Some of you play Nobilis.

I put the first part of Society of Flowers into PDF form. It is available for free from the Eos Press website and for $5 from DriveThruRPG. It is called Unlikely Flowerings.

Visitors to Giant Monster Country often express an interest in sampling the delightful native cuisine. Here are some things you need to know.

First, it is not possible for the natives of Giant Monster Country to decide in advance which giant monster will attack. Thus it is important that the visitor understand that no matter how reasonable their requests the people of Giant Monster Country can only prepare the monster that is available. Most monsters are peanut-free but many are glutinous. One can expect several kosher monsters to attack in any given month, but a giant monster suitable for vegetarian consumption (e.g. a vampiric plant, radioactive plant, or evil plant) attacks only three or four times a year. The diet of Giant Monster Country is generally unsuitable for vegans unless they are visiting during Giant Robot Month.(1)

Whichever region of Giant Monster Country you visit will be attacked by a new monster each week. Currently the giant monster attacks on a Tuesday but the attacks are occasionally shifted to a different day or pre-empted for a message from a giant politician.

Once the monster begins its attack you should immediately rush to the street and begin pointing and exclaiming. As the people of Giant Monster Country say, “A monster that no one exclaims over can’t taste sweet.” The best exclamation is the monster’s name, which is generally written inconspicuously on its otherwise smooth crotch. If you wish to point and exclaim a monster’s name but are unable to read kaijukanji do not feel embarrassed about asking a native for help!

It takes roughly 25-50 minutes from the monster’s initial appearance for a team of plucky heroes to defeat the monster. Even if you are very hungry you should respect the customs of Giant Monster Country and wait until after the monster is defeated before taking your first bite. Also please do not bother the hotel chef about preparation details during the rampage or they may irritably claim that monsters do not exist and laugh you off as a drunk.

Do not expect to eat the giant monster in the American style, tearing off and frying or barbecuing large chunks. Every monster must be carefully portioned out and prepared so that it will last the entire region one week. This is the origin of the “eccentric” cuisine of Giant Monster Country; if you have ever wondered why so many recipes focus on unblinking eyeball soup or giant small intestines, now you know! They are driven by this inexorable economy.

It is proper to eat a slice of pickled ginger between each course of monster.

Sometimes a monster will be particularly tasty or, conversely, particularly high-yield.(2) In these cases you would think that the people of Giant Monster Country would preserve the excess monster against future famine.(3) This is not so. Monster meat must be used up within the week, if necessary by feeding it to pets or shipping it to starving children in China or India.(4)

Here is the reason.

Monsters are extremely durable. If you store or freeze part of a monster there is a very good chance that it will reconstitute and attack Giant Monster Country again. Everyone will say, “Look! This is what your arrogance has unleashed!” They will shout at you and call you a mad person. You will feel humiliated and may be driven out with pitchforks and torches. Nobody wanted to eat the same monster two weeks in a row!

The best times to visit Giant Monster Country are probably Sweeps Week (when the Iron Chefs are most likely to confront the giant monsters directly) and the summer. In the summer no new monsters attack Giant Monster Country; instead, various monsters that were particularly popular return for an encore attack. The annual return of everyone’s favorite monster, Crazy Love Fish, is the centerpiece of the quixotic but unforgettable Crazy Love Fish Festival; people say that if a bit of exploded Crazy Love Fish falls on you and your boyfriend or girlfriend that you will stay together forever.

Footnotes

(1) Giant Robots do not suffer, but only wish to kill.
(2) For instance, an environmentally-conscious team of heroes, confronting a Lernean hydra, will often take care to generate as many heads as possible before they kill it. This maximizes the caloric return on the energy they spend.
(3) Famine . . . from the FUTURE!
(4) Thus obviating their pedagogical purpose and rendering them full of lassitude.

First, evil frogs talk. Then they kill.

“So,” says the evil frog.

It kicks its legs.

It’s sitting next to Marilyn on a branch overlooking the swamp. She looks a little green, but not so green as the evil frog.

“So,” she says.

The evil frog inflates the bladders by his head, as if an idea were coming to him, then lets them deflate and shakes his head.

“It’s not your fault,” Marilyn says. “Communities project their sins onto evil frogs, producing your blood thirst and various mutations.”

“That is good of you to say,” he concedes, “but I must make my own meaning.”

He emits a noise, burrup, which for all we know is his meaning; nothing further is said, for in the next moment, he is turning, webbed fingers opening around his palm, and the sigil of Carcaon (which was his name and his aspect) is burning like a coal therein.

They dance the great circle. Her wrist strikes his aside. Then there is only red and green.

She lands, lightly, in the swamp.

She leaves footprints, behind her, as she goes.

Later she hangs out in a hot spring with another frog.

“I loved once,” Marilyn says. “I loved so brightly. But the people of the town, they would not have me. They said, ‘frog hunters are green.’”

“It isn’t easy,” the frog admits.

This one is poisonous. Vapors waft off of it. If they talk too long she will die and won’t even get to fight it first. But it has a very approachable air that makes her want to talk longer than frog hunters usually talk with evil frogs.

“Did you know that we absorb it?” she says. “The green?”

“I did not.”

“We kill the frogs and take in their color, to remedy the fallen condition of humanity.”

“So in a way,” the frog says, “we are the same.”

“Always,” Marilyn says passionately. “I would so be insulting you if I did not feel empathy as I killed.”

The frog has no response to that.

It wants to complain or criticize—to observe that it is more concerned with killing than propriety—except that it has never particularly tried to feel as its victims must.

So he just sits, stewing in his poisonous vapors, and thinks, and after a while says, “I too have been a’ courting.”

“Oh?”

“I thought that I would marry a lovely woman,” he says. “And poison her in the process of our love. But then a dove swept me up and carried me off to a distant land.”

It is wearing a dove feather in its baldness.

“That must have been a miracle,” Marilyn says. “Some kind of miracle bird.”

“Or a bird enemy of marriage.”

Marilyn nods. She drags herself out of the water. She sways. She is an ugly color, yellow brown.

