Hitherby Dragons

¹ whose story does not interest.

The snowflake kingdom is high on the cloud. Prince Adric lives there. He doesn’t like Prince Leopold. PUSH!

Prince Leopold goes over the edge. Flutter flutter flutter down to the earth below.

King Gordon lives on the cloud. King Gordon is sleeping with Laurel, Melinda, and Amanda. They catch him at it. It’s not too hard once they take off the blindfolds. PUSH!

King Gordon goes over the edge. Flutter flutter flutter down to the earth below.

It’s their tragic destiny. It’s nature’s calamity! They have to have infighting so that we can have snow.

“Oh, Romeo,” says Juliet, who is a snowflake from a great snowflake family, “wherefore art thou Romeo?”

Romeo gives her a chilly glare. He can’t help it. He’s a snowflake. He also makes pointed remarks. It’s just part of the package.

“Look, babe. I’m just how I gotta be.”

“Well, I’m killing myself, then!” JUMP!

Juliet goes over the edge. Flutter flutter flutter down to the earth below.

“Woe is me! Nobody loves Snowflake Romeo!” JUMP!

Romeo goes over the edge. Flutter flutter flutter down to the earth below.

In the spring, it will be warmer, and the rain will fall like the blood of God, speared through the heart by a lance of sunlight, falling forever through the sky, soft as a cloud. Because that’s what it is.

In the autumn, leaves will scurry from the trees to carry out their offensive against the governments of mankind. They’re orange and red. Those are the colors of their revolution.

In the winter, King Gordon XVIII will stand before the assembled snowflakes. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he will say, and everyone will look utterly blank.

Gordon will blush. He cribbed his speech from late night television. Bad Gordon XVIII!

“Variously sexed frozen particles of water!”

Wild cheering.

“Tonight, we launch our invasion plan of the earth below.”

He gestures widely at the snow mortars; at the snow tanks; at the snow bombs, each carrying more than a teraton of explosive power, if only snowflakes had nuclear technology, which admittedly they do not. “We shall sweep them away in our wrath. We will bury them!” JUMP!

Gordon falls.

JUMP!

Many subjects fall.

The sergeants scowl at the others. PUSH!

The remaining subjects fall. Flutter flutter flutter down to the earth below.

“Oh no!” cried King Gordon XVIII. “We forgot our military armament. Can anyone flutter upwards?”

King Gordon XVIII hits the windshield of someone who doesn’t know how to drive in the snow. Splat.

This is everybody’s world.

¹ a legend of Santa.

Santa Claus wakes up. It’s the Tuesday after Christmas, so he dresses in black. He goes to the shore of stars. He calls for his boat. He sails south.

Pirates come, but he runs up the Santa flag. They don’t attack him. Pirates don’t board Santa’s ship. It’s a law of the sea.

The terrible shark comes. Each fin is as long as a man is tall. The beast could swallow a horse in one bite. It hungers. Santa faces it down. He meets its cold black gaze. It shakes itself, twice, and dives deep. It still plans to eat him. It’s not a very nice shark. But not this year. This year, it leaves him be. It’ll come again in 2004.

There’s the sea of angels. There’s the ocean of fire. There’s a place of strange waters glistening like black abalone shells. The waves shine with soft green light.

Santa reaches his destination. It’s just an ordinary hill. It’s not important in itself. It’s just the place he’s chosen.

He sets three dolls on the ground. One boy, one girl, and one for just in case. He doesn’t look at them. He’s looking far away.

“There are so many of you,” he says, “that I couldn’t reach. This year or any other.”

He touches the dolls upon their hearts. “Strength,” he says.

He touches the dolls upon upon their heads. “Hope,” he says.

He touches them upon their hands. “A future.”

Santa rises and walks away. Behind him, the wind starts up, as it always does. It carries his gifts away.

