Little Luca is maybe just a few hundred in population, a quaint small town sat in the middle of nowhere. It could be the 1950s, or maybe not much has changed since then. It's the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, for better and worse, and gossip spreads like wildfire. Jerry Henderson runs the town's only gas station and is married to the local schoolteacher, a tall and attractive woman named Molly. Jerry is a tall, rangy, practical man of few words, unless you count grunts from under a car hood every once in a while. Despite being in their mid-thirties they have no children, which has only recently become a talking point in the coffee shops and hair salon in town.

It's Sunday morning. Jerry wakes and upon opening his eyes, jumps out of bed, breathing heavily. "Who the hell are you?" he shouts at the dark-haired woman lying in his bed. The woman looks confused, "What on earth do you mean Jerry?". "You're not my wife!" Jerry continues, becoming red-faced, totally bewildered and angry at this intruder in his house. The woman starts to look scared, gathering the bedclothes around her. "Jerry, you're scaring me, come back to bed! What on earth is wrong with you?".

Jerry grabs some clothes and runs from the house, tripping on his trouser leg as he hurriedly dresses all the way down his driveway and into his pickup truck.

On the way into town, driving erratically, Jerry mops his sweat-soaked brow with his shirt sleeve, he's frantic. He's on his way to visit his best friend, to try and make some sense of this situation. Maybe he's still dreaming?

Jerry's best friend is the local newspaper reporter and editor. A bald, slight man with a cocky smile and small round glasses. Jerry bursts through the door of his untidy newsroom.

"Trevor, you have to help me, there's a strange woman in my bed."
"Lucky you! You sly old dog..." chides Trevor.
"No, you don't understand, that woman - I've never seen her before!" Jerry looms over Trevor's desk, almost menacingly. Trevor drops the wisecracks.
"Well, what did she look like?"
"Ahh god I don't know, dark hair, brown eyes, I guess".

Trevor starts to laugh, thinking he's now in on the joke. "Oh I see Jerry, you and Molly trying a little role play?"
"What? God man this is serious! You know full well Molly has been missing for nearly three weeks. If this is one of your stupid games it's sick." Trevor's grin once again disappears.
"Jerry, what the hell. I saw Molly yesterday at the store, that's Molly in your bed. Now do you want to tell me what this is about? Have you two fallen out again?"

Jerry looks about to explode. "You know full well Molly is a blonde, and this wasn't her."

The journalist just scratches his head and looks at Jerry, nonplussed. "Jerry, I don't know what to say - could Molly have dyed her hair as a surprise maybe?"
"No! I know my wife's face and this wasn't her. This is useless. Come with me back to the house, you'll see!".
"OK Jerry, nothing much newsworthy here today anyway."

Jerry and Trevor drive back to Jerry's house in silence. Trevor is looking noticeably uneasy, Jerry increasingly manic. As they pull up at the house, Molly greets them warmly.

"Hi fellas! Jerry where did you get to?"
"Molly! Looking lovely as always!" Trevor chirps. Jerry double takes from Trevor to Molly. "You know this woman? This isn't Molly! I haven't seen Molly since she disappeared, and neither have you goddamnit!"
"Jerry, look - if you two are having a fight I'd rather not get in the middle of it. Take me back to town, there's a good man?"

"I don't know what's going on here but I'm damn well going to find out!". With this he storms back to his truck and peels out in a cloud of dust.

The Sheriff of Little Luca is a slightly portly man with a small moustache and enormous hands - Colm by name. He's policed this small town all his professional life, with little more to do than round up drunks or get between the occasional domestic. His office is small, neat, but everything is old and worn. His door bursts open, it's Jerry, his shirt soaked with sweat.

"Colm. I'm reporting a burglar in my house. You've got to get there right away. I'm serious!"
Colm removes his hat, wipes the inside brim with his handkerchief and ponderously replaces it on his head. "Well, did you get a good look at 'em, Jerry?"
"Yes, it's a woman, she was in my bed when I woke up!" Jerry grips the back of the chair in front of the sheriff's desk so hard his knuckles whiten. An interminable pause.
"You had a burglar in your bed? What did Molly have to say about that?"
"Damnit Colm, Molly is still missing, you know this - I filed the report with you, we put up the posters around town together, on all the noticeboards, up here on the wall - " Jerry whirls round and points to a blank piece of wall. Something might have been pinned there once, but nothing was evident now. "Where is it? Where's the damn poster Colm?"
"Now calm yourself Jerry. I don't have the first clue what you're talking about. Molly is not missing to the best of my knowledge, I've never printed a poster or pinned one regarding a search for her whereabouts."