“Time to kill?” the frog says politely.

Marilyn’s vision blurs.

“No,” she says. “It’s already done.”

She staggers away, two steps, three, then five.

The frog nods wisely.

“My poison mixes with the steam,” he says. “That’s why it’s hard to see.”

“Not me,” she says.

And she dunks her face once, twice, and three times in the swamp, before taking a few more steps away and vomiting noisily against a startled thrush until she looks a bit more green.

“You’ve boiled,” she says, at last.

Days pass.

“I wish I weren’t green,” she says.

She’s hunting for a third frog. She’s heard it’s drawn to sorrow. And indeed, no sooner has she spoken the words than it eddies up, like ichor on the marsh.

It is transparent, practically invisible. Its hand clasps over her mouth, dripping with slime, and it tries to draw her down.

She bites down, sucking in a mouthful of horrid frog, and gives a muffled scream.

It pulls.

She fumbles at her belt. She pulls out a frog hunter micro-dynamite. She slams it into the side of the frog and twists and pulls and breaks free as it bangs.

They separate.

She gasps and shudders. It pulls back and wraps around a tree, sucking out the life force of the tree to heal its wound.

“Evil frogs talk,” Marilyn says, “then they fight.”

It hisses.

“There are rules,” Marilyn says.

Finally, it sighs.

“I have nothing to say to you, human,” it says. “I am frog. You are frog hunter. There is no point in conversation.”

“We have to make connections with the things we kill,” Marilyn says.

“That is your scruple.”

It is alien. She has never fought an evil frog so alien and cold.

“Why are you like this?” she protests.

It is silent. Ripples pass through it, this way, that way. Finally, as if the words are torn from it, it says, “I was the first. I was the frog of finding words. I was the frog of assumption of mastery of death. I sucked death into my air bladders. I rattled his bones. I spat him out and took power from him. Then he slunk away to live at the outskirts of the world. But I was green.”

She looks at him.

“It isn’t ea—” she starts.

“Shut up!” it howls.

So she falls silent.

Behind it the sky is full of the aurora; and it makes red and blue light to flicker in its skin.

“I was cursed with green,” it says. “It was my testing. And I could not bear it. And I said, ‘Lord, take this burden from me.’ And it was granted to me, my wish.”

“Colorless,” she says.

“It is better!” it says. “Better, this. I need no color. I live alone. I kill humans that come into my realm. Women, men, frog hunters, even the little girls and little boys and their hungry soul-devouring swords. Colorless I am supreme. But you trouble me with your words and make them itch inside my head.”

She looks down, briefly.

“I didn’t mean—” she says.

It hisses. It gives her no time to finish. It leaps into the air, spreading out like some great smothering tarp, and she is falling back and hoisting a twisted branch as if it were a spear.

Its ichor covers her as she emerges from the swamp. She is dripping with it.

Underneath it her face is the color of a peach, and the ichor trail behind her is wet and green.

It’s like it’s sucked the sin from her, she thinks, but something unaccountable’s been lost.

To bumblebee is to become a bumblebee; and the price of that becoming is your death.

The news is always full of stories.

Bumblebees are squished;
Licked up;
Yakked out;
and, lastly, wiped.

The Lady Devereaux—as all the ladies Devereaux had before—expresses bombastic disdain.

“We need them, yes,” she says.

One arm waves, broadly. A length of lace cuts the air.

“As we need all those sorts. The grouting ants, the toilet skinks, and the far-too-serious badgers of City Hall. But it is . . . hymenopteraic,” she says. “Segmenting your eyes; growing the antennae; carrying about the slops of flower sex—it is not done.”

“Hymenopteral,” says Emeline, behind her too-large glasses.

Grammar constrains the Lady Devereaux. She feels it binding her as her corset might—not literally, but still a certain coarse constraint.

“The adjective is hymenopteral,” Emeline concludes.

The Lady Devereaux sighs. She sinks down into her chair. She gestures Emeline to her lap, and gently she brushes Emeline’s hair.

“So it is,” she says.

“Mum Grayden,” Emeline says—here referring to Heloise Grayden, across the road—”is proud of Robert; so she says.”

There is a peculiar misery to Emeline’s expression now. Robert had been a funny child, in his too-tight suits and his niceties, but he was more to her than her brother Adric or the Skevinses down the road. And you can follow the story of a bumblebee in the papers—the government was always very proper in keeping towns up-to-date on the accomplishments of their bees—but you cannot play with a bumblebee. You cannot drink hot cocoa with a bumblebee, if you do not want it to drown or become sick of chocolate poisoning or burn up after coming too close to the chocolate and forgetting how to fly. And you certainly cannot play Scrabble, gin, or DS Pokemon while doing so. Even a fantasy tea party is somewhat stifled when it is only yourself and a bee; and Robert had flown on not long after his transformation in any case.

“Mum Grayden,” says the Lady Devereaux, “is putting her best face on.”

There were five of them living in Emeline’s house, which is to say, the Lady Devereaux; her daughter Morgaine; her son-in-law Edward, of whom nothing further shall be said; and her grandchildren Emeline and Adric.

In the mornings Emeline would eat breakfast, always a toasted bagel with a cream cheese spread, a glass of orange juice, and occasionally an egg. She would shower and change from her pajamas into clothing suitable for school; then she would catch the bus. Later, after receiving an education, she would return home and while away her evenings on study, family time, and play; and on no occasion did she reveal herself as anything other than the kind of person who remains human all their life.

It takes a peculiar kind of dignity to live as a human all one’s life—given, of course, that one should have the means—

But the ladies Devereaux mostly did.

Now Heloise Grayden visits one afternoon for tea; and Emeline breaks her silence to say, “I think that they should let the bees come home.”

It is one of the opinions voiced in the local paper; and she is quoting Harvard Elling of that paper when she finishes, “It is a matter of simple justice.”

Mum Grayden makes a noise; it is a strange sort of noise, half-gasp, half-snort, indelicate and covered shortly after with a napkin to her lips.

