag didn’t notice; he was trying to figure how best to fit another seven death’s heads on his modest belt. The next thing he knew, hands were shoving him back to the gates, bodies were pressed tight against us, and voices were echoing, “Show us! Show us!“ in alternate anger and disbelief.

In a daze, Tag gulped out the specifics of his meeting with the giant and his brothers, trailing off at the end. Some of the mob were disbelieving, others in awe — both sides were struck dumb as they reached the giants’ cottage and a flock of scavengers scuttled away. Every last citizen, mothers and urchins, mongers and footpads, filed past the open doorframe, taking in the grisly scene. Tag stood to one side, smiling faintly. “Seven at one blow!“ shrieked the large woman from before. “Seven at one blow!“ the mob crowed back, loud enough to drown the grumbles of the skeptics around the edges. Tag was lifted to someone’s shoulders and remained there all the way back to the city. The mob grew like a stain a it spread through the streets, and before long Tag found himself at the steps of the lord’s keep.

The lord himself, having been alerted by the commotion, was waiting on a wide seat at the top of the stairs. He looked bored, as though the mob had committed a terrible breach of etiquette by arriving late. Beside him stood a vision in a red silk skirt and black velvet shawl to keep off the morning. Her hair was black and curled loosely, like frozen peatsmoke. Tag was stunned, and rightfully so. He was set down on the first step and the cheering quieted. He didn’t know how to do much more than a simple bow, so he did that. The lord raised an eyebrow and then a hand to beckon Tag forward.

“I understand that the Quail gang has been dealt with,” said the lord. “I am impressed.”

“So are we,” said someone in the crowd. Tag wondered if Joff was somewhere close, listening. Wouldn’t he be jealous!

“I set a bounty on the giants’ heads, though I am told that their heads are no longer in suitable shape to be piked on the wall. Pity. Nevertheless, the bounty stands, when the realm is safe.” Tag didn’t know what to see. He thrust out his chest and was about to expound on the generosity, yea the infinite godlike qualities of his lordship when the regal voice continued. “Your belt shows seven deaths. I wonder who they were?” There was a pause, just long enough for the more clever in the mob to think, Hey, wait — and then the lord went on. “No matter. The bounty shall be paid when the realm is safe, which, I am grieved to say, has yet to happen.” There were one or two hisses from the assembled. “There was an elf marauder in the forest, short weeks ago. Our good watchmen were able to dispense with this beast, but not with his mount. He rode upon one of the horned creatures fit only for his kids on his side of the veil. This creature, like unto the stature of a horse but several hands taller, or so I am told, is loose in the forest.” Was it Tag’s imagination, or did the lord smile?

“Forgive me, my liege,” said Tag. “But I came here on an errand to visit my brother, and I—“

“The bounty is five hundred sovereigns,” said the lord. That was enough for Tag to retire himself and whatever children he might choose to sire in the future. Still, he had heard stories of these one-horns, and the stories always ended red. “I meant to speak with—“ he began.

“And the hand of my daughter,” said the lord. The woman by his side inclined her head toward Tag. Her eyes were needle-gray. Tag felt a redness of his own swell at his throat. He bowed to the lord’s daughter; she sniffed once, loudly, and Tag hoped she couldn’t smell him.

“I—“ said Tag with what must have been enough of a tone to prompt the crowd behind him to erupt in shouts of Hurrah! Once again he was lifted onto the shoulders of stronger men and hauled to the gates. The lord and his daughter strode into the keep without a second glance.

The crowd set him down at the gates and wished him good luck, offering such advice as They smell fear, and Play dead, if you can’t run. The large woman whose son had been taken by the Quail gang gave him a hearty hug and kiss that covered half his face. He set off down the path, looking over his shoulder every few steps, and every time he did the crowd would shout Hurrah again, though each time with somewhat less fervor. Eventually, the city disappeared behind a hill.

Tag had not slept in some time, discounting the restless unconsciousness in the giants’ pantry, but cold blood was pumping through his brain and limbs and keeping him at least awake, if not alert. It was late afternoon when he reached the forest. Before entering, he kicked around beside the path for a large rock to wield. He found one that fit his palm like the lump of cheese had. His stomach growled.

The path pelted through the underbrush and twisted around tamaracks so tall they waved like blades of grass in even the slightest breeze. Eventually it came to a thin stream and followed its course. Tag stopped for a drink. As he was bent to the water’s surface, he saw a scattered reflection of something on the opposite bank. He looked up. Mushrooms! A colony of puffballs that looked ripe for eating.

He splashed through the stream and fell face first into the ground, dropping his stone, and rooting amongst the fungi like a hog. His mouth filled with the taste of soil and growth and his stomach burbled its pleasure. Something else breathed its anger. Tag froze from the waist up — his legs twitched to keep from sliding into the stream. A sick smell wafted over him, counter to the water’s current, a scent of grease and feces. The ground shook. Tag levered himself off the ground and turned. Broadside to him was the one-horn, head bent to the stream, but not drinking. It was staring at him with its one facing, dipping its knotted horn as though stitching the air. It snorted, flared its nostrils as if it were Tag’s odor weighing the air. Tag fumbled for his stone, but knocked it with his knuckles, sending it rolling into the stream. The resulting splash startled the one-horn straight. It turned its thin face toward Tag, then past, fixing him with the other eye. Then it opened its mouth and screamed. Horses, in Tag’s experience, generally whinnied or snorted; they never tore such a sound from the bottom of their lungs as the one-horn did, a thick, bubbling wail, like motherless child.

Tag didn’t have a chance to protest. The one-horn sprang into motion, rotating on one muscled leg and leveling its driftwood horn. Tag scrambled to his feet and immediately tripped over the root of a mammoth pine. He regained his feet, but had nowhere to go, his back up against the tree’s trunk. Foam dripped from the one-horn’s mouth. Its eyes rolled crazily away from each other. At the last second, Tag’s legs gave way and he sank to the ground. He felt — and more than that smelled the breath of the one-horn pass over his shoulder and heard the deep thunk as the horn itself pegged the tree. There were splintering noises that Tag at first feared were made by his own weak bones.

But he looked up and saw the one-horn, buried to its forehead in the living wood. Its hooves flailed, forcing Tag to scramble backwards over the ground, flattening what was left of the mushrooms. His arms slipped and he slid down the bank into the stream, his head going under. When he sputtered to the surface, the one-horn greeted him with another terrifying scream, but this one was born of frustration, rather than anger. No matter how the creature’s hooves flashed and pounded, it couldn’t budge from its place. Tag slowly regained his feet, fighting back the urge to splash away home, maybe have a scribe write a simple letter to Joff.