Jerry is speechless, fuming, with tears in his eyes, but won't be beaten. "This woman, in my bed, she had dark hair. Molly is a blonde, you know this. Come on Colm!"
"Jerry, what the hell. I may not be the busiest Sheriff in the US but I don't have time for any more of this bullshit. Get the hell out of my office. Your wife is brunette, she's perfectly well and no doubt at your home wondering where the hell you are. I suggest you return to her and have a lie down. Good day."

"No! Look, here..." Jerry pulls out his wallet, fishes out a small photograph and his face turns from triumph to despair as he stares at it. It's a picture of a smiling Jerry with a dark-haired woman, the same woman he woke up with this morning.

"Jerry," Colm starts, with a soothing tone. "I know you and Molly haven't been getting along, and I know you've had your troubles with money - damnit everyone in this town knows you're likely to lose that gas station your daddy gave you if times don't pick up, but please don't lose your mind as well. This is hard on Molly too. Don't forget..." but before he can finish, Jerry has whirled out of the office into the scorching heat, the picture clasped in his hand.

Jerry staggers down the street, to the sound of church bells. He accosts people as he comes across them - "Who is this woman? Do you know her?" jabbing his finger at the photograph from his wallet. Everyone has the same answer -

"Jerry, that's your wife. That's Molly."
"A darling picture! Molly is so pretty Jerry"
"Jerry, what's wrong? Is this some kind of joke?"
"You're a lucky man, Jerry Henderson!"

He ricochets across the street until his way is blocked by the town chapel. Looking up at it's tolling bells as if for salvation, he staggers up to the doors and flings them wide. The congregation is halfway through a hymn, which abruptly stops as the flock turns to see who has interrupted them.

"You people!" Jerry is exhausted, his voice hoarse. "You people, what's wrong with you?"

The crowd just stares.

"This woman - " Jerry raises the photograph to eye level and waves it in the faces of the townspeople as he progresses down the aisle "I have never seen her before, I don't know who she is and she is NOT my wife!!!"

The pastor raises his hand for calm. "Jerry, Molly grew up in Little Luca, I baptised her and I've watched her grow up. That's her."

"IT IS NOT!" Jerry screams "And I can prove it! I can prove I'm not going insane!" Jerry turns on his heel and starts out of the chapel. The parishioners, to a man, file out behind him in silence.

Jerry staggers, runs, falls and crawls through the chapel gardens and out into the countryside. With every step he takes, more townspeople join the growing herd following him at a respectful distance. Their faces are blank, almost solemn as they trail this man through the scrub, dust and broken roads on the outskirts of quiet Little Luca.

Eventually, his tears creating clean streaks down his dirt-stained face, Jerry drops to his knees. The crowd stops as one, the entire town stood silent behind him.

Jerry starts to dig in the dirt, with the weariness of an old dog. The crowd watches.

Sobbing, Jerry digs until first one strand, then two, then a mass of blonde hair peeks through the dirt. A female hand, with a wedding ring, emerges like a neglected sapling from the dusty earth.

"That's enough Jerry" comes a voice from behind him. It's Sheriff Colm.

"We knew you'd killed her, Jerry. We all knew. We just didn't know what you'd done with her. When she disappeared it wasn't hard to make some calls out of town and find out about the amendments to Molly's life insurance policy you'd made last month. I know you swore to your daddy that you'd keep that gas station running, and goddamnit you did all you could and you didn't want to lose it, but this wasn't the way."

Jerry just stares at Colm, his face a rictus of anguish.

"This wasn't the way."

The crowd, almost as one, drops it's head, and the townfolk of Little Luca slowly file back into town, back to their jobs and their homes and their children, leaving Jerry sobbing in the dirt with Molly.

