The Apocalypse, Almost

Of course, the end of the world loomed close more than once an era. Commoners really had no idea how close they’d come to the end and how many times they had. The kings always felt a little bad for letting it slip this close without appealing to the gods for some sort of saving, but they found that despite the economic consequences, there was always a rise in the approval of the people when the king stepped up to offer food, housing, blankets, alcohol- anything to help them get through the apocalypse. Ajax didn’t care much for approval, and the apocalypse had really only gotten so close to happening because he’d skipped his trip to the temple to watch Twin Peaks from the living room couch. This was a pitiful thing to do with his night, he thought. What was even more pitiful was the fact that no one could seem to come up with a better alternative. There were things and people to do, but he’d done them all. Not the people, but enough to tire. He always had more options, but here he was. Twin Peaks. He was on the second episode.

He knew, in the way that he only gave half of his attention to, that the apocalypse was coming. He didn’t want to offer to help. He wanted to be called upon. But this was the downside to commonor ignorance. Having never looks the end of the world in the face, they did not know exactly how desperate they should let circumstances get before they called upon him for help. They might wait to see the state of the next dawn before they asked him, and the next dawn might not even come. He couldn’t quite tell if it would. He’d only just seen Laura’s father burst into tears.

Kaylin was not in the mood to hear it when she phoned. She was also impervious to his apologies, even when there was a speckle of sincerity on them. Kaylin, he also thought, was not her name. He thought this every time she came to see him. But no ruler ever went by their first names in public. Partially because it was only members of the royal family and the gods that could speak them, and partially because they did not necessarily want to say them. They tended to accumulate (depending on where you were from) unnecessary vowels, or unflattering consonants. Ajax was not his real name either, but his name was made for someone with three tongues and a lot of time on their hands to say. It had left his mother sweating to say it in its entirety. One day, some royal relative’s name would anger the gods and bring about an entirely separate apocalypse. No amount of prayer made by any royal family would help. Kaylin, or whatever her name was, told Ajax that he’d been putting off saving the world again because he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to live in it.

“I beg to differ,” Ajax replied. He was in a silk robe. He’d gotten it from an eastern country, imported, and it had cost him as much as it would have to feed one of the villages in his kingdom for a month. But it was a beautiful shade of seafoam green that a common girl had once told him made his green eyes look luminescent. This was the sort of thing to him that seemed celestial, godly. Kings liked godliness and despised it. There was only one step between kings and gods, but as kings did not have supernatural powers, it was not a step that could be overcome. The flattery and his luminescent eyes were as close to magic as Ajax was going to get.

Kaylin made a gloriously resentful noise on the other end of the line. “You don’t beg for anything. What did your last slave die of anyway?”

This was because Ajax had suggested Kaylin end the apocalypse instead of hm. Sovereigns did not like to pray in the place of others, and it wouldn’t make him look very good in front of the gods. He cared more about how he looked in front of Kaylin than the gods. Ajax wold have apologized, but his father had taught him that kings did not apologize. They did not make mistakes, or commit misdeeds worth apologizing for. Beside, Ajax didn’t really wish for the earth the fold under a rain of asteroids or boil under a sheet of molten rock from a sulfurous explosion. It was just that he didn’t want to put in the effort to stop it.

“Don’t answer that,” Kaylin said. “For goodness’ sake. What is it, anyway? Flu, I heard. I’ll go ask them to stop it.”

He told her how nasty the flu was. What the gods wanted for it. Kaylin snorted.

“This is something you could have fixed a week ago,” she told him. “If it had taken out any of my kingdom you can bet I would be asking the gods to contain it just to your country. I’ll take care of it, I don’t mind. No, really. And you’re welcome. Which temple?”

He told her.

Kaylin snorted again. “I’ll let you know when it’s done.”

Ajax didn’t care much for correspondance, but: “Come over. Let’s do something. One of those unity between nations, things. We’ve done nothing but praying for ages.”

Kaylin hung up on him. She didn’t call him back, but the flu receded. In between episodes of Twin Peaks, Ajax checked the news. The number of cases coming into the hospital had slowed to a trickled, then ceased all together. The flu could not be caught from contaminated bodies. Patients were already making a remarkable recovery. The flu was fleeing from the respiratory system as the news caster spoke. Ajax had little to do but watch Twin Peaks again. The gods might be upset with him, but they’d been negotiated with. He was both bored and wary of truly forcing himself into action. How many people had the gods been planning to take out with that flu?

A few day later, Kaylin’s entourage was knocking at the door and holding it open for her when she stepped inside. She stepped all the way inside, to the private reception chambers. Ajax shooed everyone outside. He didn’t like anyone except himself getting ogled in the private reception chambers. But Kaylin was lovely, with dusky, dark skin and lips the colour of squid ink. She had eyes as yellow as a wild cat’s. She looked furious and deadly.

“Were you wearing that when I called?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at his seafoam robe. “How bored are you?”

Ajax pulled his robe tightly around himself. He felt that this moment was a misrepresentation of his natural glory. The chamber itself was a bit of a mess with papers and several cups of coffee from different nations. He thought he liked something from Asia, or a blend from Africa. It was interesting to put different flavours of dirt in your mouth. He offered her a cup of flavoured, hot dirt and reminded her that if she wanted to drink from a clean mug she had to call for one herself, and then fix the coffee maker herself. He had someone who usually did it for him, but he’d sent them out. Kaylin took one of his pre-existing mugs and topped it up. She sat on a daybed and eyes the seafoam robe. Ajax opened his eyes wide, so she could see how luminescent they were.

“You can’t wear that,” Kaylin said.

Ajax looked down at himself. “I certainly can. I have evidence right now that I can.”

“You can’t wear that out.”

“Out? Outside? Where to?”

Kaylin said, “You said you wanted to do something unifying.”

Ajax did want to do something unifying, just without the rest of the court. The rest of the court wasn’t present, though. While Kaylin sipped her transcontinental coffee, he went in search of proper outdoor robes. As a king, he had a plethora of robes to choose from. As Ajax, nothing was what he wanted to wear. Kaylin turned her head while he changed in and out of one and another. The country ran itself outside and Ajax finally settled on something embroidered with winged snakes and man-eating flowers. It was resplendent, even if it wasn’t seafoam. It was the fourth most expensive robe in his closet, but this was a special occasion.

Kaylin looked back at him three hours later. She’d dumped the contents of each coffee cup down the sink and found his liquor. She was drinking either red wine or watered down blood when she assessed his outfit. “Somewhere no one knows us, then.”

“Is it too much?” Ajax said. “I can tone it down.”

“I really don’t think you can,” Kaylin said. “It’s fine. Let’s just go.”

Outside, in Ajax’s kingdom, he took stock. He sometimes forgot that this was the kingdom he’d chosen to create, from his father’s. All choked with people, cars, stray cats and dogs. Every alley branched off into a warren of alleys, thin as corridors. Everywhere, people of different colour, race, religion, gender, tunneled and dispersed. Ajax had been enchanted by the multiculturalism of it once, but that was the state of the world, now. And people were really no different. Not to kings. They shred this with gods. The commoners looked like a frantic population that did not share a common goal with Ajax. He could not exactly tell any of them apart.

It was a girl that caught his eye. Kaylin’s too. Not because the girl was beautiful or he particularly desired her. Though she was beautiful. But she was young, with a china-doll face and huge black eyes, and a skein of silky golden curls down her back. She was tossing her ball quite close to a fountain. The fountain was deep and the ball heavily weighted. Kaylin and Ajax both knew a story when they saw one. The gods loved stories like this, and kings liked to make them happen, with a little help from the gods. It was easier when a god was the direct subject of a story, but surely one of them was willing to give a hand here. Ajax prayed and, when the girl tossed her ball into the fountain and broke into tears, watching it sink, a frog leapt onto the fountain’s edge to offer its services. It had a voice and a personality. Making it human would be a little trickier, but the kings and the gods had time. Really, if it was speaking full sentences to the girl, it was halfway to human already. The girl had to take the frog home, first, and who knew where that was anyway?

