Bezoarville

Unedited, uncut, and unmodified from the Author’s Odd Mind

>PROLOGUE<

I’ve lived here for sixteen years.

Some years don’t end with December.

If you’re reading this, then you’ve found my journal. Either I’m a goner and you have likely taken this off my body, or you found “that book she’s always carrying around” on the ground somewhere and I’d like it back. Please don’t share the material here willy-nilly. On the other hand, if you intend to return it, no reason not to let your good deed be rewarded, so indulge yourself a little.

My name is Freddy Mellencamp, and that’s not a joke. I live in a town called Bezoarville, and that’s not a joke either. I might joke a fair amount, but more importantly, I’ll be lying a lot. That is, this record will do a lot of cherry-picking events from my life, and most of the names will be changed or moved around, because there’s a sort of person who learns of a candle under a bushel and must find it even if it means burning a house to the ground. I like Bezoarville, but if this account convinces people that it’s a good place, hopefully they’ll also learn that some lights are hidden for good reason.

To start with, I won’t say where Bezoarville is exactly, because tourism isn’t encouraged. We have a more closed economy, and most of the reason we have jobs these days is to buy things from out-of-town, pay for long distance transport, and make online purchases. As things stand, lots of us barter favors, and the residents of our town are a weird bunch, a roughly self-sufficient ecosystem that includes everything from Worst Bennemach’s gas and electricity empire to a comprehensive waste plant run by three of the forty seven Pickerings in the area. All this takes up less space than you might think, so even though I say Bezoarville is “in New Hampshire” I expect zero people to stumble into its boundaries. For that matter, we have a nuclear plant, and some liberal redistribution of radiation warning signage (entirely valid signage, just a bit more than necessary) dots the boundary of the town. Satellite imagery probably gives us away, but from the sky we mostly look like an especially robust offshoot of nearby suburban growth.

The few who do make it to town, well… they get discouraged by the bezoars from staying too long. That’s as good a place as any to start my tale.

Do you know the meaning of the word “bezoar?”

CHAPTER1:FOREIGN_BODY

The rock I’d just thrown up sat in my hand.

It looked annoyed. The worst part? I couldn’t tell if its annoyance came from being inside me, or being outside me. It wasn’t like any rock I’d pick up from the side of the road, but it had just as little to say in words about itself as those other pebbles. Might have been a new species, or class, or however one divided up different rocks; I wasn’t a geologist or minerologist or whateverologist specialized in telling granite from marble, and to prove my point I had no idea what to even call that kind of person.

The rock sat there not participating in my argument.

It had a slightly odd texture under the slime it had picked up in my throat. In color, it had the quality of lichen: not brown, not green, not gray. Rolling it around confirmed how smooth it appeared, like an evil candy. It was about the size of a quarter pulled oblong. It weighed enough that I could probably have hurled it at speed and taken off a tiny bit of bark from a tree trunk on impact.

Of course, all this came in second place to the fact that this rock originated somewhere within my body.

“You’re not a kidney stone, I’m pretty sure,” I told it. “I remember that gallstones are… a thing – liver stones too, maybe?”

Funnily enough, my uncle had gotten himself in a gallstone way, long long ago when he wasn’t the sort of person that drove the sort of person like me to flee far and fast. My lens of the past picked out a small hospital room and the blur-faced chess pieces of my mother and brother. Uncle Oliver languished against the bedframe. The birth must have been hard, because he had a large amount of himself covered up, excusing no doubt a good deal of cutting and stitching. Presumably the hospital wouldn’t have done that if the thing had any chance of passing out of him without surgery.

Or maybe my memory was even worse than normal, or maybe that case was doubly exceptional besides the fact it intersected with my life.

“Ugh.”

I forearmed my face. No vomit had come up, but the feeling of my throat backpedaling made me shudder and try to throw distance between then and now. Still staring at the stone, I began to cock my arm back for a toss.

“No, hang on,” I mumbled. “If this means I’ve got a sickness then doctors might want to look at it – if I end up seeing any.”

////

I eyeballed the rock, hoping it might object. Eventually, it got wiped clean on some limp grass, then put in one of my pants pockets. It sat quietly and coldly.

After standing, the large road sign occupied my attention again.

I’d been forging my way eastward from Pittsburgh since the fall of the Roman empire, partly because of how few people picked me up. The year AD 2002 was not a good one for hitchhikers; who knew when you’d snag a perfectly innocent terrorist and they’d steal your car and blow up five or twenty or a thousand civilians? Being androgynous-looking didn’t help, since I didn’t so easily catch the eye of some traveler with ill intentions, but also made some people reconsider helping a somebody when they might have helped out a “nice wandering lady.”

Honestly, there were a couple days I’d have accepted a gingham dress and flashed some ankle for a drop-off at the next McDonald’s.

McDonald’s, though, was nowhere to be seen.

The shoulder of the road had a big two-pole metal sheet, with the green-on-white text of navigational signs in this neck of the country, and which had gotten a bit surreal since seeing the same white character with green backing style of Vermont license plates that I’d started passing a decent number of days behind me. This sign proclaimed its promised land lay half of a mile ahead, and that the name for the same was “Bezoarville.”

A smaller metal rectangle hunched below the name of the town. This one bore orange triangles with exclamation marks on either end, bracketed laminated letters warning of the presence of dangerous materials ahead. I can only remember that the wording had an ominous kind of vagueness, like if you ran into a red octagon that advised the wisdom of slowing down and becoming aware of your surroundings rather than giving you a four letter imperative.

I felt a small chill where my pocket’s new occupant sat near the skin, at the same time as a half-smile half-frown chiseled into my face.

“Well, isn’t that funny,” I said as I took a hundred steps to pass the official border of town, then kept on going. “Probably not many unwanted guests here.”

I went up the road into this ugly hospitable promised land.

Time to start coming up with names. It’d be fitting to call that long asphalt serpent Gorge Road, on account of how it moves across a big gash outside the town proper – might be a place where construction crews blasted through rock a bit too excitedly while making the route, or maybe they dropped a bunch of boulders into a convenient bit of terrain for municipal reasons. It’s the quintessential New England road; smooth most of its distance, most of the time, but with some spots tailor-made for knocking the skin off bicyclers who get too close to cars mid-migration, and a hundred places that frost heaves eventually turn into wheel predators’ mouths, every one waiting for new patches before the next year pulls them open again.

I followed Gorge Road up through a thinning wooded area, onto a hill, and up past low-mid quality housing. Past the midpoint of the hill’s downslope, the trees parted to show Little Avenue. It ran perpendicular to Gorge Road, sliding along the center of the town’s meaty core, starting with fragmented business and residential pockets that quickly abandoned “living quarters” in favor of “professional” – but always had a house or two to break up the pattern every so often.

It was coming up on sunset, and where large glass fronts of the offices peeked out of the lineup… well, it’s still my favorite sight of the settled part of town. Something about how the disco ball squares catch dusk, then throw it across half the town’s breadth, especially where Black Lake River crosses under and S-curves its way down the other side of the avenue. It’s like everywhere and nowhere.

I was interested in three things by that point. In decreasing order of importance, they were a place to eat, a place to sleep, and a place to ask questions. Fortunately, Patricia’s Diner sat right at the first major intersection before me, and it wasn’t closed. Sometimes that’s something you have to be careful about on Sundays. Before I chose to be a tramp on a mission, I’d have rarely thought about operating hours of a restaurant as anything besides an inconvenience. Now, the prospect was the difference between garbage cuisine and maybe getting something before it hit the bins. Bad food, too little food, food that costs you something dear – these each have their problems, but worst is no food.

When I started toward Patricia’s, it was with the hope of begging or a dishwashing type dine-and-make-up-the-bill-later deal. Stealing is sometimes your only way to fill your belly, and I’ve tried it a couple times. Notice that I said “tried.” It’s harder than it looks sometimes. More importantly, when a little help from strangers goes a long way, you learn to try and behave. If I stayed in the area more than a single day, and they fingered me as an undesirable, it’d be uncomfortable at best. That being the case, I wanted to make these people think I could at least pull my own weight, offer something in return if they didn’t feel the dew-touched hand of charity on their souls.