Far under the world, there is a place. It is red. It is black. It is molten but not hot. It gapes. It is a bubble in the stone. It is air edged with fire. In the center, it has a city. The city is spherical. Its buildings spear outwards. They are the thousand points of a star. Things fly in the space around the city.

People. Their wings, black-feathered.
Ships. Their sails, made of soot.

In the city, a man named Fitz looks up. He holds up his hand and makes a cup of fire. The ships that sail above look down. One glides closer. It casts down a ladder, and a woman falls from it to crouch near his feet.

“M’lord,” she says.

“Send a thousand ships to the walls around our world,” he says. “Send them with rams and with chariots. Send them with guns and hearts. Let them cast themselves against the stone until it crumbles.”

“M’lord,” she says. She goes, and does this thing.

In the florist’s shop, he waits. Then he goes outside. He looks up. The sky is broader. Cracks in the stone let in the light. They are the stars of his world. Their light seems nearer now.

In his hands he makes the fire. She does not visit him again. She knows better. Again, the ships pound upon the walls. Again. Again.

“Are we entombed forever,” he asks, “beneath the suffocating stone? Is there nothing beyond?”

A mask of flame and darkness speaks to him, but he does not recall its words.

One of her ships breaks through to the sky. The world gapes. Sunlight pours in. Beyond that light Fitz can see the endless hungry void.

He screams.

Notes

Soot ships are often found in underground chasms. It’s convergent evolution. If people need to sail slowly through the air of the dark places, they invent the soot ships. Under the deepest sea, where the roots of strange flora make mountain-sized air pockets, the soot ships glide. Beneath the clockwork of Adelaide, the soot ships drift. In the heart of the world, where no life can exist, where the molten core burns like the tears of an angel, men who died of fire sail, and their lovers wait upon the shore.

Fishing involves going to sea in a boat, or to air in a soot ship, and trying to catch fish. This is difficult unless you first make the boat shiny. Then, fish will spot the shiny thing and try to bite it. At that point, the fisherfolk can drag them back to land. Giant whales are a common target for fisherboats, because their mouths are big enough to bite the boat but their teeth are very soft and only give the fisherfolk soothing massages. This is why the Apostle Jonah always had to get the seafood for Jesus’ loaves and fishes banquets. The whales liked his boat best!

On the mountain, there lived a young man. He had a creature that he kept in a box. It had a lot of eyes and mouths. He loved that creature.

The creature was all that kept him going. His job wasn’t happy. He didn’t have a girlfriend. His art never went anywhere. His life was small and sad. But he had his creature. His thing. He could come home and sit by the box and push food through the bars. It would eat the food. It made his heart glad. So the man didn’t have much, but he had something.

One day, he read:

If you love something,
let it go.

“I understand,” he said. So he took the creature down to the city. He opened the box. The creature crawled out.

“If you come back to me,” he said. “It was truly meant to be.”

The creature snarled. It crawled into the city. It began killing people one by one. The city called out the army. Infantry shot the creature. Tanks bombarded it with shells. It killed the infantry. It crushed the tanks. It tore down the buildings. The city died. The creature crawled on.

“This isn’t like in the proverb,” the man said. Then he shrugged. He was sad. He went back to his mountain.

He checked the news now and then. The creature destroyed civilization, bit by bit. Its path went away, away. The creature killed people the man didn’t like. This made him feel a little better. But it also killed people he admired. That made him feel worse. He stopped checking the news.

One morning the last city fell. He could hear the rockets in the distance. He could hear the fireworks. People were celebrating. It was a momentous occasion. “That’s the way of people,” he said. “When the sadness is too much, you have to start celebrating instead. I suppose, without urban centers, it’ll have to hunt people down one by one.”

It didn’t matter. He went inside. He sat by the box. He pushed some food through the bars. “Come on,” he said. “Eat.”

Nothing happened. The creature was long gone. He laughed at himself, and he took the food back. But he did it the next day, and the next. Then he cried himself to sleep.

In the morning, he woke to the sound of sirens. The creature was coming to the mountain.