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I'm about to finish my third year of teaching. That might not sound like someone who can describe himself as 'experienced', but the average teacher now lasts only three years before packing it in and looking for another career, so I digress. I have moved on to my second underfunded and underprivileged school, this time in darkest Manchester. It's been an education, if you'll forgive the pun. Despite growing up on a council estate, I've always known that I was relatively privileged; my parents remain married, there's always been food on the table, and I've no particular reason to grumble about abuse, neglect or other childhood trauma. Even so, knowing that life is different on the other side doesn't always prepare you for its reality.

It's a depressing place, it really is. Staff cynicism is endemic, corrupting every activity. Perhaps imbued by years of mismanagement, the teachers here have committed themselves to teaching with the minimum effort required because they don't feel that they are appreciated. Positivity is met with a dismay, as though it's somehow inappropriate. It's infectious, too: I find myself grumbling and complaining, rather than trying to offer ways of improving things as I did at first.

In the past year here, no-one has watched me teach, enquired as to my or my classes' progress, or contributed anything that might improve what goes on in my classroom. Where other schools have tens of thousands of pounds worth of technology in every classroom, I have a whiteboard and some pens. The furniture appears decades old, the most recent books available for reading are from 1993. The entire English department of eleven teachers has a yearly budget of £900 for books, computers, photocopying, pens and anything else.

When I watch other lessons around the school, I cringe, as the hollow figure in the corner hides behind the desk, and puts another video on. In a way I don't blame them; those that try to teach so often lack the charisma or presence to command respect from the children, that lessons degenerate into shouting matches, in which the children have the advantage of numbers. The staff blame the children, the school and the parents variously, and abdicate power and responsibility for making any semblance of difference. No doubt they are right; the children are often obnoxious, aggressive, and always apathetic; the school is grossly under managed and underfunded; the parents are, as often as not, absent or unhelpful. I imagine many would leave, if only they were good enough to get a job at a properly run school with any standards.

There is a lot of pressure on schools to deliver good exam results. Headteachers are under professional and financial pressure to deliver ever greater results, and it is commonly acknowledged that schools inflate coursework grades whenever they can get away with it. Here is no different; those pupils in danger of failing to achieve a C grade simply had their marks increased to a suitable level. I had a number of students with long term absences with incomplete coursework folders. When I declined to invent grades for them, it was done on my behalf. I have spoken to union representatives at the school, but they didn't seem to comprehend my concerns beyond absolving myself of culpability. The idea that principles of fairness and integrity are being abused here is so obvious that it would be laughed out of conversation, the unspoken truth. Dirty words, principles.

In a way I'm proud that I've managed to maintain decent lessons and not involve myself in anything underhand. Yet I feel my spirit and enthusiasm waning every time I enter that wretched building, and I truly doubt my ability to have a significant impact on the culture there. Do I stay and try to improve things in whatever small way I can, or leave and find somewhere that I can do my job properly? I took the job because I wanted to work with challenging children who need people that care about them; I didn't expect to be up against the school and its staff as well.

For all it's bureaucratic suffocation the government is blind to the situation, for as long as the results graph goes up, all is presumed well. The children here are a damning indictment of class in modern Britain; their parents don't care, their teachers don't care, their school doesn't care. What's the end result? They don't care.

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He came out of the dark forest of cement and glass and his own thoughts. Down at the end of a long alley whose character seemed well developed, a barrel burned with garbage fire, two warriors stood. They both wore leathers, covered in steel and spikes, one with a disk of hair running parallel to his face, dyed bright red, like a centurion. The other bristled with electricity, his hair the color of lightning and charged into long shocked spikes. The one with the lightning bolt of hair was rubbing his hands like a plotting fly and watching the other take occasional pulls off a bottle he was carrying. They seemed nomadic to Deuce, this burning barrel and bottle their oasis.

When Deuce came out of the alley, he tried his best to make sure they saw the Long Stick was now Long Staff, and that it was just a walking implement and not a weapon. The magic of the Long Stick always sent a chill through him when it transformed, when it changed from one thing to another in his hand. He leaned on it a little. The bottle looked at him from under a red curtain.

“A drink, Deuce?”