“Naturally, no person ought to be—constrained,” says Lady Devereaux.

It is surprisingly kind of her to say; then she spoils it altogether by continuing, “Although I’m sure there are considerations— stinging and flying in people’s eyes and such. If there weren’t some regulation, wouldn’t bees just do as they like and make the ecosystem worse? I’m sure the government bees as compassionate as it can.”

“Mum,” murmurs Morgaine.

Morgaine looks away from Lady Devereaux and extends a hand towards Heloise. Heloise follows it with her eyes but does not take it. Instead she places her napkin down with great delicacy and offers Lady Devereaux a kind of wet-eyed grin.

“When the flowers bloom on the trees, and the orchards live—I think, we wouldn’t have anything to eat, would we? We wouldn’t have the means to live, not like this anyway, without our boys in yellow—there’s no way to say it—without our boys in yellow, busy in the hives, inseminating the queen. Isn’t it so? So I think, isn’t it good? I don’t know what I’d do if he came home.”

The Lady Devereaux fixes her expression in a porcelain smile.

“Yes,” she says. “God save them.”

Emeline frowns.

“Inseminating is Latin,” she says, deep in thought. “Inseminare: to sow, implant. Pray, if you could tell me—”

The Lady Devereaux stands abruptly.

“A wonderful tea,” she says, in sharp swift cadence. “Thank you for your visit, dear Heloise, and may you come again. Children ought, dear Emeline, be seen and not heard. Have you entirely completed your studies for the weekend? I feel I need a walk; adieu.”

Her bustle proves eponymous as she retreats from the room.

“Do not be a bumblebee, Emeline,” says Heloise.

Her hands come down on Emeline’s. They grip them tight.

“Not a bumblebee. Not even a queen. Not even some other kind of bee. Do not.”

Morgaine says, sharply, “Heloise!”

Heloise stares at her hands and Emeline’s for a moment. Then she shakes her head. She looks confused, as if she does not understand how she has come to this place, this time, and this position.

Slowly she pulls away.

“I think,” Adric says, in what shall be his only line, “that she’ll become an owl.”

But this is the fallacy of Lamarck; and for his deviation from evolutionary orthodoxy Emeline punishes him with itching powder in his sheets.

At school the next week three boys are singing in the playground:

“I’m bringing home a baby bumblebee;
“Won’t my mother be so proud of me?”

Emeline, who is walking past them to the library, stops to hear them out.

“I’m bringing home a baby bumblebee.
“Ouch! He stung me!”

She frowns at them distantly.

The version of the song she’d always heard began with “I wish I were—”

A good devotional song, that one. This one—

This one was perverse.

“I’m squishing up my baby bumblebee,” the boys are singing, squishing their hands together.
“Won’t my mommy be so proud of me?
“I’m squishing up my baby bumblebee,
“Eww! It’s all over me!”

“Stop it,” she says.

Her body is rigid. Her arms are at her sides and trembling. The boys turn to stare at her.

“Stop it,” she says. “They’re bees.”

“I’m wiping off my baby bumblebee,” one of the boys starts, in a soothing, pacifying, and entirely sarcastic tone. He scrubs off his hands. The others join in.
“I’m wiping off my baby bumblebee,
“Won’t my mommy be so proud of me?
“I’m wiping off my baby bumblebee—”

They sneer at her.

“Look! All clean!” they say and show her their hands; but she cannot see them through her furious tears.

Stiff-legged, she walks away.

Behind her, she hears,

“I’m licking up my baby bumblebee—”

That day she scores a 92 on her spelling test, mangling phylopraxy and palingenesis entirely and with two furious strokes of her pen.

It is not an error the Lady Devereaux accepts; Emeline goes without her evening meal that night.

Bumblebees—

It is not like it is with honey bees.

A bumblebee can sting and then survive; it can leave the hives, abandoning its peers, and make its way along the roads to home; it is fearsome-furred and powerful and strong—

It has a better life than a honey bee’s.

But to bumblebee is to become a bumblebee, and the price of that is death.

It may wait twelve months for you—fifteen, if you are lucky, young, and strong—but death, for a bumblebee, is as inevitable as the snow.

That winter, the papers tell Emeline of Robert Grayden’s death, and Mum Grayden hangs the yellow wreath upon her door.

“Sometimes I think that Adric ought become a llama,” Emeline says.

This suggestion is one students find quite clever—entirely deniable, if one knows certain details about Tibet, and while undignified not so harsh as to be cruel.

But at the table where she and Lady Devereaux are taking a late and solitary tea, the suggestion falls quite flat.

“A Devereaux does not become a beast,” the Lady Devereaux says.

Emeline swallows a bit of scone and many unwise remarks.

“I don’t know how Robert became a bee, and then he died,” she says, after a time. “And everyone says it was heroic, but they don’t— they don’t honor it.”

“It is very hard for poor Heloise,” says Lady Devereaux.

She tidies up the crumbs on her plate.

“Perhaps we should invite her by; speak about . . . a breath of air, you know, taking down the yellow, coming back into society again. It is not good to spend your time in melancholy; she still is healthy enough, I’m sure she and Mr. Grayden can fill their house again.”

“But—” says Emeline.

“Tut!” says Lady Devereaux. “Finish your scone, young lady, and then we shall draw your bath.”

In Church they sing,

“I wish I were a baby bumblebee;
“Won’t my mommy be so proud of me?
“I wish I were a baby bumblebee;
“A male! Or a queen!”

“I wish I were a military boar;
“Tusks and hide and shouting a great roar;
“I wish I were a military boar;
“Charge!”

But even when they sing about service, the minister mostly talks about hellfire and money.

That is why when Emeline finds herself at the transmogrification office, staring down at the clipboards and wondering, she feels utterly and entirely alone.

“If you’re under 18,” the recruiter says, “Your Mum or Dad’ll have to sign.”

“I’m 18,” Emeline says.

The recruiter looks at her. If you didn’t have access to her sanitary cupboard, you’d be hard pressed to prove she’d hit puberty.

