Rumraisin Knacklevern and his best friend Mollywald, a talking flower in a wheeled RC pot, are finally being taken to the farmer’s market where magic and produce are sold in tandem.  There they just might find what they’ve been looking for, Molly’s hypothetical boyfriend, seeing as she’s never encountered one of her own kind before.

Along the way they might cross paths with the strange denizens of the market, like amorous pet rocks, an undead hunger artist, and gourds that are better at eating people than people are gourds in this, a cozy, alternate-1990s, autumnal fantasy novella.

(estimated reading time: 2 hours, 35 minutes)

Pineberry Lights

by

Blaine Arcade

The Kind-of Long Drive

“I spy with my magical eye… something that starts with the letter P.”

“Petals!”

“No.”

“Dang. I thought you were trying to get me because I can’t see mine.”

“The only thing I’m trying to get you is a boyfriend.”

“Parking spots,” interjected the witch from the driver’s seat, having already learned the lesson of not looking over her shoulder when the last time caused both her concentration and one of the windshield wipers to slip. Maybe they’d spot it standing up on the way back, waiting for them like a hitchhiker. At least it was the passenger side one.

“No,” her son said haughtily from the back in a fashion hardly befitting his slanted and slumped posture, back against the door, legs across the other two seats. It was a practical decision really, since his best friend was too small for the seat belt she was strapped behind to do any good. His legs would keep her safe, keep her petals so much more attached than the wiper, or the side-view, or the tail light (all on the passenger side, thank the flimsy cosmic shelving) so that she never had to see them.

“We passed it already, right?” she asked, cutely gripping the edge of her pot with her two primary leaves, the ones just strong enough to hold up a hand of cards, while not being quite strong enough to prevent them from tilting and him from peeking.

“Yep,” answered Rumraisin Knacklevern, fourteen years old, only seven if you divided them between his slouched body and his weightless one. His thick black glasses were off, sunbathing on his tee while his eyes used his Hengine^TM combo cassette player/ghost walkie/hag stone to find things his family was so far failing to identify.

His jacket was a hand-me-down from someone he wasn’t related to, for a high school sports team he’d never heard of (the Wintermix Puffins) and a sport he couldn’t guess (curling). What he knew was that it was red faded to brown, with puffy yellow sleeves faded to mustard, and that it was his favorite. The best thing about being poorer now was that his mom no longer begged him to throw it out. The worst might have been the sound the engine just made: a cough cut short by something like a ribbit.

Rummy, as everybody called him (only a raisin when he was in trouble), had wide eyes that could see the whole sky and a little of the ground too. His smile was always a little open in an unspoken wow, and when it was spoken it came bundled with laughter like a bouquet tied with fresh fragrant herbs. At night he smelled a little like ectoplasm and blackberries.

“Was it that billboard with the Pyre Flier on it? Because that shouldn’t count,” Mollywald both guessed and chastised from safely behind the legs he’d gladly sacrifice for her, especially since they weren’t good for anything at night anyway. Rummy’s false smile gave away the game. Yes, he had spied the monster truck called the Pyre Flier on a billboard. It was difficult to miss since its chassis was crafted out of a dragon-headed Viking funeral boat magically preserved to survive demolition derbies even if nothing inside it did. That was almost the default, since its usual driver was a ghost. He had borrowed the P from its name.

“You didn’t see the Pyre Flier, you saw a picture of the Pyre Flier,” his mother Plumwine agreed.

“Picture still starts with P,” Rummy pointed out, holding up his Hengine like a disposable camera. Its own chassis was cherry red with lemonade buttons, earphone cord braided like rope in two colors. The only dull spot in its rectangular form was the lining of the hole through it, where the integrated hag stone showed. Those couldn’t be made in factories yet, so you had to forage for them. Just drilling a hole didn’t invite any magic.

Through the hole Mollywald just looked like herself with a light coat of glitter. Agricamphors were only mildly magical plants despite their extraordinary abilities. They also tended to be officious and persnickety, so perhaps that scared some enchanting qualities away. Through the seeing stone or not, Mollywald had six scoop-shaped petals, lavender-white, ringing her bumpy face, always coated in powdered yellow pollen.