What would he write? Say, did you hear about the man who killed the Quail Gang? That was me! And Joff would write back, I heard that man then was beaten by the one-horn. Don’t worry. whoreson, I took care of it. The realm is safe.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough to urge Tag to fish another stone from the streambed. It froze his joints and nearly slipped from his grasp several times. He approached the one-horn’s head, keeping well clear of the frantically pumping hooves. He found the right grip on the stone and swung his arm like a windmill. The stone caught the one-horn right above the eye. The creature’s skull caved in and something sticky spurted onto his fingers. The legs kept twitching, so, repulsed, Tag took another swing, then another, and another. Finally, the one-horn slumped, held up by its caught horn.

Tag caught his breath, expecting at any moment the creature would find a reserve of life to flail its limbs once more. He thought he might have to call this whole heroism thing off if it kept to its current trend of growing more difficult with each victory. A cooling breeze snuck low to the ground, but it was unequal to the task of carrying away the one-horn’s stench. Tag’s stomach heaved. He lost his mushrooms.

He wasn’t hungry on the way back to the city, but he was exhausted. Night was washing in like a high tide when he tripped on his own feet in sight of the gates and hit the ground like a sack of wet laundry.

Later, he didn’t know how much, a flurry of lightning bugs resolved into torches being carried by a score of guardsmen. Their voices came softly to Tag’s ear:

“Is that him?”

“Gods alive!“

“He did it?”

“Damn.”

“But the bounty was ours!“

It may have been part of a dream, but Tag could have sworn that a fight broke out above him between a man who wanted to air his lungs and the remaining good souls who wanted to bring him to a bed and tuck him in with lullabies.

The good guys one and, through fluttering eyes and an equally flighty mind, Tag found himself in the lord’s receiving chambers being talked to in a voice that reminded Tag of the tone his father would take when lecturing his sons, though the voice’s words were about honor, and duty, and thanksgiving, and other things that meant Tag couldn’t go to bed, yet.

Then he found himself in bed. It was smelled like women’s powder, and something tugged the sheets whenever he moved, but it was warm, and soon he was fully in dream. He awoke to a blast of cold air and the buzzing of a mob and feared for a moment he had imagined the victories of the previous day. He rolled out of bed before he knew exactly why and got his bearings. He was in an ornate, if small, bedroom. The bones of a dead fire lay in an open bit at the center of the room, a brass hood settled overtop to catch the fumes. The stone floor was cold on his bare feet. He wondered where his shoes had gone. He looked down, and then wondered where the rest of his clothes had gone.

Behind him came the clearing of a throat. He turned to the doorway. The lord’s daughter stood there in the same red dress she had worn yesterday, the same needling scowl darkening her brows and eyes.

“You talk in your sleep, husband,” she said. The door was open and in the hallway beyond Tag could see two large men in scale and half-helms, visors down to mask their expressions. “Seven flies?” the lord’s daughter scoffed. She crossed behind the fume hood, during which time Tag thought to preserve what he could of his modesty with a pillow from the bed. The lord’s daughter paused a moment at the open window, the source of both the cold air and the angry amalgamate voice of the crowd. She looked out, surveying her domain, and then closed the shutters.

“You should hear my brother,” said Tag, unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth.

The lord’s daughter grinned at that, but it wasn’t a warming expression. “Yes. Your lies now are common knowledge,” she said. She adopted a hurt frown. “I’m afraid our marriage is over.”

“I’m… sorry?” said Tag. He wondered how long he had been sleeping.

“Guards,” said the lord’s daughter. She turned away from Tag as the guards entered, peering out through a slit in the shutters.

“Um,” said Tag. The guards each took a shoulder and led him out of the room, kindly allowing him to take his pillow with him. They went down what seemed to be the back way, passing through a room of red-hot pot-bellied stoves, circumventing a bustling kitchen, and edging down several thin, dark spiral stairways. They arrived, at last, at a corridor of cold blue stone, a row of small rooms chopped out of each side. Tag was escorted into one of these cells, urged to sit on a straw pallet, and, finally, ordered to relinquish his pillow. An iron grate was slid out of the wall and fastened with a small loop of chain. Without a word, the guards clanked away. Tag looked around his new accommodations in the faint hope that there would be something to hit. That’s when he realized that they, whoever had taken his clothes during the night, had also taken his belt.

“You are such a whoreson,” said a voice. From the corridor came a figure, shrouded in long black robes. A pair of hands emerged from the sleeves and lifted back a heavy hood, revealing a head of golden hair made silver in the filtered light.

“Joff,” said Tag. “Gods, what are you doing here?”

“Picking up the salt you sowed across my plans, grain by infuriating grain. What are you doing here?”

“I… wanted to show you my belt,” said Tag. Then, as Joff snorted, he added, “And to tell you I saw your mother in an alley.”

“Giving last rites to yours?”

Tag got up from the pallet and wrapped his fingers around the cold iron door. “Can you get me out here, Joff?”

Joff never used to belly-laugh. Even when Tag tripped that one time and fell into a dry well, he just chuckled, like dust sifting down into Tag’s lungs. Now, he threw back his head and shook cobwebs from the corners. He had been learning. “No. I can not get you out of here, no more than I can order my hands to turn against me. I put you here, and, until I recover from your interference, here you’ll remain. Besides,” he added. “It’s for your own safety. The citizens were merely smoldering yesterday, when they got ahold of captain Quail, compared to the rage they feel toward Tag the Tailor.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It has come to their attention, through a number of rather elegantly-written broadsides, that the Quail gang were actually killed by each other, if you can believe that of such good and moral men, after a night of drunken revelry. Some had their skulls smashed, some bled to death.”

“But that’s not—“

“And, also, the body of the one-horn in the forest has disappeared which, the author of these broadsides dares suggests, may mean that the one-horn was not, in fact, executed as Tag the Tale-Teller would have us all believe.”

“Now, wait—“

“And the belt? The death’s heads mark seven pillbugs, squished beneath mighty Tag’s rather overlarge feet.”

“Flies,” said Tag. “They were flies.” He slumped back into the shadows. The difference in distance was made up by Joff, who pressed close to the bars.

“You see, dear brother,” he said. “Your storied lies are bare! mere skeletons to drape a notion over. You haven’t the imagination to mortar the spaces with detail. You trust your audience will take the task up for you. I, on the other hand, have reservoirs of imagination and very little trust at all.” Tag had nothing to say, but Joff seemed more than happy to fill the silence. “Your divorce now to my dear Vivianne should be complete. As the man who exposed Tag the Thief to his lordship, I find myself in good favor. Perhaps I should thank you. I had meant to collect on the bounty myself, through the use of several ingenious devices of my own, but all seems well, and I am more than pleased to let it end well.” Several days later, as Tag judged it from his dim cell, a guard came by with a platter full of steaming meat. Tag had been hearing cheers all day long — a pleasant change from the mob’s grumbling.