Ajax fetched a samosa and a couple vadas and trotted happily back to Kaylin. It was a little obvious that he was pleased with himself. A king’s happiness was almost never out in full force, but his was right now. He turned it accidentally on a poor passerby, who tripped and spilled her trundle buggy of produce. A god melted in the sky, reminded of why they were so fond of humans, and why they cared for them at all in the first place. Kaylin, beside him, was reminded too, in a way that bothered her. Particularly because she knew this story too. The gods loved romances that spanned countries or conflicts. So several were made happy when she leaned forward to kiss Ajax.

Ajax had not been kissed by her before. He’d kissed many of his own subjects, brought to him by his face or the gods’ will, not by a phone call. He felt warmed by several degrees, like a polar ice cap melting. He was sure something had gone wrong with him. Everything had gone sharp at the edges for a moment. The streets and the faces, like it had been when he’d only been his father’s son, before he’d inherited the kingdom. There were hundreds of stories to tell in this square. He need only insert himself in one to know the rest of it.

“That felt more like the apocalypse than anything,” Ajax said.

“Well, keep an eye out,” Kaylin said.

Art by Maja Wronska

Text by Lucie MacAulay

All Of Her Choices

The best people for spreading lies are the pretty ones. The majestic and regal ones. The ones who charm the birds from the trees, sing the storm to sleep. They are the best at turning the tables, tilting the lights. If you look upon me and see only darkness, it is their doing. If I am the thing that creeps in the shadows, it is because she made me this way. I had done nothing to the king’s daughter. Nothing she did not ask.

I knew her before she explained who she was. Everyone within the sea knew the king’s strange daughter. The one with a propensity for throwing herself at the shore, for dragging herself onto the beach, for crusting her scales with sand, for the sake of watching the people on the rocks. She was grossly anxious when she swam into my home. Her hair amassed around her, uncut. The king’s daughters never cut their hair until marriage. Through it, I could see her lovely face, beautiful like the patterns of sunlight on water.

Her spine was rigid. A new tension crept into her shoulders when she entered my home. She was the kind of creature bred to fear the space outside of her territory. The shadow of a passing, overlarge fish might look to her as threatening as a bilious cloud of blood. It is always hard for the sheltered to discern true threat, since they have never been threatened.

I gestured her in. She did not see me the first time, until the gentle movement of my fingers became an aggressive movement of hands and elbows. She flinched and approached slowly. I am not comely or gilded like the folk of the court. I was raised among algae and pebble and coral. My hair and skin and eyes are the colour of the dirt from which I come. It never bothered me, until she appeared. And even then, it only bothered me very little.

I was not a vain thing.

“Are you a witch?” the king’s daughter asked. I could not recall her name. Her forehead was smooth and unlined, except when she raised her brows. She had never had a worry in her life before now, and her skin was unused to the effects of it. She clasped her hands in front of me in an artificial sort of gesture.

“A magician,” I said. We share with humans a certain dislike for the word witch. In those times, being a witch and living at the same time was not likely.

“What is your name? I would like to trust you if, if I only knew your name.”

I shrugged this aside. Names were not necessary. I said, “I’m help. That is all.”

She smiled. It was a hopeful smile. This was the first terrible thing love had done to her. I knew it as soon as I saw it upon her face. The thing about love was that it was not only poison, but a poison that one thought could be remedied by further doses of it. If she were smart, she would have asked me for an antidote. She would have asked me to make it impossible for her to love him. “I don’t know if you can help. If you can bring us together. I did not mean to love someone from the shore, but I do. My father would never allow us to live together. I just want a choice.”

This, I liked. I believed in choices. I said, “I cannot make him one of us. But I can make you a human.”

Suspicion and joy warred upon the king’s daughter’s face. Her face had clearly been used poorly. It was unprepared for so much confusion. I ignored the look she gave me, as though she could see all the way around me, and inside of me, and was still suspicious. “In exchange for what?”

At least the king’s daughter was not entirely stupid. Just a victim. I had sympathy for her; no one had ever told her she would need those skills her royal father had never taught her. Here was the world, and no one had told her she would have to face it. “Your voice. I can give you legs, but I need something of yours in return. It could be your eyes, but I assume you want to see the one you love.”

She was apprehensive, as people are when they’re about to amputate a part of themselves. “But how will I speak? How will I communicate with him? He does love to hear me sing.”

“He will have to love some other part of you,” I said. “I am sure there is much to love. But not if you waste away down here for the rest of your life, pining. There are other ways to communicate.”

Wasting away didn’t sound appealing to her. She gestured, to indicate that she did not know how to give me her voice. I told her I would be gentle, but when I approached her she had to hold herself still, as though I were a barracuda or a hungry tigerhead.

I coaxed it from her throat. The voice lived in many parts of the body, but the place it could mostly be found was the throat. My finger brushed her throat when I took it, and she nearly flinched. Her voice was a soft, fluttering thing between my palms, but I could see that it was beautiful. Of course he would have loved to hear her sing.

I pointed at her tail. Not a tail much longer. She would have to find her way to the surface.

Surprise and delight lit her lovely features.

“Don’t thank me,” I said. Her tail was beginning to split. I helped her reach the surface first.

It was less than two months when I next saw the king’s daughter. In that time, the kingdom had fallen into disrepair while the king searched the chasms and sandbars for his daughter. I was silent and unintrusive. I had not seen the king’s daughter. Perhaps she could be described to me? But they had no time for it. The king’s daughter coaxed me to the ocean’s surface. Even voiceless, she could force the sea to listen to her. I came when called and found her on the beach, unaccompanied, scandalous by the people’s standards.

She had been weeping, that was evident. Her eyes were puffy and red, and she had to discretely wipe her nose upon the lace cuff of her sleeve before she spoke. The sun had almost sunk below the waves. There was light cast across one of her ankles, peeking out from under her dress. She did not continue to weep when I appeared. She did start, still unnerved by my appearance. Love had taken its toll. Her face was bored by despair. Her forehead settled into familiar lines when she furrowed her brows. She clasped her hands to her chest and wrote in the sand, “Witch. Magician. I did not know if you would come. I did not have your name to call for you. I need your help, as I needed it before. Only your pity can help me.” Her movements were less lovely outside of the water.

This, I doubted. But I swam a little closer to her, until I could prop my elbows upon a rock. She recoiled a little, though not as much as the first time. “And what are you doing here, in tears?” I asked. “I thought you were with your true love. What could mar this for you?”

The king’s daughter looked both pitying and indignant. She wrote, “I gave up my voice for him. And he loves me, but he does not love me as much as another. She can speak. She is from a kingdom on land. How can I make him love me?”

I shrugged. I was not in the business of telling people who to love, orally or magically. Magic worked only so well. If I were to enchant this man, there would be a part of him, deep down, that was aware of the enchantment. That kind of festering poison was almost as bad as love.

The king’s daughter was taking the poison to heart. It had struck an artery. “You must help me,” she wrote. “I will give you anything.”

I knew of only one course of action that would help her, because the poison had dug deep, and there was nothing to do now but abstain from it until the rest drained. “You must give him up. I can give you back your voice now, and you will speak and sing again, but you must return to the water. Your legs will be gone.”

She reeled back and bit her lip. If she had had a voice then, I am sure she would have turned it on me. “No,” she wrote. She wrote it several times, then smoothed out the sand with her hand again. Her fingers fumbled as she wrote. “That is not what I asked for. I must make him love me, but I cannot without my voice. Ask for something else, and give me my voice back.”

There was nothing else to give me but her eyes, and when I told her this, she shook her head and pointed at what she had written already. She did not understand exchange, and I was beginning to curse her father again for her ignorance. And herself. Instead I thought of something new. It was magic of the kind I did not do, but I pitied her.

“If this man kisses you,” I said, “before the setting of the sun, three days from now, you will remain a human forever, and he will love you, with all of his heart.” This was a little bit of a lie- I am not proud of that. “If you do not, then come back to me, and I will return you to the sea, with your voice. That is all I can offer you.” And it was. This was the truth.

The king’s daughter clapped her hands together, delighted again. She looked almost as though she did not mind my terrible appearance, or my presence. Her gaze strayed to the road, to the end of the shore, away, away. “I can ask from him one kiss,” she wrote. “He will have to give it to me. I love him so dearly.”

“I am sure you will fair well,” I said. There was no point in saying anything further. She had made her choice.