Thinking along those lines and worrying about empty stomach songs was probably why I didn’t notice anything odd about the girl I passed on the sidewalk, or the guy coming out of the diner with his relation or friend or whomever right behind him, or the several people inside as I entered.

The patrons got an eyeful of a short-breathed basket case when the door tinkled shut. Jacket over a shoulder, trash bag in one hand, backpack with a rip along its mesh cupholder pocket or whatever, not smelling like manure but also definitely not smelling like much good. Two shoes with about one and a half shoes’ worth of material combined, a stained tank top, pants hanging loose where starvation chic did wonderful things for waistline numbers. I was a method actor of a hitchhiker down to the backward baseball cap and the mud spot on my cheek. The only possible improvement would have been a tail-wagging grimy animal companion.

In return, I absorbed the staggering figure of Patricia herself behind the counter. Her hair was gorgeous, her expression was warty, and her whole body had the solidity of the Old Man in the Mountain (this was before the rock formation fell down, so it fit at the time). She looked at me and spotted trouble, and decided to give me a chance anyway. For that, Patricia Rumsford has gratitude I cannot put into easy words.

////

The big lady of as-yet-unknown identity panned up and down my figure, and said, “Well, you look like John Brown got hisself dug up a hundred years ripe.”

She moved her eyes and her lips and nothing else, and it sounded like she’d told people both better and worse. Her eyeliner and lipstick looked plastic-perfect. She had brunette hair and matching eyes, exactly the same color as her uniform. I imagined she’d been there twenty years ago with a cold cigarette in her mouth looking no different than she did now.

Behind her, a guy with a hair net on his blond beard and another on his blond dreads came from the kitchen’s swinging door, holding four plates and a pad of paper in his mouth, moving at speed that kind of terrified me. He dropped two plates in front of two occupants with a nod, spat the pad into his apron pocket while shifting the remaining food around, and stopped on a dime as he was cutting toward the other end of the diner. His stare took me in, judged me, and made me think he was going to either laugh or tell me to beat it.

Instead, he shouted, “Patricia, we want anything for the green sprout there?” like he was in a baseball stadium and the score was tied.

“Down a tad, Tommy,” Patricia said without looking back.

For the first time, she moved, lifting a hand with a large pair of rings on the middle finger and making a slight fending-off gesture in Tommy’s direction. The movement drew a high piping giggle from one of the people he’d just served; if it were an in-joke then I didn’t recognize it as such.

“Oh, sorry!” he said, in less of a bellow and more of a highly enthusiastic announcement.

“What you want, dear?” asked Patricia, slowly standing up a bit straighter.

“Me?” I asked, after turning to make sure there wasn’t a head floating over my shoulder.

“Yes, you. Little thing comes in here barely standing, that’s a good reason to getcha fed.”

I stared past her at the plates Tommy was still holding. Pancakes and sausage and eggs on one, which was a bit unusual for the hour, and something that could have been fish or chicken on the other. Tommy kept an eye on me, and also where he was going, so how he confirmed that the mother and kid at the counter each got what they wanted I’ll never know. The child immediately swallowed a whole sausage without chewing. It had a beautiful horror to it.

“Get a breakfast-for-dinner ready, and give it.”

Patricia’s tone went not so much stern as insistent.

////

I had several questions – several kinds of questions, actually – that I asked first chance that came along after reaching a new place. “Where’s a good place for X?” gets people talking and lets you dig into their worldviews from three or four directions. When you get there, you can decide if it’s actually suitable for your needs, and from there – well, that part’s up to you. Questions should be spent with direction rather than precision, if you get my meaning. Point rather than leading. This has several exceptions, like everything in life, and one of the most glaring and difficult-to-navigate is when you see something completely outside your expectations on a level that not only didn’t cross your mind, but you didn’t imagine could even reach the curb on the side of your mind.

Now, when several of those gremlins join forces, you’re really stuck with asking about the elephant in the room, because it’s hard enough to just convince yourself that such an oversized animal managed to make an appearance, let alone walk your words around it with tact and forethought.

As Tommy dipped back into the diner’s engine compartment, my ears perked up at the ding-a-ling I’d heard across a pretty good amount of the country. There’s a lot of use for bells, and any diner worth its salt will have at least two: one to let the door tell people that customers are coming and going, and one to draw the attention of the wait staff.

This ding-a-ling sounded a tad off, though. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see why after Tommy’s hip shoved the kitchen swing door open – namely, he had a bell at his waist, and it was one of those wooden handled brass things meant to bring farmhands in from the next county over or such, and that was the first of those gremlins. It sat in a loop, with a holster or something. My brain backtracked a bit, adding detail that I’d essentially disregarded from the last several moments. A similar bell accompanied each of the pair in the booth to my right, and it looked like Patricia had a rubberized grip peeking over the counter down by her middle as well. I couldn’t see a bell paired with every person present, but I also couldn’t see all of their midsections either. Slightly muffled clangs stabbed everywhere like watered-down honeybee stings.

That was a bit weird.

Rumbling faintly under the quiet caroling, I heard something else. Patricia had said something. She still was speaking as I started to turn back to her, a fluttery bundle of words that should have been legible but weren’t. My face began to get warm.

Fortunately, the second gremlin made itself known and interrupted me. If things had gone on waiting for my reaction, I’d have gotten stuck in the three-way intersection of asking her to repeat herself, and inquiring about the purpose or story behind all the hand bells, and checking whether she was alright with the tramp in her diner setting down a garbage bag somewhere to take a load off.

As it happened, a guy in that booth on my right suddenly stopped laughing and started spasming with a hand by his throat. He sort of bobbed up and down, fingers opening. He dropped a fork. His mouth pursed. Within two seconds his companion began shouting and carrying on, and ninety percent of the place’s hubbub got cut off with gardening shears. A couple people nearby rose and dashed or scooted closer. At least one figure slid away from the commotion, appearing a second later by the door of the diner.

////

Then the guy’s throat made all the noise and commotion stop as he pulled in a whistle-clacking breath. He gagged. He gagged again.

“AGAIN, Ahmed?” groaned Patricia.

The presumed Ahmed made a sound somewhere between a sneeze and a rolling pin hitting a slightly larger rolling pin. Out of his mouth fired an oval, the brownish red of an iron deposit exposed to rain. My guts lurched at the color. A shout rose from Ahmed’s companion.

Suddenly, the plate of mashed potatoes had a rock in it.

Patricia yelled something that I couldn’t make out, between the accent and the competing noise and the upset brain, and stomped out from her post toward the offender’s table. She held an object that looked like salad tongs and a whisk had a baby, brandishing it with menace and sweaty industry, her huge soles punishing the linoleum with a completely undeserved vigor.

“I say this deserves payment!” she barked.

The instrument descended on the mashed potatoes, and stole a fair amount of the pile along with the rock.

“You had fair warning!” she said, waving the thing at her victim and probably getting a bit of taters on his face. “You were just staring bug-eyed, pinky in the air!”

It was a mix of laughs held behind teeth and people hiding their faces with their hands, but I just sat there staring at that wire grabber Patricia was holding. Moist-ish rust showed through. It had a very different texture from the thing in my pocket.

She held the rock in the air as she marched back to her counter, slid a small hard plastic bowl next to where she’d been standing (though where she got it in the first place I couldn’t tell you), and slammed the implement down into it with a sports player’s arm. Her face looked a great deal like what I’d seen first thing coming through the door, only a bit sweatier and lips opened for heaving breaths. She glanced at me with a smile.

“Sorry, honey,” she said. “Sit wherever you’d like.”

Her voice had dropped the strong local flavor. I wasn’t sure if that meant she had a generic eastern-coast USA accent and she was putting on an act until now, or she was mustering some kind of different composure in the face of… I didn’t even know what to call what I’d just experienced.

“I… uh…”

Tommy emerged from the kitchen with food, and lots of it, somehow holding both a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice on his free palm. Maybe the incident had taken a lot more time than I’d thought, or maybe they were paying the cook staff to include some sort of stove witches.

His arm lowered the dish. He noticed the rock-potato bowl. He sidestepped. The aircraft landed.