“Your share of the wedding feast,” said the guard, sliding the platter under the door. Tag went over to it and picked up a scrap of parchment that had come with it. On the parchment was a picture of a one-horn, and beneath the picture a number of what Tag recognized were words, though he didn’t know what meaning they carried. They spiked and dipped over the page like a row of men with pitchforks, taunting him. He tore the paper and picked at the meat, though it was mostly gristle, and bits of the hide had been left attached.

A week later, Tag was awoken in the night by a voice hissing, “All clear!“ and the whine of his cell door being pulled aside. A pair of rough-built men shouldered their way in and grabbed Tag by the elbows.

“Your brother says remember this,” said one, and then they were out the door. Tag was bundled onto an empty liquor cart and covered over with a burlap sack. He kept his head down. The cart took the weight of his rescuers and then a whip snapped and they rumbled off.

Tag dozed off; he awoke halfway upright, the wide hand of one of the roughs gripping him by the neck.

“Your brother said remember this,” said the rough. The hand around Tag’s neck vanished only to return, with more force, on his solar plexus. He fell down gasping as the cart executed a ragged turn and drove back the way it had come.

Tag got to his feet. The cart had dropped him practically on his doorstep, had his tailor’s shack had a doorstep. Wincing when he breathed, he went inside to greet the hills of mending that had risen during his absence.

News from the city tended to come only occasionally to the village, more from lack of bother than anything else. So, the men and women there were unconcerned with Tag the Tale-Teller, as long as he was still Tag the Tailor. Things returned to the way they had been before Tag ever made his belt; he took to capturing flies in jam jars and releasing them outside.

One day in summer, news from the city did reach the village: the lord was dead, and his son-in-law would be assuming the regency after a week of mourning and celebration. A number of men from the village planned to attend the festival; they invited Tag to come along, but he politely declined.

The men returned at the end of the week hungover and exuberant. Tag, they said, had missed the greatest festival of all time: the lord’s daughter, lady Vivianne, had appeared in on the third day in the somber company of her husband, the new lord Joffrey; on the fifth day, she came alone, but silent and tearful; on the sixth day she told her secrets, and all were made aware that lord Joffrey had poisoned lady Vivianne’s father so that he might ascend the swifter. Before the seventh day dawned, the mob had beaten down the doors to the university, where lord Joffrey still maintained his private quarters, and set the dormitories ablaze. On the seventh day, with no sign of Joff the Pretender, lady Vivianne declared she would rebuild the university better than it had been before.

Tag was ready, therefore, for the knock that came at his door the night after the revelers returned. He greeted the visitor with a swung fist. The man was wearing a homespun sack and fell as though it were full of potatoes.

“Gods damn it, Tag!“ Joff whirled to his feet, trying to look regal, but, in his current attire, he just came off silly. “Let me inside!“

“All right,” said Tag, an impulse from childhood overtaking his desire to crow victory in case it would goad Joff into stealing it from him. He stepped aside.

Joff darted in and slammed the door behind him, leaning on it to catch his breath and dab at his new split lip. “She—“ he said, and spit blood like venom “—had some stories of her own to tell.”

“So I heard,” said Tag. He returned to his sewing.

After a while, Joff ventured further into the room. “Have you anything to eat?” he asked.

“Out back,” said Tag. “I saved some of your generous gift.” Joff, forgetting for the moment what gift Tag was speaking of, headed for the back door. He reappeared a moment later.

“We have to go,” he said. A torch cartwheeled through the old glass window behind him. “I may have been seen,” he conceded.

Tag got to his feet and gave Joff another good fist in the mouth. Then he poked his head out the front door while the torch sputtered uselessly on the bare floor. A knot of men were plugging the path toward the center of town.

“They’re out back, too,” said Joff.

“Can we make it to the forest?” asked Tag.

“Not alive,” said Joff. Tag crept to the back door and peered out, careful not to show too much of the whites of his eyes. He had an idea. “On the count of two,” he said to Joff.

“What do you—“

“One, two,” said Tag, then shoved open the back door. Bip, bop, two arrows slammed into the wall. Tag ran, Joff hot on his heels, at an angle away from both groups of toughs. The shadows hid them a bit, but not enough.

“Where are we—“ Joff began, but he was interrupted by Tag coming to a halt and throwing himself down a well. An arrow hissed over Joff’s shoulder and took with it all his reservation. He leapt in after his brother.

“Remember this?” asked Tag when all the dust had settled.

“We can’t stay here,” said Joff.

“Well, obviously,” said Tag.

“No, I mean we can’t stay here. We need to find another place to live. It’s not safe for us here.”

“It’s not safe for you.”

“You’ll recall I made things somewhat difficult for you, as well.”

A pounding of feet shook dust from the sides of the well; it sifted down like silver shavings. Tag chewed his bottom lip.

“Fine,” he said. “You win.”

#

This city smelled of incense and monkey feces, rope and sweat. The streets were long strands, connected only loosely and occasionally. Women carried baskets of fruit on their heads and wore garments so loose, so filmy that their stitches had to be made of spider’s webs. No one had need of a tailor of his skill.

Tag had found an intersection to set up his table, a rough plank on two empty casks. He saw new people every day, which was good for a man in his line of work.

He dealt the cards out on the table and watched with one eye a beggar down the street. The beggar had found a mark, a younger woman with a bowl of tubers in the crook of her arm. The girl was blushing. She beckoned to the beggar and he followed her around a bend and out of sight.

Tag focused on the task at hand, sliding the cards, shiny with grease, around on the tabletop for the fat, sleepy-eyed woman in front of him. The woman stroked her chin and pointed at a card. Tag flipped it over.

“I’m so sorry,” said Tag, pocketing the woman’s coin. The woman laughed, shrugged, said something in her own language and went on her way. Tag shuffled the deck of cards to pass the time.

The beggar appeared from a doorway and ambled over, shaking dust from his golden hair.

“Good business, brother?” asked Tag. Joff shook the pocket of his loose trousers. The fabric jingled.

“I told her I was a ruined king. I have to purchase my noble steed back from the shah. I think that’s what I said. You?” asked Joff.

Tag spotted a likely mark. He spread his cards out on the table, face-up. “I’ll tell you in a bit,” he said. He raised his voice and switched to what he knew of the local tongue. “Hello! hello! Would you like some easy money? Yes, you would! Just watch the seven.” He flipped the cards. “Watch the seven.”

The Callows let me join up because I was good at telling their stories back to them. My mum passed on before I graduated and I needed a place to stay. The Callows took me in when I told them I knew words, like virtue and violent, and could use them right. They kept me after I scared Old Tina under a blanket with a story about sad murderers. Most of the others thought it was funny.