He started to remember. He’d been at her apartment, when she wasn’t there, had hopped over the steel walls of that castle and knocked on her door to no avail. He didn’t wait long, and when he was coming back over the wall he’d practically landed on the Red Capped One, who’d been on a suspicious bike. Deuce had expected an altercation, but none came, the Red Cap getting up, looking over at the wall, and grinning. He’d laughed at Deuce a little, said something meaningless, and drawn out a joint. Deuce had explained the whole thing, then.

Now, though, Red Cap and Lightning Bug, were here, not there in sketchy memory. He moved up silently and grasped the offered; A bottle with a deer on it. He drew it up and drank a mouthful of the tarry stuff and passed it back. It made him belch, a little.

Deuce looked between them, unable to speak at first.

“So...you guys fight demons?”

They both looked practiced and stoic, then cracked, Red Cap laughing louder, making a pfffft noise with his mouth, shaking his head. He reached into his jacket and produced another little white hand-rolled, lighting it and passing it to Deuce in almost one fell move.

“I said to you, this cat was crazy. This is the one who had that flag with him.”

Deuce was surprised he could remember the Back Flag, which he’d tied a strip of fabric too, written a “2” on and stuffed into his backpack. When he ran, or the wind was against him, it had fluttered to life and he’d been a samurai. Countless days spent in full run, howling back to the wind as it screeched through his teeth and battered his frozen wide eyes. Younger then, maybe, back when the Stick was still called Sword. He searched his memories for what had become of his war banner, but could only remember how it was the reason he’d fallen off the wall and onto the Red Cap.

Red Cap spoke, breaking his thoughts.
“So, that was almost a year ago, right? Did you ever see her again?”
Deuce nodded, then shook his head a moment later. He had forgotten which was which.
“I did, I talked to her. Again.”
Red nodded approvingly, parting his lips to receive the bottle, but a softly murmured “right on” broke through the narrowing gap.

Walking back thru the forest of power lines and streetlights, an hour or so later, Deuce tapped the Long Stick rhythmically as he passed them. First the rap of wood and then the tang of metal, and he sang his favorite notes above it. When he reached the hidden dark place under the bridge where he kept his typewriter, he began to write, that familiar Royal rhythm pumping him back full of blood.

(See "************" Posted 1 October 2002, 12.00 am)

He breathed out deeply, lifted his flashlight to survey what he had written. It threw a massive shadow of the typewriter across the underbelly of the bridge, the one he named “Dragon.” He’d seen a single rebar hanging from the bridges decayed underbelly, like a black arrow, a spear hoisted on the wings of pagan prayer. He giggled a little at his fiction. A sink- how infeasible! This was no new piece, but an ancient memory, cobbled together, holes in a punch card for an antique computer. He opened his backpack, pulled out the manilla envelope labeled “Out” and slid the sheet of paper into it. The envelope bulged, pregnant and uneasy. It was tearing at the edges, crumbled, the tiny metal arms Deuce had loved so much to play with had long since broken off, leaving just the little steel sternum there, and when he folded the lip of the envelope down it’s empty eye gazed on the broken metal bit dispassionately. He slipped the package back into his bag, one hand guiding the other via flashlight. Pushing his bag to the wall, he leaned back on it, rubbing his hand across his chin. Long unshaven.

He’d had no luck Xeroxing and selling the prose, but the poems seem to grab people from a distance when he’d wave them like bibles for sale. He’d pressed on two young lovers, leaving a sandwich store, three days earlier. He could see from across the space of the parking lot their sex, their love, laughing and whistling and doubled over on one another. She was bleach-blond, another Lightning Bug, and he was Spooky-haired, with a narrow wedge like frozen motor-oil swept into a quiff atop his forehead. He’d shouted something unintelligible at them, and followed it with their own language.

“Hey, hey! I don’t do crack.”

They’d stopped for that, the male uneasy, the female inquisitive.

“Just selling these, poems. A dollar.”

He’d seen roses bloom in their eyes. Without hesitation, the male reached into his pocket, fishing out a dollar bill and offering it like a loaf of bread to Deuce. Hungry. As he took the dollar, he passed the folded piece of paper to the male, looking between the two of them.

“Are you married?”

The two looked between one another, a shared smile spreading across their faces. The male stuttered.