I swam a little farther out and watched her walk away along the shore. Her legs must have been aching, but she could not tell. She did not even see it as an option- not loving him. The wind brushed away her words in the sand.

I knew what the problem was before she came to tell me. The sun had long gone, and so she brought a candle to the shore, and warned me back so she had space to write in the sand in front of me. The shadows made sharp all the anxious angles of her face. The lines that would not fade beside her eyes and on her forehead. She was lovely and older, in only a few months. “He did not kiss me,” she wrote. I was not surprised. She was sorrowful, and raging. “You must make me human longer.”

“I cannot,” I told her. She had ceased crying a time ago. She dug her fingers into the sand beside the candle. Wax fell on to the back of her hand. “I warned you that if you could not kiss him, then I could only offer you your place in the sea.”

She recoiled, and this time it was not because of my appearance, but because of my certainty. I had done all I could do for her. Her only option was the return to the sea. The poison had set in too deep. It might not even be allowed to drain. And if it did not, it might fester instead, and transform. “Take this,” I said. I held up my palm. There was a perfect blade on it, something I’d scavenged from a human wreck. Something I had made my own. “Put it deep into his heart, and you will be able to return to the sea with your voice. Otherwise, you will die.” I had done all I could for her.

Her eyes flashed. She snatched the dagger from me. It glanced across my palm; blood welled there. “You tricked me,” she wrote.

I said nothing. I knew what she would choose, in the end. She was more kind than I gave her credit for, because in the end it was not his life that she gave up.

And she did return to the sea. It was the best of the options. Anyway, she had used up all of her choices.

Art by Erin

Text by Lucie MacAulay

The Tiger In My Car

I knew she would take it the wrong way when she got here. She wasn’t a fan of most animals, but she’d always had a problem with cats. In theory, the bigger the cat, the bigger the problem. Mia would be apoplectic when she saw the tiger in my car.

I had to walk around all of my evo to see just how much tiger was wedged into it. It was much more tiger than should have been possible, and more tiger than I thought was actually attached to a tiger. As far as wild cats went, it was the largest I’d ever seen, and there was something primal to the build of it. This cat hadn’t weathered hunting seasons and greedy humans and global warming; this cat had weathered terraformation, ice flows, the birth of islands, wars and natural disasters. There was a chip in the tiger’s left ear. The ear flicked when I opened the driver’s side door and dropped into the seat. “Look, if you don’t get out now, my friend is going to be pissed when she gets back.”

The tiger didn’t have much space for adjusting positions. My car is small, but there’s only so much space that can be robbed by a tiny budget. And efficient tiger or large person would have been able to fit themselves in here. As it was, the tiger was draped over the reclining passenger seat and part of the tiny backseat. It growled and the car shook. Its eyes were not quite feline. They reminded me of the mosaic, earthen eyes of a crocodile. When it spoke, it sounded like the force of buffeting wind. “It was not my choice to get in, and it is not my choice about whether or not I will be getting out.”

“What?” I didn’t know how this answered my question. In what language would that answer my question? “You’re in my car by accident? Can’t you just-” I made a shoving motion with my hands, as blatant as I dared. I was very aware that it was a large jungle cat and I was a young woman with recent acquisition of her license.

The tiger tried to tilt its head. This was as much of an answer as I was getting, I supposed. I raked my hair away from my face. The city was too hot in the summer; sunshine bounced off every available surface. Tarmac, glass, steel; even in a residential area everything conspired to bake the residents. There was not much to do but wait. I turned on the air con. It sputtered to life a couple minutes before Mia got back.

Mia took it the wrong way immediately. She was good at that.

“Seriously?” she said. She was in the blouse she’d worn to some meeting that day in which she’d sat on the sidelines and waited for her employer to say something worth noting. She was essentially a net for all of the remarks that her employer missed and forgot. From the state of her notepad after these meetings, he looked pretty clumsy with remarks in general. I’d asked if he had a problem with memory or work ethic. This is why you should be grateful to work for Jonathan, she’d said. Mia glared at the tiger. “I told you to commit yourself to your job, Tara. Not to getting out of it. And the office party? I went to incredible lengths to get you an invite. If you didn’t want to go, you could just say so. Fine, maybe you’ll decide I’m worth your time when I get back.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I didn’t do this on purpose. I didn’t ask it to get in. Beside, why are we taking my car? You’ve got one. Just-”

Mia had perfected this to an art; turning away so quicly she looked less rude, and more as though she’d been pushed. There was something performance art about it, as though from a different angle, someone might interpret that I were the one pushing her away. She went to seize her own car, a prettier, German car that had seen more of the world than either of us.

I rounded on the tiger. “Fantastic.” This was not the tone to take with a tiger, but the tiger was not in the position to round on me. “We were going to get dinner too, before the party. You know what’s in the house now? Pasta. Leftover pasta. From the last three nights. Fuck this, we’re going to the store.”

The tiger didn’t protest. It would have been simple to leave the tiger there if not for the fact that there truly was nothing left among the apartment but dried out pasta. There is a tolerance threshold for all things, including pasta, no matter what shape I decided to buy. It was pretty suitable for a university student, but I was supposed to have surpassed that now. Mia’s cupboards were empty by virtue of not having eaten in the apartment for several days. She did have generous coworkers.

“Your tail,” I said. The tiger’s tail was wrapped around the gear shift, and was partly on my lap. It was heavier than a tail really had right to be. I’d read once that tigers use their tails to communicate with other tigers, and to balance when they made quick turns while running after prey. I would be more enthused about a giant, muscled tail on my lap if I thought the tiger was going to catch us dinner with it.

The tiger drew in its tail. I reversed out of the parking spot. About seventy percent of the reflections in my rear and side view mirrors was orange and black. I tried not to run over any lives while I backed out of the parking spot. Everything was still living when I left.

“Who was that?” the tiger asked in its windy, impact voice. It was the sort of androgenous voice that I thought thoughts in in my head. Asking the tiger what gender it considered itself sounded like a great way to get hurt.

“My roommate. Friend. Best friend. Except for right now, maybe,” I said. I pulled onto a main street and aimed for the highway. The car, I noticed, tipped a little toward the tiger’s side.

“Is that my fault?”

“Huh?” I switched lanes quickly and cut off a driver. I felt bad right up until he gave me the finger. It was like seeing a kitten try to menace you with their claws. I laughed and sped up. “She’ll get over it. She likes the idea of working with her best friend in the same office. She couldn’t do that anymore if we weren’t best friends.”

“Are we speeding?” the tiger wondered. It was strange that a tiger might have a concept of speeding. How quickly could a tiger run? This one might easily overtake the car at the speed we were going now. I pressed on the gas a little more, until I could feel the engine’s mini-seizures through the floor.

“Not… now,” I replied, pulling the car quickly off the interstate. There was a grocery store/supermarket here. It was the sort of place you came to buy fertilizer for your plants, diapers for your baby, fancy but disgusting cake for your racist mother-in-law. A teenager was probably smoking in the back somewhere. “You good?” I climbed out of the car and double-checked with the tiger. It had been locked in my car before I found it, but that hadn’t had anything to do with me. When the tiger nodded, I locked my car- for the safety of the tiger more than the safety of others; there were some crazy people in Maryland- and went to the door of the supermarket.

I imagined that some day I would be able to wring in a proper supper on a debit card instead of rifling for change for two small yogurts and a bakery bagel at the cash. There was a woman a little younger than me behind the counter, looking unimpressed with the entire exchange. I hoped the tiger didn’t expect something. I hadn’t seen any bloody carcasses in the store, and I really didn’t have the money for once anyway.

“If I had my credit card, I could have done some real shopping,” I said to the tiger. I put the bag with yogurt and bagel in the console between us. “Like, noodles or something. Pay day is in a week, though. Yeah, this is it for now. When did you last eat?”

The tiger thought for a moment. “Not too long ago. A day, two, perhaps. I am not hungry yet.”

“Hungry for what? Rabbits? Birds? Buskers?” I asked.

“Your roommate looked good,” the tiger said.

There was no expression to the tiger’s face; it was impossible to tell from its voice or face whether or not it was joking. Because there was no way I was letting it get at Mia, I decided the tiger was joking. “You’re welcome to her,” I said. “If you get hungry for someone’s terrible boss, let me know.”