There wasn’t much green stem underneath before you got to her pot, which Ms. Knacklevern had helped Rummy build out of an old RC car, itself based on an old opponent of the Pyre Flier. The controller was on the floor somewhere, probably under his loose unfolding Memento Man comics, which only came in packs of gum, so any collection of them tended to look like a fluffed pile of arcade tickets, better at hiding things than a thorny shrub.

The engine ribbit-coughed again, belching a blue cotton candy cloud out the tailpipe, but the hiccup was nothing to worry about, according to the dismissive wave of the witch’s hand, galactic nail polish sparkling.

“Guess we’ll count that one as a tie,” Rummy said. “What else is out there?” He sat up and peered through the hag stone again in search of anything notable. If it was enchanted his Hengine would point it out, and if it was haunted he could talk to it, and if it was a cassette he could pick it up, pop it in, and play it. It was the perfect birthday present, his last one before the move that took them out to Nosebleed, Nowhere.

Technically the town their farmhouse wasn’t quite included in was called Noseblut, and the state was Nowhayming, one of the least united in Americca. Crossing into its borders was like entering another duller dimension, populated mostly by corn and more robust mountain corn.

All that corn kept trying to get Rummy to notice it, but no matter what he wasn’t going to borrow its C for their little game. It didn’t deserve the honor. This whole trip was for an A, to go with the one sitting beside him, her tiny hulled seed eyes so full of anxious hope, her leaves nervously curling around the ceramic lip of her pot.

But if it wasn’t C for corn it was C for other cars on the highway, mostly off to different places yet in the same direction thanks to the scale of automobile travel, at once impressive and oppressive. Their car was cozy at home, camped in, its roof blanketed on starry nights, its heater toasty like an open fire when it was parked next to the best sledding hill that was a bit of a drive away. Here, in their fifth hour of driving, initiated at the crack of dawn as soon as Rummy came down from his nocturnal spell, the car was bad-hot, stuffy and smelly. They could hear every metal piece in the undercarriage that wasn’t supposed to be vibrating. Static washed over every radio station like the tide. There wasn’t going to be much magic for his Hengine combo player to spot.

Gold, he thought, would be the most exotic thing on the road, being an uncommon car color. One such vehicle passed them by as he contemplated borrowing its G. As it pulled ahead he followed along through the stone. A warm aura crested on the right side of the lens. Rummy snapped to it, dead ahead.

Surrounding the object was a pickup truck of dull patina and duller dust. Its bed was open, judging by how far back it extended, though the entire thing was covered and tented with an army green tarp, its load presumably secured with ropes and cords underneath. A few things almost poked through, suggesting it hauled a bunch of upside down bar stools. Periodically it kicked like a mule and sent a pebble missile into the Knackleverns’ windshield.

Rummy barely recognized all that. Once centered the aura he saw had a very distinct shape, enhanced and clarified by the doodads surrounding the hag stone. A ring with six arches. Two leaves underneath. He even saw the roots growing in a compact cyclone, conformed to the shape of a pot. What incredible luck! They hadn’t even arrived and they’d already found one!

“Oh! Shit! Mom!”

“Language Rummy,” she scolded blandly. “I have to decide if it’s shit-worthy before you can say shit.”

“There’s one in that truck right in front of us!”

“What letter does it start with?”

“No, I mean a camphor! Another Molly!”

“What!?” Molly gasped, leaves crossing over her mouth. Being a witch, his mother squinted as she focused on the truck, muttering to herself. She was going to ask if he was sure, so he cut out that fat by putting the Hengine over Mollwald’s face and letting the expert see for herself. “Oh goodness! That’s me, I mean us, I mean them alright! No mistake!” She applauded giddily with her leaves, like a thumb flipping through a hundred dog-eared corners.

“Honk the horn Mom!” Rumraisin demanded. “Roll the windows down!” He’d forgotten that he had the plastic lever that did that right on his door; almost as soon as he’d said it he was cranking, flooding the car with the smell of exhaust and nutty mountain corn.

“You don’t just honk at somebody doing sixty-five,” the witch advised. The speed limit was seventy, but the limit of the car itself was lower. “And they might not be too friendly when we say we’ve been spying on their behind with X-ray glasses.”

“Well… tail’em!”

“Yes, pin a tail on them!” Molly added, not her usual manners, but her usual incomplete grasp of human idioms.