He went outside. He didn’t bring his gun. There wasn’t any point. He stood out in the open, where it would see him easily; where it would kill him easily.

The creature approached. He spread his arms. He closed his eyes. He could hear it shuffle closer. He could hear it shuffle past. He heard it shuffle into his house.

He turned. His heart was very still. He went inside. He went to the box. He pushed food through the bars. It ate the food.

This made his heart glad.

There’s a man in Missouri. He’s standing on top of the Dove’s Treasure. He doesn’t know that. He couldn’t know that. It’s just an odd disc of metal. It’s sitting out by the road. To the doves, it is their souls; it is their destiny; it is everything that is good and beautiful in the world. For two hours, the man has been standing there. He’s been hogging the Dove’s Treasure. They all know, even though only a tiny minority of the world’s doves live in Missouri. They can feel him. There’s an ominous and brooding song in their souls. They want to strike back.

“You don’t want to stand there,” says a little girl. “It’s sacred.”

The man smiles. He looks patronizing. He shuffles a little to the left. “Is that enough?”

“You’re lucky,” she says.

There’s a woman in Arkansas. She’s having the galaxy tattooed onto her arm. The tattoo artist is asleep, but he’s still going. He’s put on most of the galaxy, and it’s beautiful, and perfect, and real, but there’s a shadow on the stars. He’s starting to tattoo in the thing that casts that shadow.

The phone rings. He startles. He blinks. He’s impressed by what he’s done so far, but he can’t imagine where he was going.

He’s lucky.

There’s a girl in Kentucky. She gets up and goes to the window. She looks at her reflection. For a moment, she sees her wings.

Sometimes, things happen. Little things. Stupid things, maybe.

Good things.

It’s worth remembering.

Somewhere out there, there are pirates.
They’re probably too fierce for me.
They’re probably too fierce for anybody.
But that’s okay.
There are pirates in the north.
But this is dry land.
– Meredith’s diary

It is 9:41am, and Meredith awakens to hear the gentle lapping of waves against her window. She looks outside and sees that the ocean has stolen her neighborhood. Short fences, lawns, bushes, street, cars, and sidewalk—all have vanished beneath a tide of green and blue. The surface of the ocean is studded with rising telephone poles on which perch seagulls and the occasional sunning crab; with the second floors of houses, such as her own; and with the gently waving treetops.

“Somewhere out there,” she says, “are pirates.”

She sits down. She sulks. Then she sighs.

“I need a better blanket.”

Outside, she can hear the seagulls squabbling.

Meredith spreads her blanket out on the floor. Then she goes to her cupboard. She’s a bit of a packrat. She’s got a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a whole lot of everything else squirreled away. So she starts by taking out a set of pontoons. She affixes them to her blanket. “After all,” she says, “a blanket without pontoons isn’t seaworthy.”

In the distance, she can hear the blowing of a great deep horn.

“It also needs a sail,” she says, and roots around in the cupboard. “I wonder if I want one mast, or three.”

After a moment, she sighs.

“One,” she says. “The third one’s all smashed. I really ought to have thrown it out after that English schooner shot it up with cannon.”

She fixes the mast to her blanket. She gets out a dehydrated crew and adds water. She uses the water right outside her window, so they end up kind of a salty lot.

“But no innuendo or obscenity,” she says firmly. “This is a family blanket.”

“Yarr,” sulks the first mate. “Things can fall off if you don’t obliquely allude to them sometimes.”

“That’s just superstition,” Meredith explains. After some thought, she fishes a selection of artillery and cannon out of her cupboard and attaches it to the blanket. This perks the first mate right up.

“We could also be using some low-end nuclear missiles,” he points out.

“Hm,” Meredith says, disapprovingly, but she installs them anyway. It’s important not to disappoint one’s crew.

“And a luxurious pleasure palace.”

Meredith checks. “I’ve only got one, and it’s cracked.”

The first mate makes a face. “Yarr,” he sighs. “And I thought you were prepared.”