“Enjoy!”

I turned my gaze to the lady whose name sat on the outside of the building.

“Well? Waiting for it to get cold?” she asked.

With less trepidation than I’d expected on arrival, I dropped my garbage bag behind the stool at the counter, loosened my backpack straps, and hunched onto the brown fake leather. I could feel the dirt sliding off the seat of my pants, and hoped it wouldn’t leave a visible smudge on the cushion.

“Thanks,” I half whispered, and then both glasses were empty and the plate had no more to give. An ant couldn’t have scavenged the surface.

“That’s a good sign in these parts, you’ll need an appetite to stay warm in the winter,” said Patricia.

I didn’t reach for my wallet yet. By scrimping and scavenging and panhandling and begging, I’d fed it with seventy three dollars and fifty nine cents, along with a few coupons that might stretch that sum ten or fifteen bucks further. That was my camel hump. Almost anything else should get touched before the cache. A few possessions could go toward cleaning up the bill if they were understanding and unconventional enough to accept barter. I hoped I could wash dishes for a few hours, though. Splitting and never showing my face again felt like a bad option, to the tune of taking up hard liquor or eating raw squirrel in the woods.

“My money situation isn’t the best,” was the opening salvo of my skirmish. “I’ve got a few things, a pair of good shoes that you’ll have-”

At this point, the rock from earlier in the day found its way to my hand seemingly of its own volition, sitting in a palm in a pocket in a pair of pants in a diner. The hand drew out quickly, gripping the thing firmly but without crushing force. It still felt weird, but not so gross.

Patricia caught the action, and one hundred percent of her interest flew to the odd rock.

“Ah! You took care of your bezoar already. Didn’t know if you had dealt with it, or were still going to, or you’d skip it until tomorrow. Appreciate that.”

She frowned at me.

“I’ll let you have today on credit, so long as you show up again tomorrow to talk it over – or I’ll take that as payment plus credit in your favor.”

“Bezoar… like the town?”

I looked at the rock, questions turning a carousel rapidly.

“Yeah, that’s how Bezoarville got named,” she said. “Little crushed-together bunches of matter from inside your body.”

I looked at the bowl she’d used, where it still sat close to my plate.

“What, you don’t think they’re gross?” I pressed.

“Oh, they’re gross, as well as potentially dangerous and distracting. If you choked that thing up in my restaurant, I’d have read you the riot act as well. They’ve got some value, though.”

She frowned again, this time the lines curling nearly to the bottom of her chin.

“It’s best if you leave the town, actually. Not this instant, but get back on the road tomorrow and head past the outer limits by afternoon.”

////

I couldn’t hang onto my whatever any more, some ball of idea meatloaf hovering between questions and demands and the desire to begin crying and the stupid contentment of a long-denied full stomach.

“What’s the deal with the bells? And are the, er, bezoars a common event?”

Patricia’s eyes turned spiny.

“What’s your name, honey?”

A question answered with a question. When the second question is rhetorical, or they’re asking something you’re obviously supposed to know, that often means you’re about to be told off or shown to the door; a distancing maneuver. When it’s something that they want to know, that’s the opposite. Since I looked like I’d followed a pickup truck for half an hour with my leg tied to the hitch with a rope, I thought it was less likely she hoped to get something by manipulating me or coming across as vulnerable.

“Fredericka Decimos,” I said, this being back before I started going by Mellencamp. “Freddy for short.”

“Well, Freddy for short, the bells are for drawing attention if you need help – but ONLY if you really need it. As for the rest? We try to shoo people along before that starts becoming a concern.”

This made me very attentive.

“Are you saying that most people don’t stay in town?”

Before she could respond, I rephrased according to my more honest interests and needs.

“I mean, do you generally… uh, discourage outsiders from setting up shop when they happen to run across Bezoarville?”

Tommy broke in with another glass of juice.

“Best to keep fires from breaking out rather than try extinguishing them later,” he said.

Just as quickly, he left.

“A bit oddly put, but he’s right,” sighed Patricia.

I thought, then asked, “Would it be accurate to say that someone hoping to harass a member of the town is going to find cold reception here?”

Patricia… flattened, would be the best word for it. Her expression didn’t shift, but it took on a different angle like grinding a glass knife to a straight edge on stone.

“As a general rule, most people who hope to do much beyond walking around the outside border will find a cold reception.”

The New England lather started foaming up her words again, though not quite as it had done before. Moving from forced control to forced pleasantry? Either way, I heard between the lines: You cannot be thinking what I believe you’re thinking.

“Well, you can probably hear that I’m not from around here,” I said.

“You sound like you’re from the wide open part of Michigan, maybe. I had a school friend who sounded a little similar, actually, and he grew up in farm country.”

“Pennsylvania in my case, nearish some of the Amish community. At least, ‘near’ if we’re talking highway through the sky. Had to leave, though, when someone close to me started getting out of hand. He wasn’t the sort that tolerated anything but fear and respect, in that order.”

I hesitated, then took a breath, asked myself why I was suddenly trusting this lady more than anyone since Rick and Mom, and pulled my sleeve up my right arm. The scar was kind of cool, if you didn’t mind questions while showing off your battle prowess.

“He had a taste for poison. Couldn’t stand the slightest challenge to his pride. I tried out smoking for the first time, and he got loud when he saw me. I called him a bully who didn’t have the bravery of a stupid little kid. He stabbed me with a broken bottle. That wasn’t the first time or the last that we Had Words.”

////

I covered up the rounded Glasgow smile, not looking at anyone.

“Never puffed on anything since either.”

That thought actually made me snort-laugh. It really had been years, hadn’t it?

“All told, he never was the sort that I could see going on a crusade, chasing ‘that stupid filly’ without even knowing for sure that I still sucked air. Even if he heard I had been encountered on the road, complete with street number and directions…”

I shrugged. Patricia didn’t have any of the expressions I’d feared she might put on, when I saw her from the corner of an eye.

“He’s the sort that’ll leave an evil, evil ghost when he dies, though. Wanting, hateful, and the most important man to be born with two legs and two arms. It’d let me sleep easy to be safe and not sorry.”

None of the customers had swung by my direction, and none of them paid me more attention than taking mental shots at what brought me to this neck of the woods with the clothes on my back and little else. The staff afforded me privacy. It felt… not terrible, really, to be partly out of others’ notice when that was what I wanted.

“Unless you want to run me out, I’ll see what this place is like,” I told Patricia with a tired arm-wave that reached past the diner’s walls. “Won’t bother anyone. If the… if Bezoarville isn’t what I want, I’ll be gone in less than a week at most. I’ve slept by the road before, so anything’s-”

The arm propping me up suddenly had a strong wide hand pushing it onto the counter.

“Little lady,” Patricia whispered, and this time her eyes made me more than just surprised.

When she cast a glare out the front door to the street, I followed its direction, but saw nothing. Still, little groups of shivers ran from my feet to my head. They all spelled “BAD” in Morse.

Patricia said, “I feel like I really ought to run you out of town, to be honest. That wouldn’t really fit the spirit of the place, though. We’re a refuge of sorts, with high walls and strange types that call our little burg ‘home.’ No matter what I think, though, you are not just walking out that door again.”

It could have come across as sinister, but the fact she started patting my arm instead of keeping it pinned longer somehow made it more ominous.

“For one, we’re almost at the new moon. You’re going to need watching for a few days.”

She leaned back.

“For another, you’re not sleeping outside. Outside’s not safe in the dark, and especially not alone.”

CHAPTER2:NO_BUMP_IN_THE_NIGHT

Sitting in an old beat-up couch was not where I’d originally expected to end up on my first day of a new stop along the road. Especially surprising was the clean hair of a shower and a single rock-hard chocolate chip cookie. This all went pretty disconcertingly against my measly hope for a dry clean alleyway next to a bakery garbage drop. Making the situation even out with good fortune and bad fortune was the big fat mystery theme of the day, with Patricia kindly taking me back to her place and kindly looking after a couple bumps and bruises and kindly staying INCREDIBLY CAGEY about a worrying number and degree of subjects.

For now, I relaxed.