On the way home, we pulled up next to a cop car at the red light of an intersection. The immediate result was that I had to pull over. The tiger was sitting right in front of the license and registration, which were in the folded up mirror in the passenger seat.

“It’s there.” I pointed.

The police officer followed my finger, then shifted a couple inches to the right, to the tiger’s muzzle. It was clean, but when you considered that the muzzle was easily as big as my palm, there were sudden, new, difficult dimensions involved.

“Can you get it out for me?” the cop said. I shrugged and leaned back. There was a perfect path through my window, to the opposite mirror. “It is your duty to get it out for me. Don’t make me ask again. The tiger can’t properly wear a seatbelt, can it?”

“Maybe.” But there was no way for the tiger to actually sit up in the seat with the seatbelt on in the position it was in now without cracking something spinal. The cop ticketed me for speeding, for the funny sound the engine made- the engine was always betraying me this way, and though I dearly loved the Evo, I was beginning to suspect it didn’t love me back- and for the tiger’s seat belt. I would add the ticket to pile of bills I could not pay. When we got back on the road, I worked my way up to a couple miles above the speed limit and very carefully did not go over. If I had been younger, I would have let the needle on the tach climb and climb. I would have kept going until cars with strobe lights stopped me. I wrestled the car straight as the tiger’s weight pulled it right and right again.

“IS this your job?” the tiger asked.

“My job?” I couldn’t be offended. What did the tiger know of the business world? “No. I actually do have a job. I’m an intern for a shareholder and business executive.” It sounded a lot better with long words tacked onto it.

“What does that entail?” the tiger asked. Then the tiger seemed to rethink the question, or to lose interest in my answer before I gave it. “What does that mean, actually? Interns do the same regardless of who they work for, to an extent, don’t they? Or are you shareholding and doing business? You could be an intern if your prime function is not being paid-”

“I was so unaware,” I said. “I did not realize I wasn’t getting paid. I didn’t know I was at the bottom of the food chain. Well, shit, there it all goes. How silly to invest in this. Just because it worked for Mia doesn’t mean it’s a viable path for me, oh no. Whatever you’re saying, it’s all right. Eventually I’ll actually be paid to do- basically what Mia’s doing.”

“And that’s what you want to do?”

“Isn’t that what everyone wants to do? Get paid to do something they love? Well, I like business.” I stopped rather abruptly because I realized I’d actually passed the turnoff for my neighbourhood. I was heading into an area that was alternately an imitation of the old Georgian homes of D.C. and an imitation of a post-apocalyptic ghetto. “And you like my car. Or you don’t. But you’re in it. Speaking of, when are you getting out? I doubt you’re really enjoying our talk that much.”

“I’m getting out when you let me out,” the tiger said “It’s not so bad.”

“What? Let you out?” I had to brake quickly again. The car behind me made a very showy screeching halt as the driver honked their horn. Everyone thought stop signs only needed to apply to the rest of the world. “I’m not keeping you in.”

“But the door is locked,” the tiger said.

I could see from here the tiger was lying. “It is not.”

The tiger nudged the roof with its head. “It is. I can’t get out.”

“Are. You. Serious?”

The tiger looked mournfully so.

I took the next exit to try to turn around. I’d come out in the kind of area that did not know that cars could look like my car looked. That is to say, that they looked like less than five figure cars. This area was probably pretty if you’ve grown up around cream baseboards and decorative paperweights. “That would require dismantling my one true love. I can’t do that to my Evo.”

“What about business?”

“What about it?” I snapped. I had no desire to be lost here. Already one of the natives had lowered their monocle to look at me. Possibly just their reading glasses. But you wouldn’t have seen reading glasses like those in my corner of Maryland.

“Do you not love business?”

“That is not the point at all. And yes. Would I be eating a plain bagel for dinner if I didn’t love business?”

The tiger flexed its paws. I’m sure there were claws somewhere in there, but as they weren’t in my line of vision and I was pissed, I couldn’t care at the moment. “Your friend made it sound lie you have a problem committing. Do you really? You seem committed.”

“Thank you!” But I wasn’t sure the tiger was saying it to agree with me. Taxpayers’ money hemmed us in on either side with groomed greenery and sculpted landscape. “You could tell Mia that. You know, if you were sticking around at all.” I slowed near a sign. I slowed some more to try to read it around the tiger. I slowed until I was almost sure I was going backward. The sign directed me toward squalor. I headed in that direction. “Anyway, did I ask you?”

“You didn’t have to. We were already having this conversation. This is what happens when you have a tiger in your car. It wouldn’t happen to me.”

“What? The tiger in my car is you!”

“Don’t yell at me,” the tiger said. Its whiskers twitched this time. I decided that maybe it did actually have an expression.

We doubled around near the interstate. There were a few miles of road to burn before I would reach a ramp. On the way there, the houses regressed. The degree of shittiness rose. The population of gas stations and corner stores increased. The number of completed houses declined. Several were under construction. One was still piled with tools outside of it, and a construction crane. “I’m not yelling. You are a tiger. In my car. Telling me- what, to get a life? Well, this is life. You do the things you don’t want to do to do the things you do want to do.”

“And business is what you want to do?” the tiger said. It didn’t have eyebrows, just long whisker-like hair over its eyes that rose when it asked the question.

“Who knows?” I said.

I pulled the car over sharply in front of the work-in-progress house. I drove over a wrench or a rock or a dug-up artifact. There was an auto garage across the street eyeing the tiger, and me, and the situation in general. “The thing is, tiger, I have this one plan. If I don’t have it, I’d have to make a whole new plan. You know how hard it is to start from scratch?”

The tiger blinked. One of its eyes was glowing phosphorescence under the street lamp. “Choices.”

I pointed at the windshield of the Evo. I said a silent prayer. “Do you think you’d be able to climb out through that?”

The tiger considered. Then it nodded.

I trudged through the yard, which looked more like a bombsight than the partially built house. I hefted a sledgehammer over my shoulder.

I queued up beside my windshield.

Inside the Evo, the tiger shut its eyes, preparing for impact. “Be gentle,” it advised.

“No point,” I said. I swung.

Art by Adam S. Doyle

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Cabaso's Hat: Part II

The thing about the market was, there weren’t many places to run but away, and away was a short trip across a dangerous gorge at regularly scheduled intervals. Not that Cabaso wanted to get away, but it was a good thing to keep in mind.

He had no intention of leaving his hat behind but his natural impulses were pushing him toward the dock where illegal rides across the gorge could be bought at outrageous prices. Outrageous for others. Cabaso was sure there was a ferryman or woman that owed him a favour, or two. Once man and hat were reunited, they would make their way across the gorge and into the rest of the tunnels and away from the market.

There was a bit to be done before then.

Something he had been warned about, by a former member of a squat party in a market on the other side of town, after helping the former member across the gorge with one of his favours and thus earning himself two more that would, unfortunately, never be collected (the market on the other side of town was vastly different from the market Cabaso currently enjoyed; denizens from one almost never experienced long life when shifted from one to the other), was the tendency for squat parties to adopt people from the market. Adoption was not a legal action, or even a trade. It was that they took all of your fears and reinforced them, then pushed them until you believed they were all something they were not. When they could manipulate your fear, it was easy to make you believe they were the only answer to it.

Cabaso was trying very hard to recall that he knew this, mostly because he could not stop being afraid in that moment.

The fear had come on him so suddenly that he did not know he was frightened until he saw someone who could relieve the fear. He was frightened of being alone, and here was someone, in a wrecked old vest and trousers, to alleviate his fear. He was surprised at how easily the man took his arm and led him toward the cellar door of the building next to Mr.Castle’s pawn shop. He was very glad not to be alone, and to see that there were other faces in the cellar.

“Another one!” someone said.

Another! Which meant there were several before him! Cabaso climbed down into the cellar. What was he doing here? What were they all going to do here? He hoped they were not going to leave the cellar. If they were to get lost, to lose one another- how horrible alone they would all be.

The squatters made a home for him in their nest of blankets. The blankets smelled old and damp, like dough that had been left to rise and do nothing else, and he sank into them with a happy sigh. “You know,” Cabaso said, “I did not even know what I was looking for until just now. I’ve only just found it.”