They weren’t my kind of people. I didn’t talk much to them, aside from the stories. They called me Quiet Archie and let me sleep on the outside of the huddle, so half my body stayed warm at night.

Someone decided I should be in Old Tina’s gaggle. Probably Old Tina, to get back at me for making her skin prickle in front of the others. I told her I wasn’t picking on her, and she told me to learn how to lift wallets or I’d be gone.

Apart from me, Old Tina’s gaggle had Durn, Broke, and Layla. Durn and Broke were twins, and had twin open sores on their cheeks from eating out of the wrong charity lines. When he met me, Durn pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek and made pus come out the wound. Broke had good ideas, and talked about them with Old Tina all the time. He was kind of a brain, and he knew it, and I could tell it made him scared, all that blood in his head instead of his fists. I wasn’t a brain — I just told good stories — but I kind of knew how he felt.

Layla was something different. She had two long, brown knots in her hair, hand-tied and spilling curls and tangles. We were kind of like twins, too — she did everything I didn’t, acted out on everything that made me look at my shoes. She talked all the time. We were like two halves of a split genetic code. Everyone knew she’d take over the gaggle after Old Tina got graduated. Old Tina was doing her best not to, probably just for that reason. 

It was enough. For as much as Old Tina growled at me, she did double to Layla. Layla scored more panhandling than any of us because she was prettier and knew how to pout. When Old Tina tried, her face just sucked into a grimace she couldn’t shake loose. Like a puppy, I took to following Layla around on days that Old Tina didn’t give me something else to do.

One time, the summer after I joined up, she and I were strolling along a sidewalk in a so-so suburb. We were visiting the cul-de-sacs and asking for donations, but really keeping an eye out for lazy housewives and unlocked doors. That had been bath day at one of the Callows’ shelters, so Layla and I both smelled like skin and new sweat. We hit nuclear families and got a few packs of cigarettes, because we told them they were like money. So, we smoked through the stands of catalpa and Russian olive and mostly kept off the grass. I was pretty happy, kind of full, a little high, but Layla wanted more to take back to Old Tina. I told her what I remembered of the grasshopper and the ants.

“Just one more,” said Layla. She pointed at a red brick one-storey which was built like a cube in the middle of a yard of fresh asphalt. There wasn’t any grass, but part of the driveway was painted green.

“Looks poor,” I said.

“Relative to you,” said Layla with a grin. She pulled me up the walk. I complained that my feet were tired, because I thought maybe we were at that place where she would give me sympathy. She didn’t. She glared at me and pushed me toward the doorbell. I rang it. It was old tech, audio-only. The track was some laughter, high-pitched and cracking like a little dog’s bark. Layla put her ear to the door as the sound faded. She shook her head; no one was moving inside. I rang the laughter-bell again.

Layla put her hand on the doorknob. “I heard someone say, ‘Come in,’” she said. Turned out the door wasn’t locked. Layla was the first through, so I got to watch her jump about three feet through her skin when a voice said, “Welcome to the pit of terror,” and cackled.

Layla had a fist-shiv cocked and ready before she had stopped cussing, and I had a grin that hurt my teeth. “That wasn’t you,” she said, and a little of the fire of profanity died out of her eyes. 

“Nope,” I said.

“You tell anyone,” she said and raised her fist a bit more.

“Nope,” I said. I stepped into the house. “Welcome to the pit of terror,” said the crackly voice. It was lo-fi, like bounced radio. I looked down at my feet. There was a black box the size of a street puck glued to the door frame, and a speaker mounted on the wall above it. I kicked my foot out in front of the box. “Welcome to the pit of terror.” 

Layla laughed just to prove she could get there first and told me to heel. The rest of the house was quiet. It smelled like a spiced pie, strong enough to burn out my senses. I could tell that once I left the house everything would be dull for a few hours, same as after leaving one of the run down kitchens.

“Quiet, you,” said Layla, and led me into the kitchen. We padded on the balls of our feet, squeaking a little over the linoleum. “It’s a man,” said Layla. She pointed at the counter tops. They were filthy with old dishes and rotten food. We started picking over the stuff, breathing through our mouths, just in case there was anything good, like bone china or wine. I opened the refrigerator; its light was burnt out. It held row upon row of liter bottles of water and an open box of baking soda. “Check this out,” said Layla. She had a small metal basket in her hands. The basket was full of pill bottles, white, and amber, and blue glass. She gave it all a good shake, and it was like castanets. 

Someone screamed. I shook my foot, but didn’t see any more little black boxes. Layla said, “Down, boy,” and then someone screamed again. The sound trickled out into a dozen syllables of pleading, and then there was a meaty thud. I expected an echo, but there wasn’t one. Instead, there was full silence, like inside a lead box. 

Layla pushed me a couple steps forward. There was a crystal sphere hanging in the kitchen window, and I spun it as I went past. Slivers of rainbows, like tears in cloth, blurred color around the room. It reminded me of the hospital where mum died. The nurses kept the windows flung wide, polarized glass letting in a soft glow that was supposed to make her feel like heaven wasn’t so bad, or something.

There was another scream, and Layla shoved me through the archway that led from the kitchen to the rest of the house to see what was going on. She stayed behind the frame, pawing through the basket of meds.

I found myself in a living room. It wasn’t much of a place for the living. There was black velvet on the walls, red bulbs screwed into the bare sockets overhead, fake spiders with big goggle-eyes, a coffee table in the shape of a casket, and an old man folded under a deep purple blanket sitting in a recliner. There were two threads of red juice out of the corners of his mouth, and his head was bowed. His skin was pink and splotchy and looked as if it didn’t quite fit him. He was watching the television.

“Hey,” I said.

“There’s some good shit, here,” said Layla. “Good money.”

The old man breathed in through his nose so long and hard it tipped his head clean back. His mouth fell open and he started to snore. His eyes were closed. The television screamed. 

“Hey,” I said, and took a step forward. The man’s eyes slit open; I could see a thin reflection under each lash, but he was trying hard not to let me. “You all right?” I asked.

“He’s a cat,” said Layla. “Rank vegetable. Come on. We should tell Old Tina.” I could hear that she wanted to be talked out of it, so I just plain ignored her. The old man’s head flopped toward me; his skin sloshed waves like a deflated balloon. 

“You’re new,” he said. 

“Brand new,” said Layla, coming out from behind the archway. Her hands were empty, but her pockets were full. “What are you doing all dead like that?”

“I’m Shooter,” said the old man. “Do you have my pills? I need my pills.”

I looked at Layla. She shrugged at me. “Just a sec,” I said to Shooter. I ducked back into the kitchen. 

“What are you doing?” asked Layla. “Tell him he’s out. He won’t know. He’ll order more for us to lift.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “My mum was in the hospital. You say you’re out, they let you be out until your chart says it’s okay to have another refill. Got to give him some of it.”