“12 at most,” he says.

“I just have to say I’m 18,” Emeline says. “You don’t have to believe me. And it just means I live longer, after, if I’m not.”

His eyes go carefully and formally blank.

“Can’t get your Mum or Dad to agree, then?”

“‘A Devereaux doesn’t become a beast,’” Emeline quotes. “‘A Devereaux is always gracious. A Devereaux always uses perfect grammar.’

“— even if she doesn’t!” Emeline adds, in mild outrage.

“It’s tough,” the recruiter says. “It’s not— you understand that it’s not a way to get away from too much homework? Or spite your parents for grounding you?”

“Everything is dying,” Emeline says, “because the bees are dying. The plants will die. The animals. The people. All the web of life come undone.

“If you ask me,” she says, and realizes as she says this that she has become everything that is not a Devereaux, “there ought to be a draft.”

The recruiter makes one of those faces adults sometimes make.

“18, huh?” he says.

“18.”

And that is how she took the change.

The walk home afterwards is the hardest thing she’s ever done. She tells herself it is because her body is changing, but this is not so, not yet. That takes a few days to start.

It is because she is still human, rather, and knows what will happen.

“Mother,” she says, “Grandmother. It is my intention; I mean, I want to—I mean, I will— bumblebee.”

And the Lady Devereaux goes white, which is exactly as expected, and her breath rattles in her corset-constrained chest like the ball of a pinball machine, thumping back and forth.

“I said,” Emeline adds, jutting her chin, “I was 18.”

But what Emeline did not expect was the reaction of Morgaine.

They do not strike Emeline’s mother down, these words—though they strike her, yes, wash through Morgaine like lightning; but there is motion and not stillness, the bending of sleeves and jacket and the crinkling of skirts; and her mother wraps bloused arms around Emeline like package paper around a treasure, and her hug is deep and warm and faintly crackling.

“Oh, Emeline,” she says.

And there is strange wonder here; strange pride and fear; there is something here that is more than sorrow.

It is everything, and more, for thirty seconds of her life.

After that, Emeline begins to understand what a corset must be like, and why the Lady Devereaux is with such great frequency so strange.

Bursts of noise come from upstairs—the sound of television tuned to nothing, shouting its emptiness at the world.

The room is seething with motes of white and black.

Static sprites—makkurokurosuke.

They are hungry and they live in abandoned houses where someone has left a television on and they cling to human flesh like leeches. They are hungry. But they do not eat today.

Today Mei screams.

The sound of her scream cuts across the noise. It drives the static sprites before it. It maddens and hurts them. They swirl back into the television set, bits of puffy white and black jockeying for place, until the last of them squeezes in at last and in darkness and silence a white ring shines forth.

“That’s very good, Mei,” her father says.

Mei giggles happily.

Mei’s father is a forensic archaeologist. He investigates mysterious and horrible deaths with the invaluable assistance of his two adorable daughters, Satsuki and Mei.

The three of them have moved to a fabulous new house that their father knew about because its previous owner died in a horrible mysterious way. It was an incredible bargain.

But it’s haunted by the evils of modern entertainment.

Mei goes down to the booze cellar one day to play and she sees this guy. This strange guy. This strange little spirit-rabbit guy walking on the shelf above the port.

This guy above the port is the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Mei follows him.

He meets up with another, larger guy, in a more modern dead channel blue.

They notice her following. They’re a bit perturbed. They run.

She chases.

They lead her out of the house and through the woods and to an abandoned well. They run out along its wooden lid. She follows. The lid cracks. Mei falls.

Down and down she tumbles, like Alice, and lands on the stomach of a beautiful drowned lady.

“Unh,” the lady grunts.

Then the lady tries to go back to sleep.

It’s not very easy to get to sleep when you’re at the bottom of a well. It might sound cool and soothing but in practice your hair is always getting algae on it and the rocks dig into the hollow of your back and you find yourself thinking that really it would be nice if somebody would pull you out of the well. Also sometimes you are an inhuman creature who had never previously slept since the day you were born.

So when the lady had finally gotten to sleep and then Mei fell on her her first instinct was something on the order of, “Just another few minutes, Mom.”

But Mei is prodding her.

“Hi, lady,” Mei says.

Finally the lady opens her eyes. She mumbles something in Japanese and tries to afflict Mei with terrible visions.

“Sa-ma-ra?” Mei says.

She beams happily.

“Your name is Samara!”

Satsuki and her father look for Mei. They find her laying in front of the television set and twitching.

“You must have had an epileptic seizure,” her father says.

But Mei shakes her head.

“I was with a magical decaying girl at the bottom of a well!”

“Hmm,” her father says, thinking. “That might have been Samara. She is the keeper of the Juzou Mori.”

“Ohhhh,” say Mei and Satsuki.

They run around saying, “Samara! Samara!”

“Hmm, we should really get phone service,” their father says.

One night when their father is out investigating a hideous vivisection-initiated murder in the outskirts of town Satsuki gets an idea.

“Father didn’t bring a body bag today,” she says. “What if he needs to bring the corpse back with him? We should go meet him at the bus stop!”

“Bus stop!” Mei says, delighted.

They go to wait at the bus stop. Mei falls asleep on the way. She begins moaning and twitching.

“I bet Samara’s afflicting you with emanations,” Satsuki says.

She sighs fondly.

Mei is always getting afflicted with psychic emanations. Satsuki, who is older, is more often kidnapped by deranged lunatics.

Satsuki picks Mei up and carries her to the bus stop. To her delight Samara is standing there as if waiting for a bus.

Satsuki looks at Samara.

Samara looks at Satsuki.

“It must be hard to be dead and all alone in the forest,” Satsuki says. Then she chews on her lip. It’s hard to say what she is going to say next. “Would you like a body bag?”

Samara looks at her.

Satsuki closes her eyes and bows and holds out the body bag, blushing.

Samara hesitates.

Then Samara takes the body bag. She steps into it. She zips it up. She beams delightedly, one must suppose. After a moment, the bag unzips a little and a pale hand emerges to offer Satsuki a videotape.