“I’m not,” Meredith says. She looks out the window. “Somewhere out there, there are pirates.”

“We could have a giant clock,” the first mate says. “That tells time. And grants wishes.”

Meredith ignores him. She pulls out a sewing machine and considers it, then nods and sets it on the blanket. Then there’s chocolate milk, and a life-size inflatable Godzilla, and a peach, and most importantly of all, the figurehead, sitting proudly on the blanket’s prow.

“Let’s go,” she says.

The cannon fires. The wall falls down. The blanket sails out.

“North,” she says.

The blanket creaks as the wheel turns.

It is an ocean somewhere in the never, on the shores of dream.

The captain harries the serpent from east to west. Hard-pursued, she dives. She passes the layer of fire, where the phosphorescence of the worms turns the sea red, yellow, orange, and white. She passes the layer of darkness. She passes into the land of the Princes.

“Help me,” she says, to the spearfish, its nose as sharp as a razor and long as the day. But it gathers its raiment of gold and its chorus of anglers and swims away.

“Help me,” she says, to the great dark eye of the squid. For a long moment, it studies her. Then there is a flickering and a fading in the great eye’s depths. The squid’s attention has turned away.

She batters at the gate of the Sea King’s palace.

“Help me,” she says to the guardsman there.

“The Sea King sees no one,” says the guard. “Nor may I help a straggler by.”

“If I am slain,” says the serpent. “If I am slain, that day the world dies.”

“Aye,” says the guard. “But things are as they are.”

“That is the day the world will die,” says the serpent, as if she cannot comprehend.

“I’m sorry,” says the guard.

So the serpent flows upwards to break the surface of the sea, and there is the captain, who has gained much distance on her in this time. His ship is made of darkest wood, and its sails are tattered as from knives; and the sky behind it is splashed with blood, and the wheel is made of bone; and on the deck stands the spearman, braced to throw.

“Kill her,” says the captain.

She flees across the water, as hard and as fast as still she may.

“Kill her,” says the captain.

For just a moment, the spearman stays his hand.

On the first floor there is a room seething with pink cotton candy. It is alive. It has a great and terrible mind.

The room has a balcony overlooking it. Scientists come there and look down at the cotton candy. So it doesn’t grow lonely.

They say, “Hello!”

“Hello,” says the cotton candy. It swirls. “I have a great and terrible mind.”

“Is that so?” the scientists ask.

“Yes,” says the cotton candy. Then it will say something profound and useful. Like a unified field theory. Or a new cardinal number between one and ten that no one had ever heard of before. Or practical dating advice.

People who get tired of working in the factory sometimes come to the balcony. They dive in. They vanish under the swirling and the bubbling of the cotton candy. They drown there. And as they drown, the cotton candy shouts, “I’m bubbling with love and death!”

It is not wonderful that that happens, you understand. It’s just the cotton candy that is wonderful.

There is a room on the first floor packed tight with rotating gumballs. These are like ordinary gumballs. But they do not like to be eaten. Instead they like to rotate around people. If they ever got out then people would be constantly surrounded by rotating gumballs. It would be very socially awkward. It would produce the kinds of complications that nuclei have to deal with every day. It’s too bad that nuclei have to suffer that, but people shouldn’t have to!

The whole factory is full of things like that. Things that are wonderful, but can’t be let out.

On the second floor, there are tigers. Tigers are pretty cool. But they like to eat people sometimes. Eat them, gnaw on them, or sometimes just playfully maim them. That’s why tigers don’t make good wonderful things to have in your house. People would always be saying, “Spot! Stop eating the guests!” and “Spot! Bad tiger! That’s mommy’s arm.”

This would not just be bad for people. It would also make the tigers sad.

The second floor also has that guy. That guy. The one to whom freedom of speech applies. It’s not so that everyone can talk, you know, whatever activist judges say. It’s for him. Scientists visit him sometimes too.