“None of this,” said Layla, patting the pills. “I know some about medicine, too. This will buy long showers for all the Callows. Do something for Durn and Broke, maybe.”

“Maybe it’s just for his skin,” I said. I looked in the medicine basket. Layla had left a couple of worthless bottles of herbal supplements, and a blister pack of B-complexes. “Should have taken these,” I said, giving her the B-pills. I tapped out a handful of Echinacea and something that smelled like raw liver and held them in my fist. “All right, Shooter,” I said, stepping into the living room. I held out the pills. The old man stared at them, arranged in a dense constellation on the puffed-out palm of his hand.

“Something’s missing,” he said. Layla came up behind me with a glass of water, which she gave to Shooter. He took the pills one by one, placing them into the pouch of his lip as if they were dips from a tobacco tin, and swallowing them back with sips from the glass. Layla glared at me, and I looked away from her. Shooter’s skin was creeping me out, so my eyes settled on the only other movement in the room: the television. The images were black-and-white; there was blood, but it was a metal gray and made me think of bad nano. 

Shooter swallowed his last pill and smacked his lips. “I stopped paying,” he said. “Last girl stole from me. Damn kids.” I nodded, absently, and watched a young woman tear her flimsy nightgown. “What are you doing here?” Shooter asked. 

“Final visit,” said Layla. She always could lie off the top of her head. “Need anything?”

“How do I look?” asked Shooter.

“I’d do you,” said Layla. Shooter laughed, and he was much more comfortable with the sound than he was with his skin. It rumbled and echoed and didn’t fit with the television at all.

“What are you watching?” I asked him. 

“This. You’ve never seen this?” said Shooter. “God, sometimes I’m disappointed,” he continued after a pause for breath. “Not even horror has survived your generation.”

“Give me a good reality,” said Layla. “That’s life. Not this shit.”

“I like it,” I said. That got another chuckle from Shooter and a snort from Layla.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s time for us to leave.”

I tore myself away from the screen and gave Shooter a small wave.

He raised a tired hand to wave back. “You live well when you’re scared,” he said, almost like an apology. It bothered me, the way he said it, so I had my hands in my pockets, thinking, all the way out to the street. Layla hit me on the shoulder. She rattled like a bone girl with every step, because of the meds. 

“We’re coming back,” she said. 

“You got all the good stuff,” I said.

“He’s all by himself,” she said, and that was the end of the argument. If I fought her on it, Old Tina would hear, and accuse me of holding back on the good of the gaggle. 

When we got back to the Callow hideout, we told Old Tina about the whole score. She listened hard — I tried to tell the story right, but Layla kept interrupting me, rushing me to the good parts quicker. I gave up and let her spill. She brought out the pills as a grand finale, and Old Tina looked them over good.

“Wide open?” asked Old Tina.

“As can be,” said Layla. 

Old Tina tapped open one of the bottles and tipped its contents into her palm. She swirled them around with one finger while she turned something over in her mind. “Give it to the twins. They can sell this stuff in no time. But we’re hitting the park tonight.”

“Bad idea,” said Layla. “Cold tonight. Be like Alaska, population and temp.”

“But a greater potential,” said Old Tina. “You want to stick with dives and dead folks, you have to take me out of the gaggle.” She leaned toward Layla and I saw something flash in both their eyes. “I aim to take Callows way past your suburbs, little girl. I dream big.”

“I don’t need to,” said Layla.

The sun went down about then, and the hideout felt suddenly smaller. I excused myself, more polite than I had to, and went off to find Durn and Broke to tell them about our haul. I was getting well into it when a kid from another gaggle came running through, crowing, “Fight! Fight!”

It was a rite of dominance. Layla and Old Tina were in crouches in the middle of an expanding, contracting ring of other Callows. I couldn’t see much of the fight itself, because the audience kept pushing me out to the fringe. They did the same to Durn and Broke. Apparently, gaggle members weren’t supposed to see, in case they helped out in the fight. Weapons came out — I could hear metal scraping like a claw on a tooth — but most of the screams that followed were deep breaths from the gut. I didn’t really want to see what was going on, except that I wouldn’t be able to tell the story right to anyone who might ask.

It ended in frustration, a pair of arms thrown up in resignation, and the grumbles of a crowd denied its blood. Old Tina had lost by the rules, given up on her own terms. She pushed through the crowd and knocked me in the shoulder on her way out, not like a friend, but like clearing the last obstacle. I watched her go.

Layla came up behind me. “Saw it coming,” she said.

“I didn’t,” I said.

“Big head, small world,” said Layla. “Get the twins. We’re going back to Shooter’s.”

The twins had disappeared before the fight was over, more concerned with selling the meds than in catching on to the politics, so Layla and I waited for them to come back. Durn came in first, and said he had punched some guy in the nuts and sold him a handful of the stuff as pain relievers. Layla scolded him for undervaluing the stuff, and he popped a zit at her and said something about Old Tina, which Layla ignored. Broke wandered in a few minutes later with both pockets full of money. “Doubled the volume,” he said to me with a grin as Layla counted the bank notes. “One pocket of pills, two pockets of bills.”

Layla slipped her hands down her pants and stowed the money in a secret pocket. Durn and Broke didn’t watch her, but I did, and I got a show and a scowl. When she pulled up her jeans again, I could see the rectangular outline of the money through the fabric, and so could everyone else, but they’d have to cut her to get at it. 

It was two in the morning before we got underway to Shooter’s house. There was dew on the streets, turning the asphalt to ink. Broke and Layla walked in the front, strategizing. Durn and I followed behind, taking turns at complaining about our empty stomachs. When we were a block away from Shooter’s, Layla turned to us and said, “Callows eat when they eat.” It was one of Old Tina’s lines. 

Broke looked at the house and shrugged big. “Whatever,” he said. “Doesn’t look bad. Lights are on. It’s one on four, so let’s go.”

“Dig in,” said Layla. She led the way, with Durn at her heels. Broke hung back with me.

“You ought to be up there,” he said.

“They’ve got it,” I replied. 

Durn was best at picking locks, so he crouched in front of the door and got to work as Broke and I ambled up. Layla crouched near Durn, getting in his light, and hissing orders. First one deadbolt then another were shot back into their shells. The knob turned easily, and Layla got the chain with a pair of handheld wire cutters. 

“Someone must have come by,” I said, quietly tapping on one half of the dangling chain.

“Or he got up,” said Layla. She disappeared behind the door; Durn and Broke jumped out of their skins as the electronic voice said, “Welcome to the pit of terror.” I wondered why the hell we had been keeping quiet if we were just going to walk right on in. Broke recovered first and peered down at the black box, as I had done, while Durn started giggling and wagging his foot through the infrared beam. Layla caught him in the ear and shushed him. We all followed her inside. 