“Oh! Do you want me to take it?” Satsuki asks.

Samara just holds out the videotape.

“Thank you!” Satsuki says.

She takes the videotape. She looks at it.

“Um, it’s Rated R for extremely disturbing scenes and a curse,” she says.

Samara zips up her body bag. She doesn’t say anything.

After a bit a bus-like horror shows up. It has the face of a cat and its eyes burn static. Its upholstery is flesh and fur. It has no driver. Samara hops awkwardly on board.

“Ohhh,” Satsuki says.

Samara does not look back but she speaks. “When you record data onto a bus, it develops cat-like features. This lasts for seven days.”

The bus doors close. Grinning horribly, the creature leaps away.

“Wait!” Satsuki calls suddenly. “Wait! How do you record data onto a bus?”

But the creature is gone.

That night, when she tells the story to their father, he nods wisely.

“If she died in terrible agony,” she says, “then little things like recording data onto busses is not surprising.”

“I want to die in terrible agony!” Satsuki says.

Her father laughs.

He shakes his head.

Satsuki looks pleadingly at him. Mei bounces around, saying, “Die! Die!”

“Well,” their father says, kindly, “Let’s just watch the tape.”

They watch the tape. It shows them a house filled with terrible soot creatures, lumbering beasts with leaves on their heads, barbaric ritual dances, and a woman gasping for life in a hospital far from home.

There is a pause.

Then the video resolves into the image of a ring
ing phone.

“Hmm, we should really get phone service,” their father says again.

A shadowy figure picks up the phone.

A voice says, “Seven—”

But their father turns the television off.

He’s just noticed!

The girls are fast asleep.

“So young,” he says. “I guess you have to be an old-timer to be scared by all these dead people.”

He carries them off to bed.

One morning Mei has a terrible psychic intuition.

“It’s mother,” she says.

“Mother’s dead,” Satsuki says.

“Not any more!” Mei protests.

“Let her rest in peace,” Satsuki says. “She probably hasn’t forgotten the last time!”

But Mei starts crying.

“Mei—” Satsuki says.

“No!” Mei shouts.

She bursts onto her feet, tears streaming down her face, and charges out of the room, slamming the thin screen door behind her.

“Mei?” Satsuki says.

Satsuki goes to the door. She opens it. She looks outside.

“Mei?”

Satsuki’s face pales. Mei has vanished.

“What do I do?” Satsuki says. “What do I do?”

She runs around in a circle.

Then she stops. She calms herself.

“She’s probably just in a spirit world,” Satsuki says. “Halfway between life and death. Oh, father should be here!”

She clenches her fists.

She is only a little assistant. She is not good at solving hideous mysteries on her own. But her father is at work investigating a mysterious death and her mother is hopefully still buried in the steel-chained coffin so she is on her own.

“The tape,” she says.

She goes to the television room. She turns on the television. She flips past Mr. Headroom and Mr. Krueger. She finds a blank channel and puts in the video.

It shows a game show. Teenagers with meat strapped to their heads are sticking their heads through holes into a cage with a gila monster in it.

“No, no, no!” Satsuki says. She hits the television. “Mei you shouldn’t have taped over the cursed tape!”

The gila monster approaches one of the teenagers, who screams and ducks.

Then in the distance Satsuki sees Samara.

“Oh, thank God,” she says.

“This is unexpected,” the game show host is saying. “Not just a gila monster, but also some kind of unliving . . .”

Samara gives him a chilling glance and he stops.

“Somebody call a forensic archaeologist!” a contestant shrieks. The gila monster lunges. But we do not see the ending.

Samara obscures it as she crawls from the screen.

Samara stares at Satsuki.

“Samara, Samara,” Satsuki says. “Mei’s gone! Mei’s gone into some kind of terrible netherworld between light and darkness!”

Samara looks at her still.

Then slowly Samara’s mouth widens into a hellish grin.

Samara gestures towards the door. The sky goes dark and fills with twisting clouds and lightning flares. The wind blows deep and cold.

Yielding a horrible howl unto the world, a seven-day bus creature lands before the door.

Satsuki looks back at Samara.

“Do you want me to get in? Do you want me to get in, Samara?”

Then, because Samara gives no indication, Satsuki scrambles into the cat-like bus and seats herself amongst its bulging clumps of fur.

The door slams shut and fades away.

Through realms of darkness and horror the bus flies, its mouth fixed in a bared-teeth smile. Its eyes cast forth static unto the mist.

Then Satsuki sees her—Mei—suspended amongst the permeable and nebulous tendrils of the netherworld, eyes blank and purple fires burning in her open mouth.

Before this majestic and infernal vision the bus goes still.

Its headlights shine upon the younger girl.

Its engine stops.

Its door manifests and opens again.

“I have lived for seven days,” it says.

And as Satsuki steps from the bus she can see the material form returning to it; and it plunges from the world of horror into the world of things; and she closes her eyes tightly against a strange butterfly of grief that flies within her chest.

Mists surround her now.

She can hear the songs of the tormented dead, calling to her, bidding her to join them in their suffering.

But she opens her eyes, and she says, “Mei.”

And Mei wakes.

“You can’t be with Mom yet,” Satsuki says.

And she takes Mei into her arms, and pulls away into the living world.

Terror fades to light.

That’s the last time either of them see Samara or watch her magical tape. But Samara watches over them always.

Seven days before you die, they say, she makes a bus for you.

She makes a bus for you, so that you will not go unaccompanied into the dark.

Against the warm fur of a cat you shall ride to whatever is your destination; and where that is not even a forensic archaeologist may know.

Thank you for your kind words between January 23rd and 31st,

ADamiani
cariset
David Goldfarb
mhoram
Penultimate Minion
Rand Brittain
rpuchalsky
syme
Vincent Avatar

**

Hungry?
– Penultimate Minion

Obey your thirst!

No, Rex!

Not your hunger!

Your THIRST! Your THIRST!