“I think,” he will say, “that the moon is a giant marble, that escaped the factory.”

“It was actually an affiliate—” starts one scientist.

“You shouldn’t criticize me,” he’ll say. “I have a right to free speech!”

“You’re right!” admits the scientist. “I have to shut up now.”

He’s not very pleasant to be around. But he’s important! Free speech osmoses to everyone else. As long as he’s alive, everyone else gets some too.

On the third floor, there is the happiness machine. You push a button and you are guaranteed to be happy. Leonard Schnauzel, who, due to his name, had never previously been happy, was the first man to push the button.

“Oh my God,” he said, at the time. “I finally understand.”

That’s when a bunch of underdressed women and a hot car were delivered to his home. Also, there were sacks of cash. When you look at commercials that promise sex and money if you buy the product, it’s not just something they’re making up—they’re harkening back to the legendary experience of Leonard Schnauzel.

“What a wonderful machine!” he said. He hugged it. A lot. But then they locked the machine away on the third floor of the factory. It’s still there today!

On the fourth floor, they have the hall of inflatable gods. These work a lot like RealDolls, except for worship instead of sex. They are not as good as an actual god, and definitely not as good as God, but sometimes people get lonely.

“Zeus!” a woman might say, inflating a Zeus. “Transform yourself into a swan and let’s get it on!”

That is not something that this reporter can personally imagine happening. But it is the illustration on the Zeus box.

“Wolf god!” a mysterious wanderer might say. “Help me restore the balance of the world!”

Then he would inflate the wolf god. The wolf god would help him restore balance to the world. Studio Ghibli knows! They’ve toured the factory in a special bus.

There is also a giant lollipop. It is stuck on the fourth floor for three reasons. First it is sticky. Second, if it were let out, people would be licking it all the time and would never get anything done. Third, it is bigger than the room it is in, which makes it also bigger than every possible egress for the room it is in. It’s true! You can prove it mathematically!

On the fifth floor are the cubiclemaids and cubiclemen. These are like mermaids and mermen, except that the bottom half is not a fish but rather some sort of office supply, like paperclips or printer toner. They sing marvelously and try to call passing workers.

“We promise a marvelous life in the cubicle maze!” they sing. “It will be full of joy and wonder!”

Their song promises a look at hidden treasures sparkling in the cubicle maze. It promises a chance to see the dolphins and memos that dart and play in the cubicle reefs. But if someone heeds their call, usually, they wind up drowning in work. It’s best not to listen!

On the sixth floor are the people responsible for the factory of wonderful things. They think they’re allowed to leave. But they’re not. If they ever stopped to think about it rationally, that’d be pretty obvious. But they don’t. They just go on making stuff!

The factory isn’t far from here. Just head downtown and take a left. The building shines like ice.

You can’t miss it!

Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow. Everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.

But Mary died.

A hive of hardy coleopteran intelligences had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow. Everywhere that the hive would crawl, the lamb was sure to go.

But the hive died.

The loper had a long neck. Its limbs were like great sticks. Its fur flowed like water as it ran. Sometimes the mammals would cast forth a new intelligent species, with warm eyes like the humans had. The loper would eat them.

The loper had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow.

Everywhere the loper went, the lamb was sure to go.

The lamb said, “Baa!”

It gamboled.

But the loper died.

Crystals jutted forth from the dead Earth. They hummed to themselves. They exchanged incomprehensible thoughts. The crystals had a lamb.

“What will we feed the lamb?” the crystals asked themselves, on a particular millisecond, in a particular minute, during a single cycle of the eighteenth aeon of the world.

“Milk.”

Several centuries passed.

“We have no milk. The earth is dead.”

“Is the lamb alive?”

“The lamb is alive. It is in good health.”

“It is good.”

The crystals’ thoughts were not in English. Your humble author has translated them via babelfish.

Wherever the crystals sat and brooded and thought their incomprehensible thoughts, the lamb was sure to go.

But the crystals died.