The apartment was very neat in some places and atrocious in others. You could eat right off the furniture and the carpet, but the fake tile kitchen area had sticky spots of the “this will be clean when you use a knife and blow torch and not before” variety. Patricia’s wood-box television had the clearest picture I’d ever seen, but the top of the set showed probably an inch of dust. In some places, scabs; in others, spotless skin.

When Patricia finished clearing up her table and counter space, she sat in a knit-topped armchair beside my couch, sipping tea in a peacock bathrobe and hair curlers.

“What is vulcanization?” the contestant on the TV enunciated, emphasizing the first two words. Alex gave her eight hundred dollars and a smile.

Eventually I chewed my cookie to death and couldn’t take it anymore. Patricia had brought me into her home, put a bandage on the big scrape at my collarbone, and thrown my dirty clothes into her washer… but it still wasn’t fully clear as to why, or what she expected of me. I didn’t even yet know her last name.

“I need to ask,” I told her. The first words since I’d stepped out of the shower, half an hour ago.

“Oh!” she said.

She frowned, got up, and walked toward a tall cupboard on the near end of the apartment’s hallway. From its top shelf she took a blonde handled bell the size of my fist.

“What am I supposed to do with…?”

////

“If you feel something stuck in your throat, as in genuinely stuck, then ring it as hard as you can.”

Ah… well, that was a nice hook-turn back in the direction I’d wanted to go initially.

“Now why would something get ‘genuinely stuck?’ I’m sure I know how to eat food the right way after two decades of being alive.”

I waited to see if she’d try to word her way around it, or try and twist the discussion into a metaphor for kidnap or assault. What she did instead, unsurprisingly, was surprise me.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked. “Don’t bother trying to be ‘polite’ or ‘conservative’ about it, just say what comes to mind.”

She looked a bit intimidating even with her bedtime getup, and the question sort of tunneled a path down that exact line of thought. Maybe she meant that to happen, or maybe she wanted me pushed onto my heels again.

“I’d put you around fiftyish on the low side, though I’ve also met a couple people who could do wonders and keep that type of appearance well into their seventies.”

Eyes turned from serious to seriously but sarcastically bothered in an instant, and Patricia’s mouth dodged to the left side of her face.

“I swear, Dolly Parton makes so, so many women look bad. I don’t care how much is surgery, it’s annoying to see that sort of…”

She gestured with a hand, and I had the impression of that hand holding a cigarette between two fingers a little while ago. Then she gave me an evil little smirk.

“What if I told you that I was born the same year as a certain nice archduke over in Europe getting shot?”

Suddenly, two plus two was making five and I couldn’t find who was carrying the one into the equation.

“You’re telling me you were alive for World War I?” I asked.

“What, do you think it’s impossible?”

“You can’t tell me you expect me to believe it without question!”

She frowned happily, and then pointed at the bell she still had on a belt around her own waist.

“We in this town have an unusual way of life. There are a lot of oddities, with the most obvious being our namesake.”

She pointed at my throat.

“Every day you’re here, you’ll hack up a bezoar. It has nothing to do with what you eat – generally – and it’ll usually be in the latter half of the day. If you try adding up the weight of all of them, it won’t come out in a way that makes numeric sense. You’re probably about half my weight. Within a year, you’ll produce enough material that it’d tip the scales away from you if you measured side-by-side. One of our residents, Dr. Koulmanpos, can tell you all sorts of other strange details; they’re made of non-human biological material sometimes, they’re made of you sometimes, they ought to be hardened only after existing for a lot longer than a day, and many other tidbits I can’t remember.”

She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair.

“In exchange for ejecting these things, and other challenges, we are given long life and good health.”

Granted, it’d be a while before I saw how that glossed over multiple important data points, but it managed to be true and aimed in a representative direction.

A heavy finger poked at a bucket by the wall, next to a basket full of magazines. What initially seemed like what Mom probably would have called a “conversation piece” was actually a collection of bezoars, not quite overflowing but pretty close.

“That’s the prettiest disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” I truthfully told her.

They really were. The human body has some weird colors inside and out, and these seemed to mostly stick to that palette in a bunch of variations. Phlegm yellow, flaky-skin gray, meat pink, scab brown, vein blue, and many more besides. Some had spots. Some had a stripe pattern. One in particular seemed to feature something on its surface that I definitely didn’t want to investigate.

“As my father liked to tell me from a young age, ‘nothing is gotten for nothing.’” Patricia said. “In any case, I have an interest in keeping you for a few days, but after that you’re free to leave on your way to somewhere or nowhere whenever you like. It doesn’t drive everybody away, but until you tell someone that there’s some benefit they tend to prefer staying away when the alternative’s THIS. We avoid a little bit of headache with our signposts around the edge of town; you’d be amazed what a simple ‘we keep bad substances here, buzz off’ notice can do.”

“Yeah? Huh. Do you feel like expanding on that whole ‘keep me here’ thing? That sounds ever so slightly concerning, almost as much as your creepy warning about not going out after dark.”

I wasn’t angry yet; she’d taken me in and done a lot for my wellbeing, especially considering how much and how little she knew about me. It wasn’t a huge risk, considering my skin and bones state. That said, I half expected her to start telling me about these mysterious dangers and then get abruptly laid out by a heart attack, leaving me to fend for myself in the mysterious depths of New Hampshire using mysterious and incomplete advice. That would certainly make me angry.

“First, promise me that you’ll not leave tonight while I’m sleeping.”

“I’ll stay here unless you give me good reason to do otherwise.”

“Fine… fine. Should have expected that from a kid like you.”

“I’m old enough to use the toilet all by myself, lady!”

She gave a raven croak of a laugh.

“You’re the sort who turns to the last page of a book immediately, aren’t you? I’ll tell you what I can, then. Every new moon, give or take a few days, you’ll throw up something bigger than a bezoar. Much more revolting.”

////

“Like one of those things but soft?”

“Oh, no, no. It can take several forms, but think more along the lines of raw hamburger, or a big tumor sausage. Three words: disgusting, unsettling, dangerous.”

As I started to shoot back with something nuclear-grade, she waved a hand, starting to get up from her seat.

“Dangerous as in ‘choking hazard,’ not dangerous as in ‘deadly octopus.’ The good doctor started calling them ‘zygotes’ back in the seventies, and that’s as good a name as any. Don’t know if you’ve eaten leathery tripe before, but if so then imagine that experience happening in reverse.”

She wandered over to the kitchen and rummaged around in a bunch of festive square containers lined up on the side of the sink countertop. After some ten seconds or so, she found a set of cookies, or fudge, or something. She came back nibbling on a piece, holding out another baked confection toward me.

“No thank you, I’m fine for now,” I said, completely honest and also desperate to not bring up anything I’d already eaten given the discussion at hand.

“There’s plenty more in those Christmas tubs,” she said with a shrug.

“When you say ‘choking hazard,’ to what degree should I be worried?”

“Honey, you’re here. I won’t let anything bad happen to you. Got some odds and ends to make it easier for you. I swear on my life and my soul that you WILL reach tomorrow, no matter what you may think.”

The thoughts were pushed back toward the far end of my brain at maximum force, but I couldn’t resist. Vagrancy does funny things to self-preservation as well as self-esteem. You know intimately and completely that you’re vulnerable, but after surviving on the road for a while, the fact of your endurance means you start thinking of yourself as a weed. You can get hurt so easily and shake it off just as much so. The upshot is that many dangers go without getting fully addressed both because you’re confident they’ll resolve without destroying you, and you don’t want them to cause you pain.

This can manifest in something like a bad head cold.

////

It can also mean playing tug-of-war with uncomfortable questions.

I’d been cloudy of thought since the sunrise greeted me outside a tourist stop on the freeway, only knocked cleanly into awareness when I’d first arrived outside town proper, then again when first entering the diner. Thinking of my place on the road, the constantly moving home where tramps belong and that they own – if only in small part – put me back on those stretches of blacktop. I rarely traveled at night. However, that freedom, the allowance to indulge foolishness, or “The Right to be Wrong” as Mom liked to put it, had become a small part of the world’s foundation. I could act like an idiot if I wanted. Now it was dangerous to do that, or apparently more so than the average wild animal and crazy road kidnapper population normally made the prospect at least.