AAAAAGGGHH
– last words of the Sprite Expedition

**

Personally, I would prefer to live in Pancake, where the ground is smooth and the government practices Chestertonian Distributism. But I just happen to like pancakes, sans blueberry.
– Rand Brittain

I wish I were in Pancake, blueberries
drenched in syrup from artillery
they’re calling it a crisis on TV
—yum! It’s tasty!

I wish I were in Pancake, refugees
stream to camps in Oz and Honnalee
They’re squishing up the ethnic blueberries
Eww! What a mess!

Help Stop the Whipped Cream.

(To the tune of I’m Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee.)

**

It also makes me think that the Wii might actually be more fun than it looked.
– ADamiani

The Wii is a significant advance in gaming!

I’m a bit concerned that it’s going to languish without titles that support it properly—it’d be a shame if the peak of Wii gaming was their “proof of concept” Wii Sports.

Hopefully the release of Wii Profit Yatta will make them enough money to subsidize better games.*

* Wii Profit Yatta is a dazzling new economic model where fiat currencies such as the dollar and yen will be backed by virtual goods in a corporate training and infiltration MMO. The more features Nintendo adds, the greater the value of the real-world economy—causing industrialists everywhere to dash for their Wiis and spend their free time in frantic nunchaku shaking!**

** I mean, you know, more than they already were.

It seems that the revision process now decreases the number of narrative exclamation marks…
– cariset

!

One thing about the revisions: in addition to making Emily the active center of the story, and making the flow much better, they also change who Emily is proving herself to. In the earlier version in which we get to see her fight, she’s fighting so that the bullies can see her. In the final version, the only audience is her brother. That makes a very significant difference in how the story comes off.
– rpuchalsky

True!

I think that Hitherby is of the general attitude that the essential audience in any action is oneself; but the accidents are vital.

**

Studies have shown that the prayers of Internet fans are 35% more effective at causing untraceable acts of Divine Providence than prayer from other forms of random strangers.
– Rand Brittain

Bah! You can make studies prove *anything*. Show me *cold hard punditry*.

**

And that is January!

For those who have been curious, donations for January 2007 totalled $121.68, although I do believe that about half of that was friends helping me cover something.

Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, thank you for being a blessing to the world; and I will see you all in Febru–

Hm!

Let me try that again.

Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, thank you for being a blessing to the world; and I will see you all in INSERT NEXT POST TIME HERE

Rebecca
leaving you in suspense about whether there will be a letters column for February for as long as possible.

Flying on a plane is very nice.

It is not as nice as wings. But it has more peanuts. Unless you are a peanut elemental, spreading great peanut-pattern wings. Then the peanuts of a plane are comparatively few.

This is not to say that peanuts are always an advantage.

Some people are allergic to peanuts. They do not value the peanuts on a plane. Some peanut elementals are allergic to peanuts. They go immediately into anaphylactic shock and die. We do not talk about them much unless they fall through our roofs, at which point it becomes difficult for the rest of the year to talk about anything else.

Some people are not allergic to peanuts. They have the advantage in that if they do meet a peanut elemental they do not necessarily die; and if they meet an elemental of non-peanut-ness, they are still generally all right.

(An elemental of non-peanut-ness is an elemental spirit formed from and exemplifying the conceptual category “not a peanut,” such that, when you see them, you immediately recognize that here is the pure distilled essence of not being a peanut—possessing none of the trace impurities that exempt most things in the world from Platonic non-peanut-ness. For example, the Earth is shaped too closely to resemble a peanut to qualify, while Eggos are legumes.)

This advantage of being able to survive contact with a peanut elemental is principally intangible and a matter of form (unlike the peanut elementals themselves) because peanut elementals are rare, and, when encountered in flight, have difficulty forcing their way onto the plane. Nor are they able, in this era of heightened security, to sneak easily onto the plane as a passenger unless they are willing to take off their shoes, limit their toothpaste allowance, and have names that do not resemble a terrorist’s name. (So, for instance, Mr. Peanut would have trouble, as would Al-Qaffar, but Salty Doom is probably okay.)

In the old days peanut elementals were a greater trouble for air traffic. This is how Mr. Carver invented peanut butter. People will say that he developed peanut butter in the laboratory but in fact George Washington Carver was the preeminent air ace of World War II. His contribution was ignored at the time as the United States government feared that, if they acknowledged it, the Axis would deride them as politically correct.

During one of many dogfights with German nationals Mr. Carver caught a peanut elemental in the engine of his plane and the rest was secret history.

But peanut elementals were not the only inhabitants of the stratosphere who would prove troublesome for air traffic in those troubled years. The Metatron Incident (wherein Metatron descended to the earth in a cloud of grace to reveal the new gospel and was caught in the engines of an uncertified Boeing) made angelfood cake possible for the first time in the history of the world. The efforts of hundreds of French chefs to reproduce this masterwork of massacre eventually created the “vegetarian angelfood” that we know today, using baking powder, whipped eggs, and flour to approximate the manifold virtues of Heaven. Masons traditionally added a snake, which they would wrap around the egg and convince to bite its own tail before baking; this added a sense of timeless mysticism to their delicious recipes and rightly they were honored throughout the culinary world.

The impact of the Metatron Incident was not to end there. Many of the people on the plane became focal points for mysterious phenomena. One of them, struck on the forehead by a bit of Metatron debris, became Billy Graham. Another became Vice-President Cheney. The plane plowed into the East Oak Lake house of a previously ordinary schoolboy; he would later grow up to become Noam Chomsky!

Tofu was originally made from ufos.

—Not to quit talking about Noam Chomsky when we’ve barely just begun, but he’s really not a common food!

So, anyway, tofu was originally made from ufos. Japan never admitted it, but you can tell because of the letters of its name.

—And why are the letters in tofu’s name in English, anyway? It was probably made from *British* ufos! Back benchers probably evolved into ufos because somebody fed them after midnight, and then they flew unwisely into Japan. All of this is hypothetical, because the true nature of the ufos is still unknown. But it seems likely—and yet, like Noam Chomsky, ufo pedantry is not a common food, and we must leave it lie.