“We’re already following them guys,” their chauffeur pointed out. There weren’t many places for the truck to escape to on the highway. Unfortunately there was one exit on rapid approach, and the truck took it. “Shit!” She swerved to follow, everything in the back shifting, Memento Man comics rustling beneath the seats.

Unable to do anything but keep watching through the stone and keep confirming the agricamphor was still inside the truck, Rummy stayed as still as possible while the car rattled and croaked, losing ground on the vehicle that probably wasn’t held together with duct tape hexes and a curse of perpetual motion. Guessing at its exact position wasn’t any help, but it felt like something. The aura wasn’t swaying on any of the turns; a big cup holder might do that. Only the ones that could handle Guzzlemart’s ultra-swig size were big enough.

Shade with gaps created a tunnel around them, throwing off his focus. Trees already. That was bad news for the car they might’ve nicknamed the rattle-wagon if they weren’t the kind of family that knew such a name was too close to jinxing it. A bump nearly lifted Molly out of her seat belt in the transition between asphalt and gravel.

“Wooh, haha, fun!” the flower blurted to fool them. “Keep on!”

“We can’t,” the witch sighed, without slowing down quite yet.

“Mom, he’s right there!” Rummy goaded, head emerging between the front seats, arms clawing the headrests like a gargoyle. As he said it he knew he was wrong. The truck had been right there, now it was further ahead. And now Plumwine was taking her foot off the accelerator. And now the truck was gone around the bend and they had come to a complete stop. Rummy collapsed back into his seat in a walloping pout; his cheeks felt like a blowfish. For a few seconds nobody said anything, unless you counted the car’s apologetic burbles.

“Sorry kids, we can’t off-road in this bucket.” She opened her door and exited to check all the spots and parts she’d patched with magic just to get it up to snuff for several hours out.

“We don’t even have a driveway at home,” Rummy complained. “It’s off-road for like six miles.”

“True,” his mother said from outside his window before bending out of sight to tap the tires, “but that’s familiar off-road. Remember the rules. Magic…”

“Magic feels,” Rummy and Molly recited together. Of all the forces it was the only one that could. Gravity didn’t, nor heat, radiation, or any of the others. Magic could do what all of the others could combined, but with the downside that it had to be in the mood at the time. It had to wanna.

Practicing magic was just learning how to butter it up, each category of spell a different instrument for spreading that butter. You had to make sure you didn’t push magic when it was feeling cruel, wishy-washy, or worst of all, bored. The magic Plumwine had used to keep their old car together worked best if they’d driven those areas before, but this was their first trip in it to the CID-Knees farmer’s market.

“Don’t lose hope,” their guiding witch encouraged them as she completed her check-up, only needing to blow some night-smoke into the gas tank, the same way you might blow a kiss. “We weren’t planning on finding one on the road anyway. There’s still a day and a half at the market. We’ll be there in forty minutes. Oh look! We didn’t even lose that!”

A lone windshield wiper hopped along the way they’d come, all the way to Plumwine’s open arms. She reattached it lovingly before returning to the driver’s seat and reigniting the engine with its dog-latin incantation.

Minutes later they were back on the highway as if nothing had happened, except some of the magic was gone from the car’s interior, sucked out and slathered on the exterior as fortification. Mollywald’s petals drooped as Rumraisin rubbed the lip of her pot with his headphones in, listening to the ghosts that decided to be the chorus in his current cassette.

Between the Knees

Secluded inside a quintuple ring of trees, only separable now in autumn with their differing colors, was the CID: the College of Integrative Design. Its faculty and students were the sorts of people who also knew that three of those tree rings were growing clockwise and the other two counter-clockwise. Once you were through the opening the atmosphere became something else, the discord of other places vanishing in a smear of hope and drive.

The main building itself, being a community college, did not reflect this. As gray and speckled as the perfect skipping stone, its humble low profile helped its office park mundanity vanish behind the temporary structures that went up in the adjoining field to create the farmer’s market, which ran for five days in spring and autumn. Tiny businesses and educated hobbyists across the more magical portions of farming and gardening came from twelve surrounding counties to sell and give discounts if they were also allowed to talk your ear off about garden gnome migration, pumpkin carriages, potion pickling, or where you managed to acquire such curse-free gold rings.