I said, “I kind of want to see these scary biker gangs that are riding around out there right now.”

Patricia said something in return, but I don’t speak cookie or fudge or whatever.

“Or the miniature Godzilla tromping across the woods.”

She rose up from her chair again, not like she wanted to be standing once more but to watch me like a hawk. Her jaw stopped moving. Her neck carried a cargo stomachward.

“Or the aliens who want to destroy all human life and grab random walkers wherever they can find them.”

“We call them Mine Children.”

She hadn’t been joking earlier, though she hadn’t really been serious since the confrontation at the diner. Now, though, she used her voice like it came from a different hole in her body, not leading to her lungs but down through a cave with a marshmallow-roasting summer campfire set up just outside its entrance. This was a voice for popping balloons and quiet preaching and nursery rhymes sung to the very worst of toddlers.

“I don’t know much about them. A few people have ideas. Hardly any have facts. They look like rocks, or dead things, that move slowly and steadily. They almost always go for loners. They almost always act up at night.”

She stared at me.

I stared at her.

When she pulled a lever on her chair to recline it like a bed, my entire body came close to exploding.

“It’s been a busy day, and if you really truly need to know more then you can discover it tomorrow. Sleep tight!”

She lay back on her unfolded easy chair like she owned the universe and was happy with how it functioned. A hand spidered over the side of the chair and found some sort of controls. With a click, the home dimmed. Lights outlined the bathroom door, the countertop above the telephone and notepad by the entryway, and a tiny circle of floor in front of the wall breaker box.

I rolled onto the couch’s length and stared at the ceiling for a while. It had few answers. When sleep caught and ate me, it had to work against some strong mental carapace and the sort of energy all panicked creatures naturally get.

Suddenly the light disappeared from the world, and I woke up without remembering any of my dreams.

“It’s time to get up, Freddy!” said the voice of some malicious spirit.

Two other things hit me in succession. First, a life raft of bacon helped the voice dig me free from a solid casket.

////

Second, the fact of being warm – not moderate, not chilly, but actually warm – tried to convince me to lie down and not move for the rest of the day. That’s not to say July is ever cold in my experience, but there’s “cold” and there’s “the bite of sunrise” – and I’ve never experienced a morning, with a more than passing warmth as the light finally reappears, which wasn’t spent indoors.

My hands stayed crossed over my jacket’s front as I sucked in the good smell, the opposite of alleyway dankness and garbage can perfume. The torso wanted to stay put in the couch’s outline of my body heat. The neck wanted to get carried up toward the pan frying action. Initial compromise consisted of me rotating so my knees dangled up over the back of the couch, my butt tucked into the square angle of cushioning, and my head and shoulders stayed straight-pointing from the seat of the couch out toward the kitchen area. Eyes closed, nose extended, I tried to stretch my spine to somehow get my mouth over there while staying right here.

Yes, it managed to remain comfortable, and no, I have no idea how.

When Patricia smacked two pots together to get my attention, I grumbled and carefully rose. The use of a couch did wonders for my posture and lower body, used to wedging into and against very unpleasant terrain each night. Everything downward of the left-side elbow had gone totally dead from my weight. Still, enormously relieving.

“Hehem,” I said.

“It’s some Canadian goodness, flapjacks the way I’ve always made them, and a nice big bunch of nature’s toes!”

A woman completely unlike the one I’d previously seen taking care of the apartment busily crammed a serving tray full of wheaty cooked circles, roughly half a pig, and an entire green cardboard basket of strawberries.

“Nah-ah-tah?” I asked.

“It’s a funny thing we like to say around here. The farms on top of the area around Clay Lake, and a few down by Black Lake as well, found themselves seeded by people of a local mindset. As it happened, most of them came from farming families, and brought a good deal of understanding of the growing season. They also had some odd quirks. For example, four came from the same part of Maine, and all just so happened to use the term ‘nature’s toes’ to talk about these!”

She ate a strawberry, and the thing sounded like a glass bulb with how crunchy and sharp her jaw movements were.

“Huh.”

“Well, go on! I had plenty of practice with breakfast when I set up my diner back in the day. Many have eaten my food; few have died.”

“Your name’s actually Patricia?” I mumbled.

My mouth managed to open enough to admit an especially fat strawberry.

“I half assumed you just went by that to help the diner, or something.”

“You’ve gone a long time to just wonder about that now!” she laughed through her nose.

“I’ve been wondering about it, just not enough to ask. More important questions.”

That made her stop her work cleaning up at the sink.

“I couldn’t tell you why, exactly, but I can see you staying here in our odd little family,” she said.

“Errrr-”

She turned. A towel dried her hands, and yet she managed to point at me while she worked it over and under. Her hair stood up like a work of art, and her earrings made me think of ants eating bits of a wintery sun. Her outfit didn’t quite jive with her uniform from yesterday, but it had a nicely formal touch.

“I won’t be giving any free rides if you do decide to put down stakes,” she admonished. “However, I know people. If you need a job, we have openings at the diner, especially since we’re going to see school starting again soon. Juliet Redtail also has some apartments going up for grabs very shortly. I can introduce you.”

She sniffed and looked out the window over her kitchen sink.

“Yowling kids all over. You’d probably give her a few good days’ rest out of the month just by being as well-behaved as you’ve been so far.”

I finished half of the pancakes and shoved more bacon into my face every time I finished chewing. It helped cut down on thinking and weighing and committing to words just yet.

“Thanks for putting thought into it,” I said in a small voice a few moments later.

I avoided scratching. My hair had some massive itchy spots, presumably from not cleaning all the shampoo from my hair perfectly last night.

“So… uh, the diner got set up back when you were thirty? Forty? It can’t have been cheap.”

My masterful tactical shift got a small smirk again. It’s not rude to make “old” estimates when the subject tells you they’re a very spry ninety-or-so.

“I was much more fortunate than most other people at the time. By thirty eight I managed to get enough blood from enough stones that I could get the lot where the place stands today. As dear as money was back then, though, I couldn’t just buy it. First few months that prices reentered reasonable rates, I had to finish my doubts off and take the plunge. You want to see scared? Go back to 1939, look for a girl who resembles me but prettier, and ask her whether she’s sure people can afford to eat out.”

////

“And could they?”

“Hoooo-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh.”

I might have begun stuffing the bacon into my pockets for later then, as she wryly laughed looking through the window at herself. My stomach had learned desperation walking eastward from far Pennsylvania. However, I couldn’t just make off like a bandit. At least, my malformed sociability claimed so. As a compromise, one bacon strip began disappearing between teeth very slowly.

“We liked our irony back then. In some ways, the fact that the town’s out in the middle of nowhere made no difference. For some matters, though, we the people escaped the worst of the starving times just because we’re so far off the beaten path. The mines and the orchards make for hungry work, and when you’re finally coming off your shift it’s the best thing in the world to know someone has you taken care of.”

The sound of an alarm clock on the kitchen microwave made her sniff, take three surprisingly dainty steps in its direction, and imperiously stab a button with a finger-spear. I took the chance to muscle down the bacon strip in my hands and reach for another. My stomach made threats of revolt.

“No shift today, it’s my weekend.”

“I guess it pays to be the boss,” I mumbled.

“I’m not the boss anymore!”

She sniffed again, this time more of a pointed nasal inhale.

“No, sir. That building’s grandfather got bought out for thirty dollars in the tense times before the second war hit its stride – and it was me, myself, and I for eight years. Dawn to dusk. Just barely scraping by, sometimes. But then Friday would hit, and a tiny three-burner grill would somehow serve up enough roast beef sandwiches I was sure the money’d buy half the downtown with some left over… until the next month started.”

“That must have been a lot of money back then, thirty dollars,” I said.

I put the last of the bacon down, hoping to open negotiations about retiring my nausea.

“For back in the day? 1939 money? That was either a fortune or nothing, depending on what sort of person you asked. You make money by spending money. What I bought was well worth it, but I was one little girl and the diner…”

I habitually grabbed for my backpack’s straps when I adjusted my seat, and a moment’s panic dogged me until I convinced myself to step back, breathe, relax. It made her next statement fly by and through and away.