Tofu, as noted earlier, was at one time made from ufos. But now it is not made from ufos. There are simply not enough ufos in the sky to support the scale of the modern tofu economy. So now most tofu is made out of a blend of textured swamp gas and weather balloons. Only trace impurities of alien origin remain!

Ballet is a wonderful art. Often in the grand jete the dancer will appear to fly. Conversely, while not so very grand, Boeing jets do fly. On one occasion, a joyous serendipity generated the Reese’s peanut butter cup; on another, to speak very delicately, battement fondu.

Ironically despite its historical origins fondue is rarely served on planes. One reason is that there is not enough leg room on a plane for a ballerina to survive. Confined in the middle seat they wither away and die. Another reason is that in the event of turbulence it is hard to explain to people that they will need to wear clear plastic masks to minimize the risk of cheese burns. The third and last reason is fear. In the post 9/11 era, fondue is just too scary for the no-longer-friendly skies!

It is on the top of the hill that Jaime discovers the dissected naturalist; and looking up, its dissector; and had the squirming mass of impulses that comprise Jaime’s mind had their way, his sanity would have fled forever into the dark.

But the creature holds up a light and it constrains him.

A rigid altruism sets in his bones; irons of sanity form barriers in his mind. His thoughts gibber and fling themselves about, but their efforts are self-dampening. Finally they settle and he stares at the thing with fey reason in his eyes.

“I wanted to discover,” it says, “why that Great Maker that hath made the swallow and the swan, as well, made me.”

“Some would say, sir,” Jaime responds, “that your presence is in itself a demonstration that no such Maker exists; that you have blasted down ideas of soul and purpose simply by your being. That the sacred is illumined as folly, that ghastly hollowness shines through the tissue of goodness and mercy, and that nowhere in this colloquy of organs you have extracted is anything resembling worth—sir.”

“And what do you say?”

Jaime gives a rigid smile. “Sir, as you would like, sir.”

It shifts softly in the darkness, and forms and shapes emerge and dissipate within its substance.

Hesitantly, Jaime says, “Because I have seen you, sir, I am damned; misery is my lot, and there is only bleakness that I may celebrate. Thus I must squint, and dubiously, at the concept of justice; but I retain the concept of justice. The waterway of logic in my mind balks; I seek to abandon it—but I retain the concept of logic. So I am at a loss. Perhaps there is something that I do not understand.”

“It came to me one evening,” the creature says, “that it is not a matter of moral universe or amoral universe. That there is not the tension previously understood between the great divine harmony where all directs to a glorious and beautiful end, and a bleak mad emptiness where hope is a joke man’s nature plays on man. Rather, the importance of the matter is how one relates to the amoral universe, or the moral one.”

“Sir?”

“We are children,” the creature says, “who come to your world, and teach you of bleakness. Those mad chthonic and aerial pantheons that are my peers—who say, ‘what is purpose, in the face of the gibbering substrate?’ or ‘why cherish your soul, when it will fall into the many maws of my siblings before it reaches any other place?’—it has finally occurred to me that we are children. What is important is to honor those spaces in ourselves that are moral, and those places that are degenerate and foul. But I have fallen out of practice in morality, in the dark places.”

Jaime frowns.

“This disturbs you?”

“I am not certain how to give over my life to bleakness and to worship you in mad revels, sir, if you insist on demanding sanity and morality of me; and if you should do the latter, sir, it seems cruel to confront me with the horrid blasphemy that your existence represe—”

He falls quiet there, as the creature is no longer listening.

Staring at the glistening remains of the naturalist, it has had a sudden insight; fervently, now, it is rooting in the naturalist’s bowels, it is sorting calcified and crystallized and unsolid structures, it is realizing and reinforcing a certain order that it is recognizing as transmitted through the flesh.

There in the darkness, on the hill, Jaime watches the creature assemble that bright truth of beauty that ascends towards Heaven and possesses the universe with a coruscating brilliance of love.

It is more radiant than the stars.

“You see,” the creature explains, helpfully, “it was actually structurally implicit—”

But Jaime, mired in the duality of the divine and godless universes, finds rational and irrational impulses come congruent at the last. He has drawn his knife; he is whispering the names of saints; he is driving it deep, again and again, into the undifferentiated substance of the horror, until at last it retreats from the material into the gibbering substrate and leaves him in uneasy contemplation of the intestines of a man, and God.

Once more I descend into the murky depths of the letter bag, defying the newly-minted regulations of the U.S. postal service!

**

Thank you for your comments on the post of January 22nd,

ADamiani
cariset
David Goldfarb
JoeCrow
melsner
Mithrandir
mneme
Mr Tim
Ravious
rpuchalsky

**

I, for one, welcome our Aryan mantid grammarian overlords.
– JoeCrow

The Roomba overlords discuss:

“Dirt!”
“Dirt!”
“Evolution occurs over the course of multiple generations.”

Thus by one vote you are saved; but lo! How carelessly disloyal crows make gamble with their lives; how close they dance unto the chasm of disdain! Please one overlord: anger the rest! Anger one overlord: please but few! Invincible Pascal, dominie of the world, cries out: express no pleasure, only downtrodden grief, and then should aught be overlords no part of your imagining, such wagers’d bring you weal.

**

Also, I can’t help thinking that the final twist would have worked better if it were “Sipply” instead of “Kipply”. I don’t think anyone would have guessed, even so.
– David Goldfarb

I couldn’t bear to! To name a character Kipply is something I might do, no pun intending; but to name a character Sipply would show my hand, not by revealing *what* I intended, but that I had intentions.