There are things that move through space. They are great vaporous things. They spread over light-years. And they know love. Their love is terrible and brilliant and bright. It is piercing. It is the defining characteristic of their existence.

The things in space have a little lamb. Its fleece is white as snow.

They love it.

They love it fiercely and well.

But the things die.

The lamb is alone. There is nothing left.

“When will I find something worthy of me?” asks the lamb.

The lamb abandons the universe to death.

The lamb moves on.

Emily walks into the Scary Forest.

Emily walks into the Scary Forest with a basket. In the basket is her cornbread. She has many loaves.

Fairies trouble her.

“Emily!” cry the fairies. “Emily! Emily! What are you doing on Great Long Road? What are you doing on Great Long Road, in Scary Forest, with a basket in your hand?”

“I’m taking this cornbread to the Arena to find out whether it can count the real numbers,” Emily says.

Then the fairies shriek and fly all around her, tugging at her hair, rubbing dirt in her clothes, buffeting her with their wings.

“Cornbread can’t count the reals!” they shriek.

But Emily endures.

The great wolf troubles Emily.

“Emily,” rumbles the great wolf. “What are you doing on Great Long Road? In Scary Forest? With a basket in your hand?”

The great wolf is long and slinks low. He has three heads. He is taller than her brother, taller than her father, taller than the city walls.

“Great wolf,” says Emily, “I am taking this cornbread to the Arena. I am taking it to the Arena for the Judges to judge. I baked it hard. I baked it well. I think it might just have a chance, a tiny chance, to count the reals.”

The wolf smiles. Its tongue lolls to the side.

“Cornbread can’t count the reals,” it says. “But I’ll eat it. And I’ll eat you!”

“Well,” says Emily, “you may certainly have some.”

She takes out three loaves of cornbread. She throws them in a pattern around the wolf. The wolf lunges, then frowns. The cornbread smells delicious—but whichever direction he goes is further from two loaves and closer only to one!

“I’m trapped at a local maximum!” wails the great wolf. He looks at the loaves. He attempts to wobble towards them all but only winds up stretching. He whines.

Emily carefully walks past the wolf. He wants to eat her, too. He eddies closer to her. But at no point on her path does the wolf’s optimum location put him within reach.

“Curses!” sighs the wolf. He flops down in the middle of the road and waits, grumpily, for two of the pieces of cornbread to decay.

Emily passes through a glade, and she sleeps there for the night. Then she’s back on the road again.

The cornbread horror troubles her.

“I am the cornbread horror,” it says. It is a large block of cornbread with teeth. “I have killed ten thousand of your kind, mortal girl. I have cut them into squares with my sharp, sharp teeth.”

“Why?”

“It is my destiny,” says the cornbread horror. “I will kill all those who bring cornbread here, if that cornbread is not different in some notable respect than each piece of cornbread that has passed through here before.”

“I see,” says Emily.

“It is not my desire,” says the cornbread horror. “I am not truly sentient, being made of cornbread. I simply do what it is my nature to do.”

It seethes and eddies horribly, as is its nature.

“Pardon,” says Emily, “but are you included in the list of ‘each piece of cornbread’?”

“I am,” says the cornbread horror.

“So if my cornbread is different from every sort of cornbread that has come through here before, but not different from you—”

“Then I will still kill you,” says the horror. “And your cornbread will merge seamlessly into my tasty fluffy aurulence. This is what normally happens, for my destiny contains a terrible twist—I cannot meaningfully distinguish differences between pieces of cornbread!”

Emily winces at that. But she still takes out a piece of cornbread and holds it up hopefully.

“Can you tell if it’s different?” Emily asks.

“It seems identical to me,” says the cornbread horror. “In the right light, it even has teeth. So it is necessary that I kill you.”

“But . . . it knows the difference between the two of you,” Emily says.

The cornbread horror hesitates. “Uncertainty rises! Can cornbread truly be distinct from the cornbread horror if its only distinction is that it knows itself distinct from the cornbread horror, while this distinction the cornbread horror knoweth not?”