“That’s lovely,” said his neighbour, wrapped in another blanket. There was something strange about her eyes. They were colourless in a way Cabaso’s mind did not want to see. “I bet you don’t want to leave it, do you? Never leave this place, eh?”

“Never,” Cabaso agreed. It seemed the most basic of things, the simplest truth, that he should never want to leave. What help appeal outside the squat party? And, locked deep down inside of him, if there was a voice protesting or questioning, it was easily ignored.

Time passed, but Cabaso would not have sworn that it did. They did not sleep, just let more of the dough smell collect around them. Someone on his other side shifted occasionally and made small, unhappy noises as their skin changed. It was like dough rising, like the smell, smoothing out all the cracks in his face. Perhaps it was painful, but Cabaso would not know. He did not move in the swelter of blankets. Someone moved across the floor above him. Someone else left to wander through the tunnels that ran under the houses and shops of the ridge, then came back, empty handed. Which was disappointing. It would have been so good, Cabaso thought, to expand the party. There could never be too many squatters.

When he shifted again, after some time, someone else brushed his arm. They smelled distinctly human, and like heat, not like the damp that settled into the cellar and his bones. They were trying to attract his attention, shifting in the mass around them. How irritating, and rude, Cabaso thought. He frowned at the man.

“Don’t give me that look,” the man said. “You know why I’m here. Oh, this is a bit of a mess. I know you would have rather I left you alone. Know that circumstances forced my hand.”

Cabaso tried to recall what circumstances those were, and if he were in any circumstance that would force the man’s hand. He did not think so.

“We’ll get out of here through the tunnels,” the man said, “Once you’ve woken up. Oh, that better be soon. Come on, Cabaso. Please make it soon.”

But Cabaso was awake. He had been awake for a while now. Sometimes the scenery of the cellar changed, which was how he knew that time had passed. More faces had become mountainous and dough-like. The woman beside him was hardly recognizable anymore, except for the blue shawl tied under her shapeless chin. It was a sight. The strange man was distracting him from it, and he tried to put into words why he found it so irritating to move or be spoken to at length. “This is where I belong,” Cabaso said.

Something next to him that could have been a person nodded. It was like watching an unbaked loaf of bread bounce.

Cabaso tried to ignore the strange man, and not to move. These things both proved difficult, since the strange man was right in front of him. The strange man moved about the cellar, pushing aside Cabaso’s squat party as he reached for Cabaso. He tugged on Cabaso until he stood. Cabaso was put out to find himself travelling through the tunnels, away from his squatting territory and his party. He was sure he was meant to stay with them. This man was leading him toward a place he would be quite alone.

“This is not-” Cabaso broke off because the man had stuck something in his mouth. Cotton balls or cloth. It was in between Cabaso’s teeth and made his words into sloppy noises.

“You know me,” the man said. There was light shining down through the floorboards, on the man’s dark skin. “Algernon. Come now, Cabaso. The squatters got you. If Castle decides now’s the time to check for squatters in his shop, you’re caput.”

He tugged Cabaso along. They bumped into chairs and tables together. Cabaso turned around, to go back, but he was walking backward, because the strange man was still pulling him. When Cabaso glanced upward, he saw a knot in one of the floorboards, and through it, it looked like Mr.Castle had gone to meet his neighbour. Cabaso did hope Mr.Castle would not check for squatters, or disband or dismember their squatting party.

“Oh, dear,” the strange man said. He looked up through the knot. Mr.Castle was wearing lots of finery for his visit. Cabaso thought it was nice. He thought his party must be getting worried about now. The smell of dough was fading, and his head felt very large, a balloon about to pop, filled with helium. He wanted to take hold of it to make sure it didn’t fall off his shoulders.

The strange man dragged him a few more feet away from the squat party. Cabaso should have been infuriated by this. He should have turned around and reclaimed those feet.

“He is gone,” Mr.Castle said, agitated and hateful. “Just disappeared. Cuffs open. Well, he’s no thief, just a con artist. If you see him, though, you can still cut off his hands.”

Cabaso’s cranium swelled even more. He would have to poke it with something to deflate it, soon.

Mr.Castle moved again, into Cabaso’s full vision. Through the knot, he was an attractive shape, if a little large at the stomach. He looked exactly the Mr.Castle that had tried to drown him in a metal container a week (several days? A month?) ago, except for the addition of a remarkable piece of clothing that did not mean to sit on his head. The hat was like all the shadowed shades of colour.

Cabaso did touch his head, then, because he thought this thing in it might burst. He was only prodding his anger, he realized. Like prodding an animal only half-stuck in a trap. He looked fiercely at the hat on Mr.Castle’s head.

It was elegant. It was sophisticated and mysterious. It shone like a wet street. Something about Cabaso gave a little snap like a “twing”. 

“My hat,” he said.

It irritated Cabaso slightly that Algernon noticed the exact moment he woken up and did nothing about it. It would be a mistake for them both to run, right now. There was still a party of squatters in the bowels of these houses. They had no advantage except for being awake, and they were on vastly different pages. Algernon wanted to get away, only. What Cabaso wanted was on Mr.Castle’s head.

There was the matter of getting from the bowels of this house, to the ground level of Mr.Castle’s house.

“Excuse me, Algernon,” Cabaso said blandly. “I’ve just remembered what it is I’m here for and that I’m in perfect control of the situation. I should be getting along with it, actually.”

Algernon said, “Cabaso. Oh, dear brother, you don’t seem to understand exactly what’s going on. It’s a little more complicated than all that, I’m afraid.”

Cabaso, understanding exactly how complicated it was and how complicated it was not, said, “I am sure that if you would rather stay here, behind, you are welcome to. There are some very nice people in the other room that will welcome you with open arms. I, however, had something of extremely important business to attend to.”

“I’ve got this,” Algernon said.

Cabaso, who believed Algernon had, at the moment, nothing, wandered past him, into the cellar of Mr.Castle’s room. It was much easier to see how the squatters were really one entity from outside the party. They were all so incredibly dough-like. Mr.Castle, it turned out, was very bad at pest control, because they were very close to growing between the cracks of the floor boards. Cabaso had to be very careful about edging around them, toward the stairs that led up the ladder. Algernon was a little less careful, on account of trying to reach Cabaso before he revealed them both, but he was too slow. And anyway, Cabaso was good at big reveals.

He made a very flashy one in Mr.Castle’s store. Perhaps not the best of places to reveal himself. His coat, flung open dramatically and devastatingly, knocked over a couple second-hand lamps. And his delicate, dark fingers, outstretched for show, scraped one of the shelves. A nail broke. Cabaso tried not to let it affect his entrance.

“Oh, that’s very rude,” Mr.Castle said. He was holding a gun in Cabaso’s direction and though the hammer was cocked, Cabaso still felt worried at its presence. He did not like barrels pointed at him. Having Algernon climb up after him did not help.

“Hello again,” Cabaso said. “I’m afraid I haven’t the time to be almost drowned again. I have to be getting on. And you are actually a primary function in my getting on. Don’t try anything with that gun, now. They’re permanent, you know.”

“I do know. Where exactly do you plan to go next?”

Cabaso lifted one shoulder. The hat was in the same room as him, just on a devastatingly wrong head. “I could show you. If I had a map. And time. But you can’t expect me to stay, really.”

“I can, really. There’s a map there, on the counter. I want you to tell me where it is you think you’ll be going before I actually do kill you. Pick it up and unfold it, carefully. There you go. Come on. Hurry up. You, behind him, stop leaning over. I want to see- ah.”

Mr.Castle came forward to look at the map. The gun was still pointed at Cabaso. Through the floorboards below them rose the scent of dough. Cabaso held the map open before Mr.Castle. “This is a shame. I’d rather hoped you would put down the gun when you came to look. I also hoped I would have a more interesting route to show you, but it’s looking more and more like we won’t be getting very far. Just out of this room, isn’t that right, Algernon?”

Mr.Castle opened the one flap of the map that Cabaso hadn’t unfolded. He stepped on a floorboard that should have creaked, but took a moment too long, because the creak was coming from the floorboard being pushed in the wrong direction. Dust was dislodged from the grooves of it. Cabaso felt a slight pressure beneath his boots.

“I am going to enjoy killing you,” Mr.Castle said, pressing the gun into the side of Cabaso’s head. “And this time I won’t wait for you to drown. Directly at my hand, you see.”