“Well, no, no, not yet, not really…” the male stammered. Deuce grinned, the first time in some time, then, his missing tooth like an open door.

“Well, what the hell are you waiting for?” he’d sing-songed at them, his pitch rising at the end as their blood followed suit. Deuce had opened up, dangerously, in the moment. The rose that blooms into eternity. The wave of color washed over him, electric, laughing, cosmic. Somewhere in deepest space, the cold dwarf planet Eris shifted her face. He laughed too, with her, the two lovers trapped between him and the moment; waiting no longer, they took their poem and walked into memory. Deuce was left in the field of grazing cars, at the foot of a sandwich shop, that, for the first time in his life, Deuce recognized that money couldn’t buy what he wanted. At least, the amount that he had could not. He reflected on his compostion and meditated on the dollar he’d been paid for it. It unfolded in his mind.

(See "**************" Posted 19 July 2004, 6.06 pm)

He’d been channeling some great god, some ancient top-hatted prankster, saxophone in hand, fish for a face. A mousetrap zeppelin replica. He trembled to recall the whole piece, wondered if those lovers would read it. Below the sandwich shop sign, he sighed, slumped, distant. His shattered and shuffled memories swarmed like bees, like musical notes licked by fire. He was riding up and down, now, into mania, into depression. He needed to start walking, so he grabbed his Long Stick, and standing, prepared to march into the future.

“Wait!” A voice rose up from the sleeping cars, and Deuce turned to see the male of the pair running back towards him, jogging really, paper in hand. Deuce expected he’d like a refund.

Wait! He’d gasped it, not really speaking, held the poem up to eye level, looked Deuce in the face.

“Where did you get this?”

Deuce shrugged, pointing at his chest absently, gripping the dollar bill like it was a liferaft.

“You made this all up? This is something you invented, from nothing?” the male gesticulated with the poem sharply.

“It is, I promise.” Deuce nodded, his thoughts rolling back and forth from the pressure, like a cheap waterbed. “Why?”

“This is my girl and me….it’s our story.”

Somewhere, in deepest cold space, Eris turned to face the sun.

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By the time that he ran out of breath, he’d made it to the Towers. The humming was still going strong, and all his hair stood on end. He could sense the ozone here, could feel everything carrying that incredible potential, magnified by the steel skeleton with arms outstretched. There were more, of course, they held one another’s hands in vibrating glory in a long straight line along the side of the road, and he always suspected that they marched by cover of darkness, rooting up their girder-spun spider legs to buzz and hum and slither towards the horizon. He’d stand at the one near the locked metal box that was cemented into the dirt and hummed in unison with them all. He’d done it every day, pleased he’d made it even through the storms, the hottest days of summer, the holidays, and stood under the skeleton, lifted his arms, and surged with the ancient power of the buzzing ziggurats. He’d recharge his power here, under the power lines.

He sat in the summer heat meditating to the chrome vibrations of the Towers. After an hour, he stood, began his walkthrough of the 10 steps. The steps were his own invention, his own kata, and they required a Long Stick. He stretched his fingers out as far as they could go, his arms to full crucifixion, holding the stick out in a line parallel to the horizon. One, step forward on the right foot. Two, step forward on the left foot.

Above him, the monoliths purred in approval. He swung the stick over his head, then to the left, back over, to the right (three, four). His feet drew circles as he walked over the dirt, scraping out a syncopated rhythm. Brown dust clouds rose up around him like steam off boiling water, and his right toe scraped the asphalt of the 2 lane road.

His left foot swung out and forward, hooked back and stomped down on the street, and he pirouetted 180 degrees, stretching his other leg back like a snake. Toes touched street. Five, and six. He rapped his stick against the ground from whence he’d come. The electricity of the place filled his lungs, borne on dirt molecules, clinging to his skin and sweat.

He took the seventh step, pivoting on the foot, taking the long stride over the solid yellow line, creeping ever forward, the sound of a distant motor growing nearer rising over the insistence of the steel around him. He swung the stick to remain balanced, his drunken war dance into oblivion made him heady, and he felt like he might rocket out of his own skull at any moment. Eight and the sudden explosive ZOOM of a car in the lane he’d just departed, coming around a blind corner and brakes shrieking an expletive at him. The human it had eaten made faces of pain and terror and rage all superimposed, trying to strangle some circular vital organ inside the car. He took the ninth step without losing his balance, twisting his foot like he was stepping on a cigarette, finally finding dirt again.