The lights in the kitchen were on, and they made everything else that much blacker. We couldn’t see more than a foot into the living room

“What was wrong with this guy?” asked Durn.

“Looked like he was shrinking,” I said. “Except his skin stayed the same size.”

Layla led the way into the kitchen. We started opening cabinets, searching for anything of value. I found plastic plates and cups, a set of camp silverware, and a bottle of gin with less than a shot glass’ worth in the bottom. Durn and Broke found soap and were fighting over bits of it to rub into their sores. Layla got frustrated fast and stopped talking in whispers. 

“Quiet Archie,” she said. “Go check out the living room.” I didn’t have a point from which to argue, so I tossed her the gin and mouse-stepped through the archway. The living room was populated with dull the black shapes of furniture and wisps of wind from some unseen vent. “Go faster, scaredy-man,” said Layla. “Even he could call the cops.”

I fumbled my hand along the wall and found the familiar plastic of a light switch. I gave it a click. Fluorescent tubes that hadn’t seen life in a while stuttered bright. “Shit,” said a voice. I shaded my eyes while they adjusted and looked toward the voice. 

Shooter was sitting in his chair with a police-grade pistol cocked in his right hand. He looked as if he had been half-boiled in vinegar. His skin was puffy and bruised in some places, drum-head tight and thin in others. Huge blisters had formed on his face and arms, but they were bloodless. It looked as if bubbles of air had been blown between his dermal layers. “What are you doing here?” he asked. The gun was a little shaky.

“Take it easy, man,” I said. I tried to think of something to tell him to get him to lower the gun, but all my stories took off right about then. The only thing I could remember was the smell of the room in which my mother had died, and how it seemed to make the bones in all my fingers melt.

With a muttered, “You find anything?” Layla peeked around the archway. I glanced at her just in time to watch her scream. Even though I could see it coming, the rest of my bones went the way of my fingers and I just about fell into the television set. “What the hell is that?” cried Layla.

Shooter’s face went all loose, like a sheet in the wind. He was trying to make some expression, but I couldn’t tell what it was. My heart was chattering like a bird’s because of the gun, no matter the strength or disposition of its owner. “Hey, Layla,” I said. 

Durn and Broke had come to check out the commotion. Durn shrieked like a girl, worse than Layla had, but Broke just stood there with wide eyes, methodically stroking one of the sores on his cheek. All four of us might as well have been stuck to the floor. Layla’s face was contorting through several recognizable expressions, in at least as much flux as Shooter’s. I leaned back against the television set, because my legs were shaking, and felt as if they would only be shaking harder in the near future. 

Shooter’s eyes went back and forth across us and he lowered the gun. He put both his hands against the arms of the chair and started to lever himself up. The skin on his wrists folded and stretched like the scruff of a shar-pei. He winced and I heard a quiet, wet tearing. A fold of gray flesh had sloughed off his arm as the bones and muscles beneath twisted. I felt all the bile in my stomach and hoped it would stay there. Shooter dropped himself back into his chair and, after a moment, reclaimed the gun. 

“Get out of my house,” he said. Durn had calmed down a bit, so he sneered at Shooter, flipped him off, and stomped back into the kitchen. Broke followed him a moment later. Layla’s mouth was open in some combination of horror and fascination, so I nudged her with one of my jittery legs. She closed her mouth. Then, glancing once at me as if for confirmation, she pinched her nose . She started to sneeze, a big fake windup to a massive explosion. She blew saliva all over the room, and then she laughed. 

I was the last one out of the room. “Want the light off?” I asked Shooter.

“Leave it on,” he said.

I should have turned around to leave, but I couldn’t break off my stare. I just stepped backward, leaving Shooter alone with his fake cobwebs, his purple-and-orange lampshades, his gun, and something of his that grew like a chuckle.

“Welcome to the pit of terror,” the electronic voice cackled four times as we left.

“We come back after he’s dead,” Layla said, and led us off to dive in the dumpsters. 

Later that morning, I was telling a bedtime story to my gaggles and whoever else was nearby. The story went like this: “We were two steps in when our breathing stopped. It was too quiet to breathe in there, like sneezing in a line-up. I went first and slipped on something wet. The darkness stank of dog shit and landfills, and now my shoe stank, too. I was just gonna whisper to Layla that the coast was clear, if she watched her step, when something touched me on the neck. Not like a bug or a piece of hair, but cold like the tip of a screwdriver. The lower half of me jumped — you know, like when your muscles all spaz that once before you go to sleep. Someone coughed, a sick cough, full of phlegm or vomit, and the cold against my neck branched and multiplied. Five points rested across my arteries, like five fingers. 

“That’s when Layla hit the lights. Hold your stomachs. We were standing in the kitchen, and it looked worse than Bromide’s downtown. There was this soup on the floor, like tomato mixed with split-pea. Looking at it was like looking at a wrong tag, you know, something that tells you you’re out of Callow territory.

“Then I saw what was touching me, and I knew I wouldn’t ever feel like I was home again. It was man, sized and shaped, but so dead there should have been flies. It had eyes like greasy soup hanging down at its cheeks on these thin optic nerves like harp strings. Its mouth was hanging open, with sugar-black teeth. It wasn’t breathing, but something that smelled awful drifted up out of its throat, and I gagged. 

“I didn’t scream, but I did have to gag down a cup or so of bile. I took a step back and the thing’s fingers slid right off my skin, as if they were made of slick plastic. It took a step forward, and I swear to holy sustenance it moaned. I said something to Layla, but it didn’t matter because Layla was already out of there. All of them were. I didn’t waste my breath in breathing more of that shit; I took off after them. We ran until we couldn’t smell no more, and that was only after I kicked my shoes off.”

I beamed at my audience, only a few of which bothered to look down at my feet to see that, yes, I was still wearing my ratty old shoes. A few of the youngers made faces at me to prove how little they believed. “Tell us another,” said a girl from another gaggle, so I told the one about the toad and heaven.

Afterward, I looked around for Layla and the twins. I was hungry. I found Durn first, but he wasn’t interested in going out. He was trying to make time with two girls. He spit blood at me to scare me off and grinned with red teeth.

I found Broke at the well. He was getting a drink of water. After he was done, he dropped a tablet of something in after the bucket. He turned around and saw me. “Iodine,” he said.

“You seen Layla?” I asked. 

“You’re all right,” said Broke. “Layla thinks so, too. But you’re out of the gaggle. She asked me to tell you.” He looked as if he didn’t mind the duty.

“Because of the story,” I said. 

“It wasn’t a very good story,” said Broke. 

“No, not really,” I said. “It worked, though.” 