For the ‘integrating’ of the CID was the blending of magic and modern society, a growing field in the very current tech boom of 1991. Computer conglomerates were pushing into the cities, automating everything, and only borrowing unpredictable emotional magic when they had no other choice. Out there in the sticks, people thought they could do a bit better if they just slowed it down, introduced magic and microchips more formally for a protracted and heartwarming courtship.

Maybe Rummy would attend in a few years; they couldn’t afford much better anyway. He liked music, and how you could make plants grow differently if you played them an assortment of tunes. Mollywald liked Japanese city pop, but most plants couldn’t just tell you that. Thoughts of education dissipated however, as soon as they parked between four trees that barely allowed them to do so, disembarked, and walked through the long grass that was still wet at midday to reach the knees.

They stood twenty-five feet high, and draped between the smooth flowing pillars of natural rock was a banner welcoming absolutely everyone in corporeal and incorporeal existence to the CID-Knees farmer’s market, which was more of a fair when you considered the crafts, games, and local talent also present. Legend had it that the knees were the only portions to remain exposed when an elemental rock giant settled down for an eon-nap, the rest quickly blanketed in soil and vegetation.

Mythology statistics was one of the college’s fields of study, and one thesis that had been walked between the knees a few times estimated that local legends in Nowhayming had a thirty-seven percent chance of being at least fifty-six percent true. Rummy didn’t think those were the best odds to build a university on, given that being wrong could mean the whole place toppling if the giant rolled over into a more comfortable position.

Then again, they didn’t call it an eon-nap for nothing. People were changing things a lot faster than dozing giants were. Some guy driving out there from an alien intangible ‘corporate headquarters’ like an anti-prophet and declaring they were bulldozing the whole place because of a bad quarter or to stimulate economic growth instead of literal was much more likely to happen in the next decade or two.

Rummy’s own first steps between the knees also made him wonder if magical giant sweat was percolating up through the dirt, giving the college more raw material to work with. An unfamiliar tingle danced between all the hairs on his legs, up his body. He was holding Mollywald’s pot, and right as the tingle went through his arms he heard her leaves shudder. Could be the giant, could be the market.

“Wow,” his flowering friend whispered as all three of them filled their eyes with row after row of tents and stalls more colorful than the surrounding fall foliage. Peoples great and small populated it, such that any two diminutive beings you saw chasing each other had an equal chance of being human children playing or one changeling off the leash trying to copy the camouflage of another. Ogres had come down from the mountains to buy leather and peddle gems or jars of summit snow. They were mostly bigger and burlier humans in appearance, but with higher variance; sometimes they were cyclopean, or had tusks, or only three fingers, or a hunchback with horns on it. Most uniting of all their features were overalls paired with sleeveless flannel shirts.

Parasols made shafts of shade dark enough for ghosts to appear, escorted in their unfinished shopping business. Woodland elves danced to test the bells on their curling shoes, then asked to try the next size up. An old growth slime had learned man-shape and man-walk, and was wandering around buying unrelated items to then stick inside its chest like fruit suspended in gelatin.

Class was just as mixed with kind, students trickling in from the college, rich suburbanites looking for something quaint, craftsmen slicking back their hair that really needed to be washed for their first encounter with small talk in five months. You could find anyone there, as long as that anyone wanted to buy a caramel apple, get their fortune read, or stroke an ash-crested room temperature phoenix at the petting zoo.

Another layer of life riddling the CID-Knees was its harvestman infestation. Magic feels, as Plumwine Knacklevern told her son moments after he was born, every morning while he brushed his teeth, and her tax advisor when he pleaded with her to keep better or at least less crumpled and sassafras-stained receipts. That means magic feels things about animals, just as humans do when they look upon adorable bunnies or hideous hairy spiders just dropping in for a bite to eat.

Animals that were looked upon by magic affectionately were those who did endearing things, like cozy up to smarter beings and allow themselves to be partly or fully domesticated. So there were harvestmen, the lanky wanderers who never saw a struggle they couldn’t misinterpret, and then there were harvestmen with jobs, like those at the market.

To perform these jobs their bodies were now the size of a double-meat calzone, their profile expanded much more when you suspended them on their thin and crooked legs. The jobs themselves were myriad, delivering written messages and goods from one end of the market to the other, effortlessly climbing the wooden posts that elevated the luxury vendors away from the muddy riffraff.