“Come again?”

Patricia eyed the way my hands hovered around my torso. It had a piercing expertise, that look. I didn’t give my story away on a whim, but it hit me how valuable the ability to listen and absorb the character of random people on a first meeting had to be for a diner owner. Probably similar to a bartending skillset, if not used quite so often.

Other than an instantaneous check to be sure the backpack still sat where I’d left it, and my garbage sack of things-to-not-lose, neither of us referenced it again.

“You know how much space a person actually needs to live comfortably, I take it. Enough floor space to call your own for sleeping, a few amenities to make things easier like a sink and toilet. A door between you and the rest of the world.”

“That sounds about perfect.”

“Figured you’d have an idea there. The people like me, who decide to put their all into something like a store or a business one day? We don’t always understand that. I had to learn, and it took a while.”

She didn’t apologize or try and weasel out of making me feel “bad” or “unfortunate” for my circumstances, she just carried on. I hated her a tiny bit for that, but also felt more than a bit grateful.

“Anyway, that eventually led to the first major remodeling once a few more people landed on the payroll, then it got built out again when we had an idea of how to use that much building. Then I sold the place to Robert Tanaka back in eighty nine, after I felt I’d ‘made it.’ I’m just a partner now.”

When I told her that I thought I was getting it, the sentence crawled along for two and a half words before my stomach announced total rejection of diplomacy, and Patricia’s counter got covered in food of a slightly-used nature.

All told, it was a pretty good start to a day.

CHAPTER3:A_FISH_SWIMMING_UPRIVER

The last of the real morning had shredded by the time I decided to go and take in the lay of the land. I needed more proof of this place being a haven before it could have any strong odds of becoming My New Home.

Uncle Oliver had a very strong chance of coming after me if he learned where I was, and… well. He didn’t make much of an illusion of holding powers of nature at his beck and call, but he’d held sway in Dawson Ridge still. Just because you lose your crown doesn’t mean people stop calling you Your Majesty overnight.

I’d occasionally had nightmares of him and his stupid hat on my way out of Pennsylvania. He’d be walking up to me, wearing his slacks and jean jacket, as I lay stupefied by sleep paralysis. On the side of the road, under a bush, inside a bridge’s shadow. He’d step lively, stop when he loomed overhead like a starving bear, and stared down at me with his keyring twirling around a finger.

“What a prize,” he’d chuckle. “Look at what Sarah loved. And now you’re here.”

Then his eye would come drifting down, smiling with hate.

When you had a person like that interested in your welfare, you needed assurances.

Before I forget, let me set the record straight. I don’t hate my mother, even though she was right there when I was getting the ill-treatment-horror of the day a lot of the time. Oliver Decimos had the charisma of a gangster, horrible and wonderful for his foes and friends. You went along with what he wanted or you suffered, sometimes both. If Mom ever tried to step in and redirect him instead of blunting his issues, she’d have gotten the back of his hand or worse. She contributed to my misery by coming up with punishments for me… but without her suggestions and arguments on how to discipline me, I probably wouldn’t have survived until I managed to escape.

////

When the thing you want most and the people who control your life the most refuse to meet, some seam in the machine has to give.

Patricia wanted to show me the local sights first, but sadly that had to take a back row seat. If the admittedly promising situation so far wasn’t quite sufficient, better that I leave now and tear the bandage loose. That idea made me upset. I so dearly wanted to stop running before I hit the Atlantic Ocean and had to trek toward Massachusetts and Rhode Island, or Canada. Maybe that wasn’t in the cards. To compound that problem: money. No hands-out beggar was I, waiting for a dollar fish to come to my net, but I also couldn’t breed quarters or easily make an investment that guaranteed the exchange of labor for pay. You didn’t hire a migrant worker for six hours doing anything really consequential. You found someone who’d stick around at least a short while, or with proof of competence and special skills.

Even so, I’d made it with next to nothing before. Comparing poverty and captivity, I’d take the first any day.

I decided the next thing that had to happen was an inspection on how poisonous the town was to outside observation. The few places around the area, the neighboring villages of… let’s call them Grinder’s Switch and Sundial and Greenloop – I needed to understand what they imagined when someone said “Bezoarville.” If they considered the place as a backwater, or better yet some kind of colony of the ill, then that would serve as maybe the best imaginable testimony in favor of staying put. If they considered the place as a good vacation destination (or worse yet, a location with terrible problems but extremely notable reasons for outlanders to visit), that would serve very much the opposite goal. I wanted this place to not only have warning signs around the border of town, but mental blocks to dissuade the very idea of tourism.

After all, much harder to investigate persons-of-interest when they fall off the map.

On the positive side of my research, this did not take very long at all to investigate. The first happy sign was when, funnily enough, I learned there were no buses in any direction that crossed town lines. There was a historical-society-worthy set of tram cars that would bring you around within the confines of Bezoarville, every one of which seemed to be piloted by sweaty and ill-tempered men with very short legs.

////

I’d never done much map reading, just figured that I should head either East or West from Dawson Ridge when I skipped town, and West seemed a bit iffy if only because I worried I’d just keep marching into the Midwest until the rest stops got too far away for survivable travel on foot. North of Pennsylvania, of course, is the sort of land where I couldn’t hope to live through the cold season, unless I stayed close enough to home that getting found out would have been a given. South? Mom might have come from that direction in the distant past, but anything above eighty degrees Fahrenheit made me itchy and annoyed.

All that said, I still managed to uncover a lot of useful truths in a bit under nine hours. Talking to people in Grinder’s Switch and Greenloop, they knew of their neighbors decently well. Yes, their little enclave had that really unfortunate tendency toward illness, and something about a nuclear plant being problematic, and it would be preferable to nearly anything else that business didn’t involve crossing the border.

A nice man with a handkerchief said he had a cousin in Bezoarville. He showed no interest in visiting, though he would take care of said cousin if the opposite sort of visit ever happened. My reasons for asking were what, exactly? That was a tad invasive, no?

Three women out eating lunch stopped arguing about their favorite sitcoms’ best plots and worst actors just long enough to call me “curious” before saying they’d visited the town once and it was fun, and also a bit odd. Nothing specific. “Odd.” It was pretty remarkable how much their friends and neighbors ignored or just avoided Bezoarville, true, especially compared to expectations. “Yeah, sure! Let’s head up the road and check out that cinema! But not if it’s over THAT direction.” They’d never ignored the question, precisely, but they’d never not ignored it either.

A young mother with a short but active son and a child on a leash made a few ominous statements, in between managing her kids. They didn’t have much of a concrete body to them, more a direction. They aimed suspicion at “those people” and what might have been implications of witchcraft, along with vague indications that I might not be trustworthy by extension. I guess she thought of my potential new hometown as… what’s the phrase? “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

This all pleased me.

Given the animosity and general lack of back-and-forth between Bezoarville and the regional ecosystem, at a guess the rest of the world heard about the place – if at all – as character-poor and mildly dangerous. Would Uncle Oliver be willing to believe his niece set up shop here? Probably, in due time. Would he leap to the conclusion that it made for an ideal hidey-hole above all other places at the very instant he learned of its existence (presuming that he ever did)?

No. No, he wouldn’t.

This partly satisfied the Plan. I’d never gotten around to giving it a formal name, let alone writing it down, but my aim of securing a new life for myself had three broad-strokes stages. As some of the Pennsylvania Dutch speakers I’d known liked to put it, Alles Anfang sind schwer. “All beginnings are hard,” or thereabouts. That described the daunting profile of the first stage – go and find a place far from home and circle it like a buzzard, assuming it proves suitable. Take precautions; secure bolt holes, obtain tools for protecting myself, learn the lay of the land so a midnight flight remains possible in the grimmest circumstances. Make traps and dead-drops and prepare in case someday, somehow, that natural disaster of a man found me again. Probably it would end with me putting knives and hammers and such all over my domicile, but that was a Future Me problem.