“You made fun of Durn and me and Layla, and none of us can figure out why. I don’t care much, and Durn doesn’t barely know it, but Layla took it bad, man. She stood up for you against Old Tina, when you didn’t know it, and you turned her into a ‘fraidy-cat in front of other Callows.”

“That’s not what it did,” I said. “What it did was scare people.”

“Why would you want to do that?” asked Broke. “Scared kids don’t get food, and Callows don’t get scared.”

“He pointed the gun at me,” I said. “I got scared.”

“You’re out of the gaggle,” Broke repeated. He turned away, adding, “You could have stood up for her.”

Feeling a bit like the world was too large to fit my body, I ambled around the hideout for a while, figuring I’d run into Layla sooner or later. Everyone who met my eyes had one of two reactions: either they grinned at me, a little like Durn had, or they blinked like they were high on junk they couldn’t afford and then passed me as if I were invisible.

I found Layla outside. She was kicking at a piece of rusted metal. “There’s a monster called tetanus,” I said.

“What do you want?” she asked dully. 

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just to talk.”

“Don’t tell me no stories,” she said.

“I didn’t mean nothing bad,” I said. 

She met my eyes and stamped hard on the metal, sending a strained tone to both our ears. “You think about the wrong things,” she said. “You think about what words mean, ’stead of what words do, and you get distracted. You talk to old men ’stead of lifting their china. You scare the wrong people. You didn’t grow up Callow, and you can’t stay Callow.” She rushed by me with one hand to her cheek. Her fingers were spread wide, and I saw a red sore underneath, like those on the twins. She needed medicine, but none of them knew how to ask for it. She slammed the door to the hideout just behind her and I heard something scrape up against it. I gave it a knock or two; it was blocked up tight. There were other doors, but I didn’t feel like trying them. I was out of the Callows. I cared about as much as I do at the ends of stories, which is to say, not hardly.

Nervousness, resignation, and something righteous all had settled in my stomach like rubble, but they weren’t enough to fill me up. My stomach growled at me every time I took a step. I headed for the nearest kitchen, but it was locked up, and there were young Callows outside that already knew to give me dirty looks. I tried a couple other kitchens, but they were all locked, too, and without Durn my chances of breaking and entering were dead as lies. 

There was one door I knew wouldn’t be locked. The sky was lightening toward gray when I got to Shooter’s house. I knocked and pushed the door open a crack. I triggered, “Welcome to the pit of terror” a couple of times. I called out, “Mister Shooter, it’s me.” 

“Come to finish the job,” came a voice from the living room. 

“That’s right,” I said, and then felt a little stupid because it might have been the television speaking. 

I crept into the kitchen. It was cold; the linoleum seemed to be pumping ice right through the thin soles of my shoes. “Thanks for not shooting me,” I said, sending the words out as a sort of vanguard to test the resistance.

“No problem,” said Shooter. A dim light from the living room switched on silently. I followed it to its origin, a small lamp on an end table next to Shooter’s chair. The man himself was wrapped up in a blanket, only his eyes visible.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“You kids took my pills,” he said. 

“Yeah,” I said. 

Shooter coughed and twisted his face away from me. I heard a wet tearing sound, like damp paper being stripped into segments for papier-mâché. “I needed those pills,” he said when it was over. 

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry for the others. I’m not with them anymore.”

The blanket fell away from his face as he turned to stare at me. I had gagged earlier that night when I saw him; this time my whole body shivered. My eyes filmed over for just a second, to blur out the mess, and then they cleared again. Shooter’s cheeks were missing — not empty air, but the top layers of skin were gone and I could see the ruby-fading-to-pink of fresh wounds. A limp sheet of gray flesh curved from his forehead, nearly covering his eye. He raised a hand to brush it away and I saw brown, gray, and green all mottled on his fingers and wrist. There was a gleam of white bone as he flexed his knuckles.

He stared at me for a long moment, holding the hank of skin out of the way. Then he grinned, a wide sharky grin, and said, “You don’t run.”

“Not much,” I said. “I walk, mostly.”

“That’s the trouble with you kids, ones I’ve met. Wouldn’t know to get out of the way of a speeding train, were you on the tracks.”

“Last longer than you would,” I said. Shooter chuckled to himself, but didn’t do anything more. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked. 

“Disgust wearing off?” asked Shooter. I shrugged. “It’s a good story.” His consonants were beginning to slur. “Let’s see if I can’t get you back on track. It’ll be my good deed for the day. You know the factory out past the bridge?”

“Some gang lives there.”

“Not yours?” asked Shooter. “Well, it used to be where I worked. It was a steel plant. We poured girders for building skyscrapers with. Main room’s so big it has it’s own weather, something like twenty storeys high, a few acres on the ground. I worked on the highest catwalks, maintaining the gears on the pots that poured the molten steel into the channels. Shooter with his grease gun. I worked there twenty years, you know. Had blisters on my calluses, and calluses damn near everywhere.

“Statistics is what got me. You gotta watch out for those. Time I started, there were twelve of us grease monkeys. By the time my story takes place, eleven of them had taken out liability claims, and seven of those were on disability thanks to accidents. I was the last man standing, kinda. But statistics caught up with me. The day it happened, I was on storey seventeen, working on a crankshaft. I was standing in the wrong place, too near the channel, and the automated bucket started pouring while I was standing right in front of it. I got out of the way of the steel, but the bucket tipped me over. I fell, god, I don’t know how many storeys. I ended up on my back, staring up into these glimmering shadows, all red from the light of the steel. I had the wind right out of me.” Shooter laughed and shook his head; the way the skin of his face moved was obscene, like unwanted nudity. “Then I did the dumbest thing in my life. I rolled over to catch my breath. Guess where I was. Yeah, right next to one of the channels. I rolled myself over into liquid steel. Didn’t get too deep, luckily. Had a buddy, a new guy — I think he’s still working for the company — came and helped me out.

“Most of what I remember after that comes in the hospital. Seventy-percent of my skin was cooked right off, and the rest of it wasn’t healing right, so they needed to do a full-body skin graft. Problem is, skin’s just an organ like everything else, and my body rejected the transplant. That’s what the pills were for, to fool my body into accepting the skin.”

“Where’d you get it all?”

Shooter leaned forward and grinned at me. “We waited in alleys for children like you.” I closed my eyes and, after a moment, I heard him sit back in his chair. “Moral of the story is don’t work in steel, kid.”

“My name’s Quiet Archie,” I said. 

“Good name for you.” I opened my eyes just as Shooter closed his. “What scares you, Quiet Archie?”

I thought about that for a while. While I did, Shooter breathed evenly. “I’m scared that if I don’t get something to eat, my stomach will digest itself,” I said.

Shooter smiled behind his mask of skin. “Maybe you’re scared you might have to hurt someone to get your belly full.”