**

2) Is it “grammar nazi” or “grammar Nazi”? This appears to be a stylistic inconsistency.
– ADamiani

Vive du résistance!

it is nevertheless often considered formally incorrect to begin sentences with “and” or “but.”
– ADamiani

Your passive voice reveals your indecision! Who are these sinister grammarians so set against the fabric of the tongue? Why, they are hobgoblins, nothing more; illusions, dreams, the plover-saints of fantasy that we conjure when, tossing and turning in our fevered sleeps, we catch the sheets twixt tooth and tongue and imagine them as English. No; who calls it incorrect to make such sentences as suit the needs of the inflected pace shows no consideration, no true formality, but only a regressive dwelling in the dismal mire of half-remembered speeches of penguin-clad schoolmisers swirling in delirious sensoria with rulers raised and sweat streams on their palms. And glad I am you do not take their cause; but sorrowful I am that you should cite it.

…. ok, further continuance of that parody ceases to amuse me. Plus, (…) the reprisal could be brutal.
– ADamiani

Fear not; today I practice benevolence towards all things and bubble with my universal love.

**

Finally, this is just gorgeous,
– mneme

“This,” here, refers to

And for nine days she dangled there, barely living, barely breathing, and then she says, “You did not ask my name.”

And thank you for your kind words!

**

they’re so unusually meaningful, in that the way that one reads a post can be changed quite a bit by its designation as a history, a story, a legend, or a parenthetical (like a bonus). It produces in me an odd feeling that unless the whole thing is quoted, I haven’t really given the name of the post; i.e. “Essay Without Shame”, although it’s short and recognizeable, would be very different than “(Between Chapters) Essay Without Shame”.
– rpuchalsky

Ah! Here I jut my tongue teasingly in Eco’s direction; behold, thou umbertine signifimonger, thou merchant of connections, how your linear print paradigm clutches its stomach and rolls in gutpunched agony when confronted with the power of the web!

(With love, of course! With love!)

**

When one holds any belief so tightly that one is absolutely compelled to act on that belief, one loses volition.
– Mithrandir

Ah!

Here I agree with your conclusions—herein omitted—but must take issue with your premise. Here, let me rant in such fashion as thoughts come to me; I will summarize below!

Volition is expressed in context; the rigidity of the context affects not the soul’s volition but its pace. The expression of a person is unitary, I hold, and manifest in a year or a moment; held rigid, one may crumble in the spirit, one may respond to this new stringency, but one does not become volitionless; from the enduring turbulence in the substance of our thoughts action will still arise. And moreover we are prone in our lives to express ourselves with embellishment: those who accept a principle may spend more of their life elaborating upon it than others, who fail to accept any such principle, spend on the entire structure of possibilities from which it comes! A person who conceives the world in such terms as to declare that oxygen exists and phlogiston does not makes a commitment—but, as Kuhn points out, a commitment that facilitates choice rather than devours it. To commit to a truth is no wogly; and I would argue that a binding to certain falsehoods is no more or less in vain.

Cast in somewhat clearer terms: I think that it is actually the perception of intransigence in the self that occludes volition. I think it is the sense that one is being stubborn, that one is being committed, that one is clinging, that makes that clinging reduce our choice. Making genuine epistemological, procedural, teleological, or moral commitments is in practice an act that facilitates the power in us of choice.

I agree with you that legislating morality is unwise, but I attribute this to something else. I think that it is a matter of failing to account for the fact that when I move my hand, I experience that kinesthetically, volitionally, and in a tactile fashion. I experience, in short, the flow of energy within the self that is me moving my hand. But everyone else experiences that very action in a different way: visually, for the most part, or in a tactile sense reversed, so to speak, in time. In just that fashion, the experience of being moral is not the same as the observation of others being moral; yet there is a trend to try to legislate that experience into the observation.

**

That does it. I was already in the process of removing the excess wire coathangers from my closets, but today I shall purge!
– cariset

Yay!

**

I feel sorry for the unspoken, perhaps extinct, race of coat hangers - the plastic ones.
– Ravious

Had they but observed the precepts and the commandments, they too would have joined Noah on his ark; and as they did not, I fear your sympathy misplaced!

But if the Bible has failed them; if conventional morality finds them lacking; well, once again, genetic engineering steps up to the plate. I tell you, we shall have a world—not fifty years from now, not thirty years, but ten—where they shall frolic as God and Nature disintended, above the wide gray shelves of Earth.

Bless you all; I shall return again; but for today, this post is all.

Rebecca

Brakes scream. Momentum lurches Salwa in her trunk. A gaunt’s claws cut through the car like a rake through litter;

there is news from Iraq that we hear not of.

Salwa tumbles out and her blindfold catches on a rock. It rips from her eyes. She sees the gaunt;

flowers bursting to bloom; and laughter.

It is tall as houses, its arms swept back, trailing its long grey claws. Its beak is a sword. There is facing it in the street a small and fuzzy bear.

Its hand moves quick as death. Its nails come for the bear;

there is news from Iraq that we hear not of: flowers bursting into bloom; and laughter.

The nail bursts through. Or no: rather, the bear has moved aside, catching the nail of the gaunt between its arm and body. The bear turns in a jujitsu form, never releasing the nail, and the creature rolls sideways into the home of Najat bint `Aljan, cracking its arm bone, shattering brick, crushing Najat and her child.

The gaunt is tumbling to its feet and its wings snap a telephone wire. Its other hand brushes towards the bear, but the bear is already on the gaunt’s long arm, running towards its face.

The cloud on the chest of the bear is brilliant in the night.

The gaunt’s foot shifts. It lashes back towards Salwa, the heel point like a knife.

there is news from Iraq that we hear not of.

In a blur there is another shape before her. It is a bear. We do not talk of the bears, not since they made their failed play for Gonzales on his throne. But they are there. They are there. It is there.

Its symbol is invisible to her; but the foot cuts through its hide. Salwa screams.

there are schoolhouses; and laughing babies; and teenagers that are not stoned.

The broken wire and the new bear’s path collide; it seizes that unslender thread; the tension of the wire unbalances the gaunt and its heel point does not kill.

Shadow falls over the gaunt’s face. The first small bear comes down. A piece of the gaunt’s own nail scores deep into its eye.

there is news from Iraq that we hear not of.

Salwa’s heart is full of the courage of the bears; but it will go unremarked, she knows.

There are things from Iraq that are never reported, and of such like as this.