///

The second stage of the Plan had to do with something more… domestic. Get lodgings. Set myself up as a hooked-in but not strictly vital member of the local environment. With pay and a place to set one’s head, you can live virtually anywhere in this country, even if you don’t have a life. As a certain Mr. Rale of Dawson-Maple High’s economics class said at the beginning of every semester, though: “Food necessary, happiness optimal, riches appreciated.” Hermetic subsistence doesn’t need a smile, and it barely needs other people.

That was the third and arguably scariest stage of the Plan.

No, not really. But it scared me a lot. “Go out into the world, make friends and acquaintances, and in due time become your own person.” The sort of thing that would take years, and without a hundred kinds of tiny support it might take decades. I hadn’t been actually going in the direction of the seaboard for years, but – as hinted before – the act of giving up most of your good fortune in life performs paradoxical changes even within days of making the shift. Suddenly, the mind stops panicking at the idea of losing everything. At the same time, when you acquire pretty things, or substantial conveniences, you will hold onto them so very very tightly.

“It’s a pretty day,” I said to myself. “Pretty and warm without being hot. Just enjoy it.”

Okay, my internal voice told me back. Just let me rub fingers over the contour of these thoughts one more time.

“No,” I said, more quietly. “The Plan isn’t a guarantee of success. Follow it, don’t become it.”

Follow it, don’t become it. That’s kind of catchy.

“Thanks, I wish I knew where it came from!”

Don’t worry about it, just keep it in mind.

“I’ll try.”

Spending lots of time in your own company can make it easier for you to lose the center of gravity for your mental gyroscope.

“Get back to it!” I told myself.

My self said something indistinct in return, and the wheel in the sky kept on turning.

////

Three blocks from my final reconnaissance that day, I stopped, head creaking right, and rocked back onto my rear foot.

In front of me, a stationery store; behind, a duplex with an office set above a subs-and-spaghetti place with the unfortunate name of Switch ‘Wich. You couldn’t call their separation a “road” unless it widened two steps’ worth or so. The smell of the alleyway I was passing had a bit of the stab of garbage. Trash cans with wax paper sheets distributed the majority of the smell, though a surprising amount of spring morning freshness was coming from the swaying trimmed-down trees parked in the alley as well. Past the first of these trees lay a pile of mismatched trash.

If you keep on the road for long enough, you begin to notice the difference between junk and trash. That old ball-peen hammer sticking out between those plastic bags, that was trash. You know that old saying about trash.

Long enough to almost reach the ground if I slid it through a belt loop, the thing had a scarred and half-useless face on its head. I had to clean some grease off where its rubber grip was starting to crack with age. Also, it had a bit of a smell. If the print running down its side was to be believed, though, it had a titanium core.

Holding it felt like puzzle pieces meeting.

“Well, this calls for a celebration!” I said.

“What sort of celebration?” asked the gas station clerk ten minutes later, as I dropped a six-pack and my ID and some of my dwindling store of dollars in front of him.

“A celebration of finding a means of self-defense as my spirit animal, and it representing a new lease on life!” I said thirty minutes later, a shiny sweat-covered beer bottle in one hand, my hammer in the other, and a stupid smile on my face.

“HWORF!” I added an hour later, crossing the border back into town, bent over as another bezoar came sliding free with the grace of a figure skater on sandpaper.

“What I wouldn’t give for one of these tram operators to make just a single stop inside each other’s routes,” I groaned, not looking forward to the long walk to a station from such distant parts.

But the prospect of trying new things was a pleasant distraction, all told. It gave me strength, that thought of mulling over happy things and forgetting about sad ones.

////

It was a good idea when I found that hammer, and decided to bring it along for the ride. THAT was not my mistake.

My big mistake came when sliding the wrong level of celebration from the “bad” column to the “good” column.

When you’re in the dunce corner of life, you want to pull open your own chest and pin a sheriff’s star in your ribcage. You hear somebody telling you about an idea and how bad it is, you get ambushed by an inquiry as to how good or bad or otherwise your current plan of action will become in the fullness of time, and you suddenly get the urge to rip yourself open and point to your seal of office. “Quiet, I’m the authority around here” doesn’t get triggered often, of course. You ask for kindness, and you accept the terms, and that’s now a fact of life. You throw yourself on others’ mercy only by giving up the idea that you’re above such things.

But sometimes, that needs to all get left behind so you can do something, wise or stupid, on your own terms. I’m not worthless! Look at how worthless I’m not! Reach out and grab a bag of Tootsie Rolls or whatever you prefer. Draw a big peace sign on the bark of fifteen trees with a flake of rock.

Get drunk.

In all fairness, I’d never crossed that line before. Giving up sobriety wasn’t new, but in the neck of a brown glass bottle danced a little Oliver. Beer felt like a wire noose around my soul and he was holding the other end. Just…

Remember that I needed both to feel alive and feel numb.

Several minutes or days after spending some precious green stuff, and the clerk at the counter checking my old high school’s student ID, I was moving down the road with the intent of making my way back to Bezoarville’s bustling central area. If I’d started my journey at a different time or place, the escapade would have ended up with me maybe getting in trouble with one of Patricia’s rants on tap, or running into an annoyed sheriff. I wouldn’t have tied the extra cord closing my garbage bag onto my wrist. My ideas would have had few odds of bringing me happiness, and also would have kept me on the straight and narrow.

Everything went the way of the average Brothers Grimm tale when I tripped on the shoulder of the road and fell down into the ditch running alongside it.

To be honest, most of the events of that day had low to moderate haziness thanks to the weirdness of my sudden change of fortune. Novelty tends to add a greasy, slippery cloud over parts of sensation, after all. My day also got supermassively blurry between the visit to that convenience store and ending up literally flailing with the hope of becoming upright and returned to the blacktop.

At some point, I became convinced that the road was holding me back. The destination of the place I’d slept the night, and heavily indulged in food, lay in THAT direction. In fact, I saw that the easiest path forward had little to do with the tram service. I’d just stop trying to get up the incline, pull my carcass onto the forest carpet, roll over the ribs of tree root knots rising from the thick needle blanket, and keep walking in a more or less straight line toward civilization. It would short circuit my journey by quite a good distance. After all, I remembered the rough shape of some of the roads veining this area of region, and they came much closer than the next junction along the big road heading East from central Bezoarville called… let’s say, Carriage Lane.

So I began walking with more pep and purpose, initially propelled by the confidence of the ignorant, and began veering northward as well as westward.

It also ended up being in the direction of trouble.

CHAPTER4:MINERAL_DISLIKE

I had very few things working for me that late Monday.

The first was my terrain. Incredibly thick layering of pine “leaves” across the forest floor had built up since probably before any European stumbled onto this continent, and that meant the ground was forgiving. Deep drifts of orange brown filaments both choked back any bush and shrub growth – helping to save my legs from that incredible evil called the deer tick – and kept foot fumbles from ending in a sprained ankle. It meant blood-alcohol effects didn’t make me knock myself out on a branch or trunk. A few stumbles here and there couldn’t be avoided, though, and as I progressed the local bark-skinned flora scuffed my hands up but good. This served to chase off my unsteadiness with time. Inside half of an hour, the movement Northwest stopped coming from errors of judgment and confidence, and started coming from embarrassment, resolve, and a fluctuating balloon of dilute fear.

The dying of daylight, along with the gradual changes of night-approaching woodland noises, sped me up at first, then incrementally slowed me down. I’d maybe be able to make the journey today, knowing the area as well as I do, but not then; doubly so, when accounting for the late hour. If I’d not decided to cautiously pull my ugly new hammer out as a security blanket, there would also have been many more tree collisions. An arm extension made of metal is a decent substitute for a cane, or at least a boat-pole, under the right circumstances.

That hammer, and specifically having it in my grasp, was another boon. The next time you feel down in the dumps, find yourself a hammer and grip it firmly halfway along the handle. You WILL begin getting a sense of vaguely animalistic reassurance, or my name’s not Freddy.