Leaving it to fret over the complexities of destiny, Emily moves on.

“I’ll kill you if it happens to be identical!” shouts the cornbread horror, behind her. “You’ll see!”

Once she is out of its sight Emily breaks into a run.

Fairies trouble Emily again. They’re very troublesome.

“Emily! Emily! Is it worth your life? Is it worth your life to have cornbread count the reals?”

The fairies swarm about her, pinching and tugging.

“I want to know what happened to Mom,” Emily says.

“To Mom! To Mom!” shout the fairies.

One fairy hangs in the air in front of Emily. “Your mother makes cornbread tastier than yours—but even her cornbread can’t count the reals!”

“It can’t,” shout the fairies. “It can’t count the reals!”

Then a western wind rises and they all swirl away.

The great face troubles Emily. It’s a great face, that’s in the middle of the road. Also, it has tentacles.

“Emily!” booms the great face. “Emily, you are here.”

“I am!” says Emily.

“I am the great face,” it says, “on the road to the Arena, where the Judges judge cornbread to see if it can count the real numbers. I will not fall for such tricks as the cornbread horror did. Do you know why?”

“No, sir,” says Emily. She looks attentive.

“It is because I am more than cornbread,” says the face. “I am self-aware. I am a person, with an internal model of myself and my intentions—an ‘I’ inside. When I declare my intention to snatch you up with my tentacles and cram you and your cornbread in my mouth and chew and chew until you’re all dead and gone, it is not the gallows prediction of an inanimate pastry—it is the unswervable declaration of a dedicated soul!”

“I see,” says Emily sadly.

There is a pause.

“Make it fast,” Emily says. “I mean, faster. I mean, don’t just sit there.”

The face scrunches up unhappily.

“My internal model is inaccurate,” it says. “I believe that I intend to eat you, but I am not making any move to do so.”

Emily pats a tentacle.

“That can happen with self-awareness,” Emily says sympathetically. “Like, I never thought that I’d try to make cornbread that could count the real numbers. But then I did!”

“Thank you,” says the face. It is pleased by her commiseration.

The face hesitates.

“It can’t actually count them, you know,” the face says. “No cornbread could. Cornbread can’t count the reals!”

“But . . .”

Emily flounders.

“But, why is there an Arena at the end of the road, then?”

“It has been there since the dawn of time,” says the face. “But no cornbread has ever reached it; for the road has many dangers, and at each step the cornbread must pass a new test. The tests are infinite; thus even an Iron Chef would be doomed to failure.”

“That’s too bad,” says Emily. She hesitates. “My mom,” she says. “I mean, a long time ago. She went this way. With cornbread.”

“I did not intend to eat her,” says the face. “She is somewhere ahead. But her fate is predetermined. She will fail.”

“You don’t know that!” snaps Emily. “Maybe she could go down the road forever, never finding a challenge that her cornbread can’t pass! Maybe when no typical cornbread can pass the test, hers is just atypical enough! Maybe when she faces a monster that despises people carrying unusual cornbread, hers is normal enough to get her past! There’s no way to determine if she’s dead without finding out where she’s dead, and to find out where she’s dead, I have to catch up to her, and if I don’t catch up to her then maybe she’s still alive forever and her cornbread will pass the test!”

There is a silence.

“Wow,” says the face. “You’re really passionate.”

“I have to be,” says Emily. “You can’t make ambitious cornbread without a burning passion. And corn meal.”

“I really think that I’m going to eat you,” says the face. “But instead, I’ll say, ‘good luck.’”

In the infinite distance there stands the Arena; and along the road are infinite dangers and hardships; and somewhere ahead, Emily’s mother; and the fairies swirl in the air over the Scary Forest and the Great Long Road, dancing, playing, spinning, crying, shouting when they’re near her, “Cornbread can’t count the reals!”

And it may be that this is so.