The car swerved and screamed down the road, honking and leaving tracers of rage through the shimmering veil of light that constantly flowed from the distant asphalts surface. He placed his feet on dirt again. Ten. He collapsed to the ground, kicking up more brown dust and invisible electrical surges as his hands and knees slammed down. The Long Stick was in his hand, and he bruised his knuckles when he crashed. He knelt there, gasping a little, panic in his trembling red hart. The skeletons seemed less fevered, less intense. He’d satisfied their bloodlust, their love of his death sport, with the 10 steps, and the Towers would buzz and hum again, and he’d return to enact that rite for them another day. His heart retreated to the hind part of his chest.

Heading back towards his own part of the city, Deuce felt compelled to walk backwards. He’d always been confused as to where he was going, so it helped a little to reaffirm where he had been. His red track shoes cut little bloody smears of light into the sidewalk as he shuffled. His feet multiplied grossly, like pigeons stalking the elderly with bread in hand, he felt threatened, lynchable; all those shoelaces! The imprint of red reminded him of chum, in the blue city sidewalk ocean, and he decided it would be best to walk backwards, in case young sharks caught his scent. He waved the stick a little to take his brain off his feet. Streetlamp, passing by. His ability to dodge them was becoming uncanny.

When the crowds got thick, Deuce turned back around, confident that he’d lost any underground predators that might have been following his feet. Today he’d felt like an R. Crumb drawing, animated inside out, popping like halogens, like an urgent beast on the creep. He’d felt it reverse, the ancient game of predator and prey, to invisible vapors, to solid-steel tyrant animals. Was he alone? Were there other avatars? Other demigods? It was maddening, the waltz of heroes danced alone, villains lacking but beasts in abundance. He was unsure if tomorrow would be clear, would be hazy, if he’d sail through misty seas or glorious sunsets. He was only sure that, in the moment, he was burning up, operating at ten-thousand percent, totally exploding with light forever, chain reaction supernova, absolutely nothing but alive.

Too alive. Neon-alive, leaking gasses, volcanic and catclysmically alive, besieged on every side, by grayness, pressuring him not to be on, to petrify into subservience. The banal night rising behind him, giving chase, the sun setting before him.

It was another dark night. He walked through the symmetry of the cities streets, intensified by the great sameness of all things in the evening. He was growing anxious, horizontal. He needed something worth searching for.

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The grass was on fire with color, big sheets of it flowing off like mirage, wicking away like candlelight into the atmosphere around him, where the color cooked up off the field and met the sky in an interplay of all the heat and damp air. He walked determined, strides vast, each one a league, each one a mile or more. Everything was vibrating at different frequencies; his eyes were somewhere between 30 and 80 hertz, his skull faster, his spine slower, and everything around him pulsed with intense possibility. The world was crouched like a cat about to pounce, and he was it’s playmate and prey, it’s sacrificial calf.

Over the hill here, and down into the depression, the only valley in his world, where the hole spat water into the grass when it rained, and a pond would form. When the water gathered here, he’d sit and feel the sun on his face, hear the nearby cars fade into the sound of running water, stretch out and bask like the stray cats that mau’d at him or goggled at him from treetop, walltops, and rooftop. Sometimes peoples things would drop out of the storm drain and he’d fish them out of the dark water, set them out to dry and take them. He’d found a good bag that way, one that could be carried by hand, or on the shoulders, and it had even had a pair of bright red track shoes inside, which he saved. He always brought the Long Stick to the pond when it would appear, now, and had even started carrying it on the buses, too. He’d had a bit of protest, about that, from the troll that drove the steel thing around, but he’d only had to stare at him a little to make it a non-issue. He knew trolls would turn to stone if you stared at them without blinking. And so he’d taken his seat, as was his place, and the statue of a troll drove the bus.