Cabaso did see. He was also edging slowly toward the door, so slowly he was nearly holding his breath. The barrel of the gun pressed lightly into the side of his head, then not at all. What he needed, was to not be in this room, very quickly. He hoped that Algernon had been listening and that he was also aiming to be out of the room very quickly. There was the hat, which didn’t need to listen, but needed to be out of the room with them, very quickly. He would soon have to actually grab it.

Cabaso took a full step backward. Mr.Castle pulled the hammer on the gun back, eyes narrowed. He was tilted, a little, because the floorboard beneath him was. He bared his teeth at Cabaso. Cabaso noticed that Algernon was matching his pace in going backward, except perhaps he was moving a little more quickly. Cabaso hesitated, made a decision, and stumbled back several paces as though he’d lost his balance. Mr.Castle raised the gun, but did not shoot. Cabaso heard Algernon breathe in, very quickly.

“What is happening?” Mr.Castle said. His mouth was stretching sideways in the shape of dismay. The floorboard beneath his feet appeared to be buckling. He took a step back as well. The hat followed him.

“Your squatters are getting bigger,” Cabaso said. “I thought they would, if you were not careful. And you never seem to be. Algernon, you’re quite ready?”

He saw Algernon nod in the corner of his eye.

Mr.Castle aimed his gun again. They were unfortunately very close, and his aim was very accurate. “You are going to die today,” he informed Cabaso.

“Oh goodness, darling,” Cabaso said, pressing a hand to his heart. “Lies do not become us.”

And it was at this moment that the first of the squatters burst up through the floorboards, and broke several of them in the process. Because the first of the squatters was atop the rest of the squat party, and had become the rest of the squat party. They were no more than a rough collection of fingers and an outline of limbs that was melded somewhat into the rest of the party. They ballooned upward, white and thick and squishy, throwing Mr.Castle back.

Cabaso leapt upon the heap. It was an unpleasant heap to be atop, even for a second. The sour smell of dough filled his nostrils and every crevice of his head. The only forgiving thing was the feel of the hat’s brim between his fingers, then the hat in his palm, then the hat on his head as he fell back and made for the door, Algernon on his heels.

It was not unusual for people to run from the squat party, so the squat party had realized that it could stretch itself out in an effort to catch the runners too. It stretched toward Algernon and Cabaso as they flung themselves through the door and onto the ridge. It stretched on the ground floor and in the tunnels, and so there was not quite enough of it to stretch. They stretches not-quite hands toward the both of them and came up empty. They pulled back together, lest they accidentally sever part of themselves. It was frightening to be alone, anyway.

No one noticed Algernon and Cabaso running into the market, away from the pawn shops, toward the main ferry docks of the gorge. They slowed to a jog between the stalls, and when the space grew cramped and crowded, they slowed to a leisurely stroll to catch their breath.

“That was quite the risk you just took,” Algernon said, as the ridge wall fell away behind them. “Are you entirely sure it was worth it?”

Cabaso heard him only partially. He was inspecting the hat for damage and finding none. There was a bit of dough on the brim but he flicked it off and stepped around it on the ground. Let the market deal with it when it began to grow. He would be long gone. “Entirely.”

They walked deeper into the market, both looking over their shoulders for Mr.Castle and unwilling to admit they were looking. Cabaso had dusted the hat off long enough; he put it on.

It fit as it had before. Which was to say that it fit perfectly. The man beneath it looked a little fantastic. He was all cast in colours of shade, like you could not see him properly, even looking head on. Like he was meant to be cloaked in shadow. The twinkle in his eyes was darker than the twinkle in others eyes. The hat was magnificent on him, shining like wet pavement.

Cabaso adjusted it, just so, to be able to see out from beneath the brim without making the curve of the brim look like an invitation. He turned around and found that Algernon had performed a trick of vanishing enigmatically and mysteriously away into the crowd, without a goodbye, without a hint of his leaving or having been there in the first place.

It sounded like something a charismatic character would do in a story. Cabaso realized it was one of his pet peeves.

A lady in a stall beside him was giving him a look. He was not interested in the look right now, unless he could make its owner owe him a favour, but he wasn’t sure of the market’s future, and he definitely did not want to be a part of it, with Mr.Castle possibly still floating around somewhere, and a ball of dough squatters definitely floating about somewhere. So he tilted the hat to her and the hat took the gesture and turned it into something elegant, stately, regal, and charmed her with it, so that she would never forget the man in the shadowy hat with the charismatic smile. She did not know Cabaso, but she knew he was like no one else she had ever met.

Cabaso turned away, toward the gorge and his ride out of the market. There were some thoughts lingering around him, like the stray threads of a cobweb, about what was going to happen to the person under the hat and about whoever that might be, and about the people around him. Then he tilted the hat down and performed a trick of vanishing enigmatically and mysteriously away into the crowd, without a goodbye, without a hint of his leaving or having been there in the first place.

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Art by anonymous

Cabaso's Hat: Part I

Cabaso was not in the habit of getting himself into difficult situations. Not difficult situations that he could not easily talk himself out of. It was a bit more difficult to talk himself out a situation when there was no one around to talk to. Which meant there was also no one around to hear him complain of the circumstances that had led to him being here, and if there was a short list of the things he loved most dearly in this world, complaining was most certainly on it. Near the top. Somewhere after apple crumble and friend plantains and being a mysterious, charismatic, rakish enigma.

He would have complained, had anyone been around to hear it, that in the beginning it was only because he’d wanted his hat back. The hat was not just any old hat. It was not just any new hat. It’s magnificence transcended time and any notion of old or new. It was timeless, beautiful, elegant. A masterpiece of hattery. It had a hidden pocket, which was nearly unheard of, and every colour on it was like a colour seen in the shade, so it always gave the impression that he had just emerged from the shadows, or was a blink away from slipping back into them. He was, when he wore it, effortlessly unique. It was a hat he refused to give up.

Which was what made losing it so hard to stomach in the first place. He had not gambled it away. Not even drunkenly. Cabaso did many things drunkenly, but the consequences were never visited upon the hat. But he’d been doing someone a favour, and been happily doing it (for favours always had to be returned, and on the shortlist of things he loved dearly, being owed was present), and somewhere within the favour he’d been clubbed over the head, and the hat had not protected him. In fact, when he’d come to, the hat had been notably absent. This was disturbing for many reasons, not the least of them being that, hatless, Cabaso was also up to his thighs in water, and the water was slowly rising. We will return to that in a moment. For the moment, the hat.

The hat should have been in Cabaso’s possession partly because it had, once he’d procured it, never left his possession. And secondly, because there was no reason for anyone else to have the hat, unless someone was trying to hold it hostage, to make their way out of a debt they owed him. When he racked his mind quickly for the name of the soul malicious enough to attempt it, he came up empty. When his mind instead conjured up the image of his hat, his hat of midnight colours and the shine of wet cobblestones upon another’s head, circuitry in his brain suffered.

Some say that clothing does not reflect the person inside them as well as they could or should, and that they do not make the man. This is, to some extent, correct. But it is more correct to say that when Cabaso the boy put on the hat and glanced at himself in the mirror of the White Hart Inn’s tavern he saw Cabaso the man, and Cabaso the man stood straighter, tilted his chin up, unless he wanted to look menacing, and was no thief of a good hat, but had come to own it the same way he’d come to be conceive: because the universe had willed it. Cabaso the boy had not had the name yet, but Cabaso the man knew it as soon as he donned the hat and saw himself in it. The hat was big then, but no less resplendent and perfect. Its perfection had only aged with him, as it should. Cabaso. The name came with the hat. No other name could wear this hat.

Back to the water, which was climbing up his pelvis. There had certainly not been this much when he’d been put here, he thought, for he would have woken up to such a shock, rather than this gentle lapping of rising water. All he had wanted was to get his hat back. It had been harder demanding answers without the hat. People listened to the hat. The face beneath it was slightly harder to remember without the shadow of the brim cast on it. And people generally did not want to remember Cabaso. Remembering him often came with seeing him, and often that walked hand in hand with owing him.