Nobody paid them, as they might eat the money. The harvestmen simply harvested, plucking what was offered and escorting it on its way, as someone had to for the market to properly flower and wilt away in its delightfully seasonal bursts.

“Do you think that truck was headed here too?” Mollywald asked as they approached the ticket booth, manned by a bored student idly pushing the buttons of her virtual familiar with her left hand. “I know it turned, but maybe they needed to pick up something first.”

“Could be,” Rummy offered. “There was a lot of stuff under that tarp. Definitely an ‘I need to sell some of this garbage’ amount. Soon as we get in there we can check the Hengine.” Her tiny breaths told him exactly how much tension was in her heartstrings, even without a heart anywhere in her xylem and phloem. This was her first trip anywhere. How could he tell her that journeys weren’t as glamorous as they looked in the movies? Sometimes the quest doesn’t find anything, and it almost never works on the first try. It was far easier to lose something specific than find it. He only existed because something cosmic briefly dropped and misplaced its brunch.

“Hello!” Plumwine greeted the ticket vendor, resting the edge of her shoulder bag on the wooden counter. Best to do that every chance she got, since it would only get heavier as their stay wore on, filling up with supplies to help her reorient her witchcraft business to a more rural customer base. “Could I get three tickets please?” The student looked up and took her in, from her dingy coat, scarf, and gloves that were a little too bundled up to her short bouncy curls of a shade you’d be tempted to call violent violet. Magic, not dye, she used to claim before gray set in some of her roots. Now it was both. She had an earnest face, her freckles too a mix of natural and peppering cinder scars from potion miscalculations. A tiny owl tattooed between her eyes had bled over time, and was now as blurry as a nightclub stamp the morning after.

“Uhm…” the vendor mulled, looking at Rummy next and his nervous cargo. “Anyone who needs an escort doesn’t have to buy a ticket.”

“Thank you, but she’s part of the family, so three tickets. Nothing wrong with the market getting a little more support.”

“Your wish is my command,” she answered dully, pulling three maroon tickets off a big standing wheel of them, forced to brace with her knee so she didn’t have to take her other hand off her familiar. After the transaction the trio started to move on, but the student spotted Rummy’s cassette player sticking out of his jacket pocket. “Nice Hengine.”

“Oh, did you hear that!?” Mollywald’s crisp-crackle voice climbed him. She pushed his zipper up and down. “You should ask her out on a date.” Her human escorts snickered.

“She’s too old,” Rummy explained, with several other explanations ready in reserve should they be needed.

“Really? Hmm.” Mollywald said, bending over his arm to take one last look back. Even with all the movies and shows he’d brought her out in the backyard she still didn’t have a grasp on human aging. With agricamphors it was as simple as the difference between bud and bloom.

By the time she faced forward again they were in the market, awing her once more. Songbirds were perched on a stereo, singing along to last year’s chart-toppers. What she thought were strollers turned out to be wicker baskets on wheels, full to the brim with artisanal cheese stamped with makers’ marks, melons rocking under their own power, black iron board game pieces from the blacksmith, and bags of corn silk dried into a cereal. There was laughter, haggling, muddy stomps, an auctioneer ramble somewhere distant passing over them like a yodel, squeaky wheels, greasy spoons, a cauldron of golden honey stirring itself, a hot plate of smokey sausage samples, dogs under the tables, cats atop, toads in laps, and toddlers too.

The agricamphor had never known such dense life, and was brought to her equivalent of tears. The joy was a woolen blanket pulled over the isolated sorrow, but it always bled through to memories of her early years: sprouting alone, budding alone, blooming alone… Naturally smart, she knew the animals passing by weren’t the best company that existed. Something had to build the abandoned house not far from where she broke ground.

Years it took, for her to spread her roots far enough to penetrate its dirt cellar, feel out its floorboards. Her estimation of it only ever got emptier. Later she would learn it had been cursed by its previous owner with the purpose of conservation. Nothing grew inside it or bred there, preventing nature from taking it over while it was abandoned.

Then the Knackleverns moved in. Plumwine peeled off the curse. The house lit up at night. Molly knew how to make noise, to howl at the moon like the wolves and coyotes, to sing with the morning birds and nightly crickets, so she could draw their attention, but she was much too shy. Somehow the loneliness didn’t force her to pipe up, which was actually when she was most terrified, that she might drown in a bubble of her own make, help mere feet away, unable to compel herself to ask for it.