Just as important as the forest’s debris composition and my tool of choice, though, was my hope for compromise. That is to say: at some point, I realized “go northwest” was an ill-advised action. I also remembered that Carriage Lane went essentially in a straight line. Rather than continuing as I’d done, or breaking straight southward, I tried to split the difference by heading southwest instead. Distance was getting screwy, and I’d never had the best compass sense to begin with. All that put together meant I felt confident still about moving westward eventually helping, and while I couldn’t and wouldn’t try to backtrack in the almost-dim, that indecision could get harnessed for the power of good.

This all meant that when the sky turned indigo, and the noise of forest creatures started to fail, and other noises took their place, the distance to civilization was about as optimal as one could ask for.

When the fat pine trunks started to admit a bit more groundcover between them, and shrubs began to reach for my ankles, the world had become shadows of slightly different colors and textured fear. The rebound from tree to tree almost made me miss the first thing to come slouching through the wilderness and discharge a quiet noise, buzzing and creaky.

I’d never seen a tardigrade before, but what I eventually learned – after finding out what they looked like under magnification – was that the thing took deeply after the water bear. Hard to pick out details, but it had the same long multisegmented body, stumpy feet, and a head like someone hearing instructions as to how an ant’s face looks and then painting less than half of the results while feverishly dizzy. The thing that wasn’t a tardigrade had notable differences, though. The size, for one; this creature went an arm’s length from head to back.

It also… didn’t quite look whole. Again, the poor light didn’t help, but the thing’s left half had a jagged absence. It made me think of Africa. When you read a map, you can see how Africa and South America fit puzzle-piece-neatly together. The thing didn’t limp, but I also didn’t see it move much.

A giant bug-creature is cause for concern. When I heard a hoot, that concern turned to panic. Something in the trees above me made the same hooting noise, but not “hoot” like an owl – “hoot” like a deep-voiced human ironically imitating an owl. My neck almost destroyed itself as I whipped around. In the canopy I saw another form, bigger and moving, not huge but long as a car. Most of it coiled and moved behind the trunk of the tree where it clung, but I got a glimpse of two eyes for a second. Flat fish eyes, black egg yolks on white salad plates. The hoot came again one more time as the high up thing disappeared.

Not the slightest bit tipsy anymore. My hammer creaked in my hand as I heard other disturbances, from other directions.

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Some slumping creature scrambled away behind me and to my right. Its shape was like a starving cow with its sides having unevenly long legs. It slow-galloped off, behind a nearby bulky thing that first looked like a low wide mossy rock but was instead a… patchwork of squirrels, I thought, stretched out into a dome or hoop. Back yet farther stalked a big fishy sort of slithering entity, flopping at random and making thin knocking noises.

Another sound! Whirling, I spied a moving shadow in the distance, roughly as far as I could hurl a golf ball and without any hint of detail past the outline’s essentials. Fat pillars of legs or other moving body parts, not doing anything I could determine. A toddler squid? A machine? But it was near and past that creature that I finally found my motivation. Some collection of shadows roughly the size of a large dog motored along very quickly, as in “I’m gonna getcha, T-minus-three seconds” quickly. This thing, more than all the other mostly quiet things combined, made sounds beyond just disturbing the forest. Panting sounds, or even laughing sounds. Harsh sounds.

I choked up my grip on my hammer and began to run.

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Stacy Deynlop, that impossible gossip of childhood days, was a good friend and an even better source of sporadic wisdom. Her dad did fancy computer things, and her mom did dry-cleaning, so she always had this cloud of nice smells following her, and always made strange insightful statements from some angle off in outer space. Some springtime day when we were around nine, before she spilled an ice cream on me, she told me an odd lesson her dad had learned. She said that the first time you see or do something, and it fills you with fresh wonder, that isn’t the point when you learn most of the rules and behaviors of it. That comes with the second time, when you have a bike wobbling but carrying you, or a fishing line cast into the weeds but with the correct technique.

The first time I met Mine Children, my thoughts contained only “I hate those things” and “I don’t want to touch those things” and “I hope ever so much that those things will die.”

The forest stumbled past in snapshots of bad dreams. Trunks and roots and loam and boulders, the ache of ribs not constricting as best as they could, gasping over jostling clothes over insect orchestras while a two-stage lolloping something gradually got louder than all of them. It had the drumbeat certainty of a statue toppling onto you, shadow-first.

When the big rapid steps behind me changed, I made a decision.

I tossed my garbage bag off to the side, took a second to slow, and swung to face the not-a-dog about to hit me. It sprang at me just as I pulled around, and the fearsome clobbering it might have received turned into an effective fending off of a feral creature. Instead of catching it squarely with the head, the shaft of the hammer pushed the thing’s weight away at an angle. If it had impacted me directly, the sheer weight could have snapped me in two; even without its leap adding momentum, I knew it was far heavier than my hunger-fit self.

Scraping the skin off two fingers and bruising a hip with its trailing foot, my foe hit the dirt awkwardly and tripped over a root. A clacking noise came from the chest area. Its hefty self went skidding for the length of a car. I made a decision right then.

Sketching a careful path, I closed the distance, hammer rising like a machined moon. The creature didn’t have the chance to respond effectively – it flailed and failed at raising itself. When the beat up head of the hammer landed, I aimed for the general neck area.

From then until I die, I’ll always remember the sound it made.

When it hit, the blow didn’t snap bones or go cleanly through a shell. Instead, part of the thing’s body fragmented. It had a consistency hard to easily describe, and it partly disintegrated like a solid stone’s surface under a drill – some larger chunks mostly left in a crater, while particles went spewing dustily forth. The hammer didn’t bounce, though; a little give in the thing’s body meant the head kind of sank in momentarily.

With part of a shoulder dusted, the thing still didn’t make any real sound other than clacking and rustling on the ground. No cries of pain, no snarl. It didn’t even change the motions of its feet fumbling for purchase.

I didn’t really think after that. The hammer pecked at the creature again and again. My lungs mugged the air for oxygen and then threw it out with loud malice. The neck and much of the right front limb broke into tiny pieces, cracks and crunches and squishes coming in rhythm as I tried to pick good targets in the dim evening. Among the creature’s body ran a pale gluey substance, along with what I was pretty sure were solid rock chunks and some fuzzy marbling that could have been algae or mold. This grab bag of materials turned the hammer’s blows a bit, but not enough to prevent the whole of the foot I was demolishing from becoming gravel.

When the burning fatigue shouted at my arms to ease off, I stepped gingerly back. The world wobbled. If I’d worn glasses, they’d have been solid clouds.

The thing still flailed, but weakly. I wasn’t going to kill it, assuming it even could get hammered to death.

Behind me, rustling. Other creatures wandered the forest; some definitely if slowly moving my way. A glance confirmed that not all the silhouettes were chasing, but that squirrel-dome-or-whatever would trundle into range in less than a minute.

Hard and fast instinct took over, and the garbage bag was snagged from the dirt without even doing the math of it first. Just a case of “danger there, goods here” and the confidence of someone grabbing for what they needed.

Then began a death march of a jog straight South. Sometime in that walk, I encountered Carriage Lane again, presumably… but maybe not. Maybe there was a translation from here to there, and God saw fit to teleport me straight back to Patricia’s doorstep without a long long hike of a middle step.

She tripped over a sleeping Freddy in the morning.

CHAPTER5:AULD_NOVA

“Taking a chance on you. Don’t mess it up, okay?”

“No pressure.”

“If you want to make anything worthwhile in a kitchen or a shop, you need some pressure. Granted, usually metaphorical pressure.”

“Metaphors need to get ebola and vomit themselves to death.”

“Heh.”

The door opened.

“Well, good morning, Patricia!” said the prettily dressed woman who answered the door.

“Good morning yourself!” Patricia said back to Juliet Redtail.

If Patricia was a painted block of carven granite, Juliet had a vibe of dense wood clothed with felt doilies. Each had different ways in which they could only be called “enduring” and “attractive” and very little overlap of personality.

“Who’s this?”

Juliet stared up and down, assessing me for some mental filing system. She didn’t comment about my looks, though a bandage wrapped around a set of fingers and a long forehead scratch crossed from above an eye to where a widow’s peak might have pointed. She also said nothing about the hour, though five o’clock in the morning definitely wasn’t normal.

Maybe I ought to have learned before then that “normal” was even more loosely defined than I’d thought for a while.