“Sure, okay,” I said.

“There’s bread in the kitchen,” he said. 

I went to get a piece. I ate it out of sight of Shooter, and then returned to his side. He was asleep. A brush of gray light was touching the windows, so I turned the lamp off and made my way to a corner over a heating vent. I curled up and went to sleep smelling the bread on my fingers.

I woke up to the sound of screaming. Shooter had the television on again. His show was in black-and-white, and was zoomed up close on a young girl’s eyes. While I was out, he had switched on several chains of orange and black fiber-optic lights; they webbed across one wall like the home of a giant spider. I heard wind outside pressing against the walls and making them creak.

“Happy Halloween,” said Shooter. 

“What’s that?” I asked.

“When I was a kid, last day of October was Halloween. You dress up scary, you make girls fall in love with your courage, you steal candy from children, you try to scare each other to death.”

“I’d get you there,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Shooter. He paused his movie, leaving the poor girl frozen in front of a monster with a long face.

“I can get you more pills,” I said.

“It’s too late,” said Shooter. He grinned at me again. “I’m in the worst pain I’ve ever been in my life, and I just can’t help but grin. I got up and looked at myself in the mirror while you were asleep. I haven’t been able to stand up that long for a year, at least.”

“Let me get you some more pills,” I said.

Shooter shook his head and looked away, toward the window, to sever any of those conversation threads. “It’s getting dark,” he said. “Tell you what—” he faced me again “—there’s a camera in my bedroom. Why don’t you go get it.”

“Okay,” I said. 

He pointed toward one of the doors exiting the living room. I headed toward it. “I keep a woman locked in a box under my bed,” he added. I knew he was lying, but, after finding the camera sitting charged in cradle on an old wooden dresser, I kicked up the filthy blankets and took a quick peek.

“What am I doing with this?” I asked as I handed the camera to him. 

“Hang on to it,” he said. “It’s better than words.” He levered himself up out of the chair. As he stood as straight as he could manage, I heard a wet plop. Part of his scalp had fallen to the floor. “Leave it,” he said. Then, “I hope not everyone out there is as docile as you.”

He led me through the kitchen, triggered the “pit of terror”, and stood for a moment on his front walk, breathing as deeply as he could. He was dressed in filthy, stained pajamas. He tried to unbutton the shirt, but his fingers slipped and bunched over the task. He grunted deeply and tore the fabric, exposing a back that looked like a skinned cat. “Let’s go,” he said. “Turn the flash on, and get ready.”

I followed him at about twenty paces. He shambled through the gloom between streetlights with a limp and a few sentences of muttered pain. At the end of the block, I saw a pair of young girls playing with chalk on the concrete. They were up past their bedtime, and I could hear them giggling as if they knew it. Shooter raised his arms so his elbows were locked out straight, his hands dangling from his wrists. As he approached the girls, I crossed the street to get a better look. Shooter went dark in the shadow and then emerged, moaning terribly into halogen light. The girls looked up as one, and I flashed the expressions on their faces. Shooter took another step closer, and I flashed them again. A small puddle had formed beneath the girls, and one of them dropped everything she had to cry. The other stood up and ran. She pounded on a door as Shooter lowered himself behind a bush. The door opened and the girl slipped inside. I heard someone say, “Who are you—” before the door closed.

I crossed the street to rejoin Shooter, who was laughing so hard he had pissed his pants. They clung to his malformed legs. He was trying to be quiet, but he wasn’t very good at it. “Did you see them?” he gasped. I said that I had. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do some more.” I agreed.

We haunted the neighborhood for a couple of hours, spreading ourselves out, never getting caught by the adults. I had nearly filled the card when we arrived back at Shooter’s house. He was having to hang on to me, and I was having to breathe through my mouth because he stank so bad. 

“Here,” he wheezed. “Set me down here.” I was more than glad to. We collapsed on his front walk, and he kept laughing so I joined in. “Show me the pictures,” he said. I set the camera to review and handed it to him. His face was illuminated, made more hideous by the angled light from the display. He giggled like a little boy, muttering things like, “Oh, her expression is priceless,” and, “Did you see him run.” He kept laughing and laughing, and then I noticed that blood was trickling down from his eyes. He died with his mouth open, with his hands loose around the camera.

I left him outside to frighten the police. I pawed through his movie collection before I left, grabbing a few things to sell on the streets, and took what was left of the bread. I didn’t take the camera because, despite what Shooter said, I thought that words were better.

I walked into the city, stopping on street corners to sell my wares bit by bit. Folks gave me weird looks when I told them what I had, but some curiosity made them buy, and I managed to get rid of all I had brought. I was just considering going back for some more when I saw someone else making a sale across the street. It was Old Tina. She had her skirt hiked up and her eyes were all dark with bloody makeup. I took a look around me and realized my feet had wandered back into Callow territory. Neither Old Tina nor I were Callows, now, but we were young enough to be a threat.

A pair of guys about Old Tina’s age approached her and made low gestures I could barely see. I started across the street. I waved once, but Old Tina didn’t see me. She took the two guys by the hands and led them into a dark alley. I called out and got no response.

I used a corner to slip into the alley, outlining myself as little as possible against the street lights. I had picked up a few things from the Callows. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out Old Tina up against the wall, bracing herself with her hands, as the guys peered down between her legs. 

“Hey,” I said. “You paying?”

“Yeah,” grunted one of the guys. “Wait in line.” There were two of them, so I didn’t try to pick anything. They shoved their money into Old Tina’s mouth. I stood by a dumpster and watched until they were finished with her. I didn’t think she had recognized me, but the first thing out of her mouth after the money was, “Quiet Archie. What are you doing here?”

“I’m out, too,” I said. 

As she counted her money, I pulled out what I had made. “Put together, we’ve got enough for a room somewhere.” I couldn’t see her very well, but her outline was all hunched like Shooter, and her details were silver from reflected light. It looked as if her eyes were cast down. I wanted to bring them back up but kindness wouldn’t cut it. “Can I tell you a story?” I asked. She sighed and I went on ahead. I told her a story about a virgin murderer who, out of envy, slaughters those children who have sex. I tried not to hold anything back, to work the rent flesh of Shooter into the words. 

Maybe I should have kept the pictures. 

I couldn’t scare her, this time. I didn’t tell it right. She punched me, as if something were all my fault, said, “There’s no place for the self-aware,” and sobbed. I touched her face to calm her down and felt wet skin. She hissed through her teeth. She turned away, and I could see the same open sore on her cheek as Durn and Broke had. I brought my face into the same light, looking at her as closely as I dared.

“I need some medicine,” she said. 

We each pulled our faces back into shadow, not like a race but like a divorce. “You and me both,” I replied.