Over the hill, finally, no pond today of course, as there had been no rain. Once past the hill there was the Divide, where the cars nested with moody expressions, grazing the asphalt like bison. He liked the Divide, liked the cars that migrated to and from there. You could walk right up and pet most of them, and they wouldn’t make a sound, and only the occasional one would start to shriek at you, and you really had to be pushing those around, for the most part. He’d been petting a little blue one, a flowery bug car, once, when suddenly she started shrieking at him, whooping and hollering her horn and electronics out. He’d tried to soothe the little female (he could usually tell their gender by color), but to no avail. He rubbed behind her rear views, down her back, and even dared to stroke her exaust, but the car only shrieked for help, varying her crys.

That car was not here today. He paled at the thought of the Old Long Stick in her windshield, how he had tried to kill the car, and when he jabbed his hand into the broken glass to get the Old Long Stick back, he’d gotten her blood all over his hands, all over the cuts on his hands, and it hurt him. He’d run off without his weapon, Some people shouting at him from the ranks of the cars, bare fists waving in the air, and he had silently sworn never to commit autocide again, for fear of the long term repercussions.

He navigated the stately beasts deftly, dancing through their shadows and through the beams of colored light that passed through their windows. He peeked into the back of one car, seeing she had recently eaten a pair of sweaters, and a tiny stuffed bear, and they were scattered about in her innards. The poor thing must have been starving, he’d nodded to himself. He skipped a little as the light made colored bands around his feet, and stood up on tip toe to look into the belly of a big alpha car, a black one with a strange yellow triangle marking on it’s vast back window.

He was shocked to see the car was pregnant, and his mind reeled for an explanation for why it’s belly contained a tiny human child. His eyes flitted to the exaust, and back to the steel womb of the car. He couldn’t imagine the deviant. He rapped gently on the car’s window. The human child, a little boy, turned and stared at him. He was wearing some kind of carapace, sitting in it really, and he was strapped into it as though he was about to go skydiving. Perhaps remnants of his egg’s shell? The child waved a little, and Deuce waved back, then yelled.

“Are you alright, human child?”

The kid waved, laughed and gurgled, rolled his head, and he realized that there was a tiny chink in the cars armor, in the window, a narrow space about an inch wide. Air seemed to be able to pass through it, but in the heat he couldn’t imagine that anyone would enjoy baking in a cars belly at this high hour. Maybe it was incubating.

He was just trying to stick his fingers into the crack in the window when a human adult female approached him. He’d heard little hoof click clacks on the ground from behind him, but had learned that the females with hoofs usually sneered at him if he looked at their strange feet when they walked around. Sometimes they yelled, but he had terrific trouble understanding them, even seeing them sometimes, and so he didn’t look over his shoulder, and so didn’t expect the sudden bludgeoning force to the back of his head.

He crumpled to the ground, his right hand stuck in the window, and he hung there staring down into the asphalt abyss and watching stars flicker to life and die in accelerated time. There were a few novas in the black panel that filled his vision when he was hit, again, and then again. He tugged to dislodge his hand and it finally came loose, and he grabbed blindly for the Long Stick that must have rolled beneath the cars underside. He rolled onto his back to face his assailant.

From her extended arm came a burst of burning hot nothing, a hissing snake bite of pepper that blinded him and made his blindness scream psychedelic to him. He roared and bicycled his legs, pushing himself backwards, finally grasping the stick and staggering to a stand, shielding his face with his arm and waving the stick in front of himself. He connected with car and felt a pang of guilt rush through him. He backed off, quickly, and bolted with shut eyes through the field of cars, bumping one, then another, the second one sending up a high pitched protest to the sky. He clawed over the far hill and collapsed on his belly, creeping up to watch the cars.

The human woman was talking into her hand furiously, and then started jabbing a tiny silver key into the side of the car. She finally connected, stabbing the car and twisting the blade back and forth.

The car, as is their fashion, swung open it’s mouth and swallowed her whole.

He rubbed his burning eyes and tried to sniff back the river of snot pouring out of a hole in his face. At least the cars disliked humans as much as he did.

The cars eyes flashed, and it hummed alive and crawled backwards, taking the woman away to digest, and the now screaming child in it’s belly somewhere to birth. He watched the car roll away to wherever they all went when they went, and then grabbed his stick and took to running. When one human started screaming at him, usually more would come. They would usually start screaming too.

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