Cabaso tested his throat and gave a very slight hollar. There was a rasp in his throat that told him his assailant with the club had either dunked water down his throat, which might explain the ugly feeling in his stomach, or had had their hands wrapped around his throat at some point in his black memory. Maybe there was an ache to his throat he could examine later, when the water was not mounting his hipbones and rising.

In the market, Cabaso had asked the local friers for their assistance. Friers were not much in the way of assistance when it came to intellectual matters, but they could use their eyes at least, and mostly they could use their memories. Cabaso needed some of both. “Did you see a fellow go by with a hat?” Cabaso asked them. “You would know the hat. Beautiful. Magnificent. Incredible. Belongs on a head of a similar kind. The fellow with it would have had to come by here to get anywhere.” The market headed off the honeycomb labyrinth of underground paths. The way he and the assailant had both come had been blocked off by the rising water levels. The tunnels were cut off.

A frier with a basket full of bok-choy shook his head. He dumped the bok-choy into a steaming pan and covered it with a net, to catch the spitting oil. His skin looked like he’d been frying things for years and leaning over his job. It also looked like he’d been eating fried things for years and had forgotten food existed outside his job. “Haven’t seen him. Did you check the pawn shops? All sorts come their way.” The bok-choy frier coughed. “We’s got bok-choy, if yer interested.”

“I am not interested,” said Cabaso. “I am interested in my hat, which none of you seem to recognize. When I find it, I shall return to broaden your sad horizons with it. Which pawn shops are in this district? Where would I be able to buy it back?”

The bok-choy frier shrugged. “Pawn shops along the ridge.”

“And who would have bought my hat?” asked Cabaso.

The bok-choy frier did not answer. When Cabaso repeated the question, he lifted a hand in a gesture that Cabaso felt was unsportsmanlike. Gentlemen were not to be found often in the market. It was followed by another gesture of the kind that looked, if they were playing charades, as though the frier were slitting his own throat. Cabaso was determined, but smart. He asked no more questions. He kept looking for answers.

Elsewhere, there were more answers to be found. Someone dealing in old trunks, who smelled like a cellar that had not been well taken care of, told him, “I know who you are. I know you’re looking for your hat. Saw it by the ridge. Near that old second hand- you know. What’s the place called? There’s a long-nosed man who runs it.”

He had the attention of the hair on the back of Cabaso’s neck. “Well. The Belfast Beacon?”

The trunk-dealer snapped his fingers in Cabaso’s direction. This was not much of an improvement, as far as gestures went. It was shaping up to be one of those days that was against Cabaso. But the trunk-dealer was of a friendly kind, so Cabaso was generously silent about the gesture. “That’s it. That’s the store. But I still can’t remember the bugger’s name…”

“You are quite close with bugger,” Cabaso said. He did not sigh. Sighing was particularly not in style. Or not of the kind of style Cabaso preferred. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I know his name.” There had been no cheer in him, but now the absence of cheer was instead filled with anti-cheer. He could feel that, without the hat, it looked petulant and resentful on him, instead of broody and misunderstood.

He walked away and toward the ridge, which was covered with second hand shops and pawn shops. He held his hand over his eyes when he passed under a lamp meant to imitate the sun’s glare. It was doing a fabulous job of pointing out Cabaso’s lack of a hat. Gold is never wrapped in more gold, said a voice in his head, in the exact tone of his brother’s voice. Precious things are never wrapped in precious things. Cabaso made an effort to pretend his brother’s voice had not spoken in his head.

Instead he pondered as he neared the ridge. This was a risk, because Cabaso had few friends here and many people owed him favours, and because The Belfast Beacon was home to one of the very few men in the world that Cabaso owed. He liked to make calculations and the way he understood it was that there were only a handful of deals in the world worth making. He had made one that was not among that handful, and the month he’d spent with the girl enthralled by a love potion was not enough to owe another human being. But he’d done it.

Here, he would have not to trust anyone. Cabaso had good practice with this. Without the hat, he did not even trust himself.

He should not even have trusted the paths on the edge of the ridge, because no one was watching closely enough to stop his assailant. He remembered looking toward The Belfast Beacon and the one Turkish lantern shining in the window and thinking, something is off. Then correcting himself, because it was not something. Many things are off here. He turned. Wrong, wrong, wrong. That was about the time that the club struck the back of his head and flashpapers ignited behind his eyes. They settled again as he tumbled into the dark.

Which brings us back to the water. It was the third thing he’d noticed upon waking because the first thing he noticed was that his hands were cuffed to the wall. And secondly, he was still without hat.

He had been unconscious. And now that he was conscious, there was no one around him to determine that he was in any condition other than the one in which they’d delivered him to the cellar filling with water. It was a compartment in a sewer that he was cuffed into, filling rapidly. It was not watertight, but the leak around the locked door on the other side of the compartment was slight enough that it did not matter how much water drained from it. On this side, water would continue to rise and to make his circumstances increasingly lethal.

He knew exactly who it was that had put him here in the first place. He knew who it was that owned the Belfast Beacon, which was not the first store of its name. But the last store had been burned down. An incident that could have been viewed, unfortunately, as Cabaso’s fault. It really depended on who one asked. If they asked Cabaso, he would tell them that it had only happened in his presence, and near him, and that he was not in control of all of his limbs all the time. If they asked an eye witness, they would tell you that the Cabaso had, basely and clumsily, knocked over a candle and set the place ablaze, thus putting him in the poor graces of the Beacon’s owner, Mr.Castle. And also in Mr.Castle’s debt. Cabaso could see Mr.Castle’s awful, spider smile now, unhappy to watch his shop burn to the ground, glad to have caught Cabaso and to be owed something for the mess Cabaso had put him in. He had never wanted to see the smile again, but he was seeing it now, namely because Mr.Castle was leaning out of a hutch in the compartment several feet above his head, and looking down upon Cabaso with glee.

“An honour, surely,” Cabaso said. He made as much of a bow as a man can make with his hands cuffed to the wall, and without an elegant hat. “I had not anticipated seeing you, Mr.Castle, or I would have dressed more appropriately. The cuffs are a bit excessive in your presence, I think. If you rid me of them, I think you’ll find I’m in a manner more befitting a chat with you. We can talk, you and I.”

To Mr.Castle, it was obvious that ‘you and I’ was a concept he had no interest in. “I think not,” he said. His voice was smooth, like the smoke rising from a lit cigarette. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to get you in that position? You are slippery. I am giving you no slack at all until I know for certain that you are dead. Then you can have all the slack you want.”

“Again, how honourable of you,” Cabaso said.

“I really want to hear you beg and scream. I want to hear you pleading for mercy. Have you ever cried, Cabaso? Of course you have. I meant outside of infancy. You will today. For me.”

“That sounds like an unlikely thing,” Cabaso said, “but we’ll see. You did not follow me to the market on the off chance that I would lose my hat, be drawn toward the ridge looking for it, and then receive instructions to go looking for The Belfast Beacon to retrieve it, and thereby put myself in the position to be thwarted and stuffed into this hell hole, did you?”

Mr.Castle smiled.

“Well, that is devotion,” Cabaso observed. “Or overreaction.”

“Devotion,” Mr.Castle agreed. “I had other plans as well, to find you and make you pay for what you did. This was, infact, the simplest of them.”

Cabaso did not doubt that it was. Mr.Castle seemed the type to use simplicity so long as it was efficiency. He liked to look clever, and though scheming looked very clever, winning looked the cleverest. And he did look suspiciously like he was winning right now. He stood up straight and pressed his back to the wall. The water was above his belly button now. The sensation did something unpleasant to Cabaso’s body, and to his panic.

“Well?” Mr.Castle said. “Beg for my forgiveness.”

“Ah! Oh, I see. Well, here goes: please! I’m begging you! I have much to look forward to. I have my whole life! Mercy! Please! You looked best with a bit of compassion on your face, Mr.Castle, and I know I deserve not to even be lifted from this tank and onto the dirt beneath your feet, but if you were feeling so forgiving-”

“I think you are aware,” Mr.Castle said, “that it is a factor of the cadence of your voice that everything that comes out of your mouth sounds sarcastic.”

“I am aware now. Shall I change my voice for you? I am afraid my accent is strong. And my voice won’t matter much longer. Underwater and all that.”

“Be quiet,” Mr.Castle suggested. “You will be on your own very soon. In some time, the room will fill with more water, and you’ll drown. You’ll be dead the next time I come in. There will be laughing on my part. I’ll get someone to chuck your body into the river or something.” He turned his head a fraction toward the window he was poking out of. “Ah. Hang on. Here is something…”

He left. And he returned wearing an insult. He wore it not nearly as well as Cabaso wore it. The rim was too tight around his head, and the shadow that fell across his eyes was sleazy and unkind to his features. The hat itself was a magnificent thing, shining like wet cobblestones, in dark shades, like it was permanently in a shadow. It was mysterious. Charismatic. Enigmatic. Everything about the angle of the rim said elegance and beauty.

Cabaso’s head swelled with rage. Blackness pushed on the inside of his cranium and carried his temper on it, buoyed and darkening the rest of the world. He was really only a few feet below the hat, and the head wearing it, unjustly. The hat was doing its best to turn Mr.Castle the bastard into Mr.Castle the handsome rake. Because it was nto just any old hat. It was his hat.

Then Mr.Castle went back inside the window, and this time he shut it behind him. There was a bang as it swung all the way closed. The darkness was absolute. It did not rid him of the water, which was counting his ribs upward. He writhed against the wall, but the cuffs were firm and tight around his wrists. His legs were free, but they could only go so far without his hands. And he did not want to try walking away and slip into the water with his hands snagged above him. It sounded uncomfortable on several levels.

The hat would have been able to solve this. There was a hat pin in there was had many more uses than most hat pins did have. There were buttons on the hat that had more capabilities than other people’s buttons. There were picklocks and tiny useful instruments in the concealed pocket of the hat. There was also a bandage that would have been perfect for sliding between the cuff and the knob of his wrist. The water did not help his hands slick and come out of the cuffs. It only made it a little harder to concentrate when it was almost up to his underarms.

Cabaso did a quick calculation and realized he was on his way to a quick death. Not necessarily a pleasant death; he’d heard many things about drowning and most of them pointed toward agony. All he had to do was un-cuff himself, and then he would be free to find the source of the water and shut it off, or get out of the room, or both options in alternative order, and then avoid Mr.Castle but not avoid the hat. He would complete it with the most perfect getaway Mr.Castle or anyone in the market had every seen.

He tugged on his wrists. The cuffs bit them hungrily. He tugged harder. He lost a little more of the skin on his wrists to the cuffs. He considered when he’d last updated his will and then whether or not he had actually told anyone where it was. He had many fine possessions he was proud of, but the one that he would be most worried about in whatever afterlife existed sat on Mr.Castle’s head. He thought about his death, and the agony, and the after, and his hat.

“Oh, stop that. Now’s not the time.”

The voice had spoken in his ear, so Cabaso turned his head, automatically, toward the speaker. There was something metallic and finicky happening around his wrists. The pressure around one of them was gone. His hand came back to life as he lifted it out of the water, out of the unlocked cuff.

Cabaso turned to the voice. “Pardon?”

In the darkness, Cabaso should not have been at all able to make out the smile. But he could, because the darkness parted for that kind of handsomeness. The smile was roguish and inviting; the eyes invited swooning.

“Other wrist, now,” said the man. He smiled and the eyes did not invite swooning so much as encourage it.

Cabaso did not swoon. He shifted his shoulder slightly so the man could reach around him without moving through the water too much. The water was up to Cabaso’s shoulders, and not quite up to the man’s. The couple inches of difference were annoyingly infuriating. The man did something else metallic and the cuff around his other hand opened.

“That’s better, isn’t it? I hoped you weren’t in trouble, but it sounded like you were,” the man said. He looked at Cabaso from a dark and handsome face. Cabaso looked back from his own dark face. His eyes sparkled. He was not much taller than the average man, but his posture told everyone he was ever likely to meet that they would look up to him in some way or other so they may as well begin by looking up to him physically.

“Trouble? What trouble? I am perfectly all right,” Cabaso said.

“All right does not require rescuing. I just did that.”

Cabaso would allow him to hold this opinion, however wrong it was. “Mr.Castle does not know you’re here, does he?”

“Absolutely not. He’s still waiting on the other side for you to drown. If you were cuffed, that would only have taken another, foot, but I think he wants to be sure. See? The water is already up to your chin. The water’s coming from the floor. But give it a minute and it will buoy us up to a door in the wall.”

“You planned this?”

The man with Cabaso’s skin and the roguish smile said, “Of course.” He made a face that might have made some people, when looking at Cabaso and the man side by side, think, for a horribly misguided second, that he was a tad more handsome than Cabaso. “Did you really think I was going to stand by and let someone drown my little brother?”

The water touched Cabaso’s bottom lip. He did not tilt his head back. He had his pride. “No one was drowning me. I told you, I’m all right.”

The man began to float on top of the water. His limbs helped him. He didn’t look toward the window where Mr.Castle and the hat had disappeared. He looked toward the opposite side of the compartment and pushed himself slowly to it. Cabaso floated on the water too, and watched him reach for a latch. A part of the wall that did not look like a door swung open, like a door. “This is it,” the man said. “I recommend going quickly, before it fills with water.”

Then he did not give Cabaso the chance to ignore his advice, because he seized Cabaso and hauled him through the door, which was actually the entrance to a tunnel, which was actually like a long water slide.

The water slide went on for a bit. In the dark, Cabaso had the time to reflect that he was going down and away, and getting farther and farther from the hat, and that he did not know what was at the bottom of this, and also, that he was not enjoying himself.

At the bottom, he nearly twisted his ankle in a metal grate. He hit his face on it instead. The hat’s brim would have saved him. He dragged himself off the grate and onto a concrete floor where he shivered and was miserable and wet.

From the tunnel came a sort of enjoying-himself noise. It preceded his brother, who shot out of the tunnel and only his feet like he’d finished performing a very good trick. “Ha!” he said. “Brilliant, huh?”

“To some,” Cabaso conceded. And, not that he was particularly curious, but, “were you holding your hands above your head as you came down?”

“Of course I was. Why wouldn’t I?”

Cabaso got to his feet. His feet didn’t like it. Well, his feet would have to just take it. “You name? Is it still Algernon?”

“Absolutely. No reason to change it. Don’t fix what isn’t broken and all that. And you, Cabaso? Still calling yourself by that name?”

“Don’t fix, and all that,” Cabaso said, though it could be argued that changing his name might actually aid him. He sounded uncertain. He looked drowned and conviction-less. He felt very young and stupid.

“Well, whatever works. Look, I’ve got to go. You know, things to do. Just don’t get into any more messy situations. And don’t worry about it. I know you would have done it for me.” Algernon meant every word he said, which did not make Cabaso feel better about it. It made him, in fact, feel much, much worse.

This really was an awful day. Because now it just had to be said. “Thank you, brother.”

“You don’t have to. But! Your hat, right?” Algernon smiled, like the way he said it did not make Cabaso feel ten inches tall. “Mr.Castle still has it, as you know. And I know you don’t want to hear any advice, but here it is: forget the hat. Really. You’ll be better off without it. Get another one.”

“Hm,” Cabaso said.

“Hm.” Algernon inclined his head, and it was as elegant a gesture as though he were wearing a hat. He shook his head once, spraying water, turning his hair into a devastating mess. He was elusive as he left, leaving in a direction that Cabaso did not notice entirely. This was Algernon’s talent. Leaving through indeterminate routes. People were always left with the feeling that they’d just witnessed a magic trick, but a very high end one.

He could forget the hat. He could lie low or pay someone else to retrieve it for him. He could change his name and plan out a route too complicated for Mr.Castle to chase him. He could get a new hat. Not his hat. It would not be his hat at all.

He came very close to another sigh. He was still going to get his hat back. And part of it was this: sometime, when he was young, he’d decided who he wanted to be. And because he had human imagination, what he created could only get as far as an amalgamation of things that already existed, and it was a variation on a model he’d already seen.

He had known many things about who he wanted to be, and what he wanted not to be, and even as a boy he had decided to become or not become all of them. He had wanted to be entirely different from his brother. He had not wanted to be like anyone that already existed. He wanted to be clever and enigmatic and slippery and devastating. He wanted to be one of a kind.

So, essentially, like his brother.  

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Art by anonymous