Rumraisin went exploring in the backyard and found her between taller plants. At the sight of her face, expression neutral in absolute fragility, he gave her a warm smile and introduced himself. Words would come to her very quickly, in less than a week she knew them all, and how to read too, but learning how to smile from him was even faster than that.

“Okay, put me down,” she urged Rummy once they had stepped off to the side of the market’s main thoroughfare.

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m ready. Let’s get looking!” Carefully Rummy dropped the wheels of the RC pot into the least muddy patch of grass and pulled out the controller. In a fluid string of clicks he extended its antenna and handed it down to Mollywald, who stabilized it against the lip of her pot and made her two primary leaves conform to its joysticks. She pushed forward, plastic wheels spinning to life, splattering mud all over the boot that swung in front of her to stop her progress.

“Hold on you two,” Plumwine admonished. “I know there’s no sense in trying to keep us from splitting up, so we need to set our ground rules.” She dug around in her bag, assembling a loose handful of bills and a coin purse, which she handed off to Rummy. “That’s all I can give you for anything you want to buy, so spend it wisely. Have fun, but don’t get in anyone’s way while they’re just trying to make their living. That’s what we’re doing here too.”

“Yes Mom.”

“Yes Plumwine.”

“And I need you back by the car before total night so I can supervise.”

“Mom…”

“I know Rummy, you don’t need it. They need it. Some of these people might scare easy and pull out a shotgun even easier. Don’t make a witch pinky promise now, you’ll never get out of that. Am I understood?” Nods all around. “Fantastic. Your last obligation is to come into this first tent with me. I want to see Molly test drive that in tight quarters without hitting any of the wares. Every strike is one dollar I’m taking back.”

With the stakes financially set, Rummy and Molly cautiously analyzed the tent as they approached it: dull green, narrow, and with hand-painted signs out front so sloppy it looked like an octopus had tried to write all their separate claims at once. One of those claims was a bundle of cattails harvested from a pond where a murder victim’s body was found, available for only fifteen dollars, an offer Plumwine Knacklevern could not refuse.

Inside the atmosphere of the market vanished entirely, probably magically, replaced by the stale dusty air of an antique shop and the smell of yellowed paper inside stuck drawers. Crates were balanced atop barrels despite being more structurally sound the other way around. Balls of cobwebs had price tags. Lording over it all was a shabby central figure, an old woman sat upon a stool with her back against the four bundled posts that held the whole tent together.

If she was a farmer it was a long time ago, and she was still slowly selling off her success, since everything organic in there was dried and tied and given a mothball breath mint, including the cattails next to her that Rummy’s mother went straight for. Mollywald established a clear circle around the tent, using it as a racetrack, the jerky brakes jostling her whole stem as she stopped too early to avoid every possible collision.

“Rummy,” she said without looking up at him as she passed in front of his shoes, “use your hag stone please.” As she disappeared around a barrel he pulled out his Hengine and switched it on, noticing the light was already yellow. Either he’d left it on or one of the ghosts singing along had flicked it back on to keep doing so, which the user manual said might happen sometimes. You needed the ectoplasm filter upgrade if you didn’t want to worry about it. The yellow light quickly faded to nothing, as if it had waited to make him feel bad about it. Its batteries were dead.

“See anything?” Molly asked as she made another pass. He’d need an answer for her on the next one. Hag stones didn’t need power to work, not technically, so he held it up to his eye and scanned around the tent. Far too much, that’s what he saw. Without the refinement of the mechanical and digital frame he was looking at raw magical auras and all their offshoot rays. Every color he knew and some only magic knew were spinning in concentric lens flares and a truly pagan level of bloom. There was no telling what that pink was generated by, or those yellows, forget about that dazzling silver.

If he looked at it for a few seconds more he would get a headache, so he let it drop. One magic pebble on the side of a creek would’ve been no problem for a raw hag stone to identify. But at the CID-Knees every pebble on the paths had been pressed into the ground by boots that had walked enchanted hidden glades, and beneath them there might’ve been the magic of a sleeping giant.

Students and professors of magic were mingling with farmers of it. Magic fruit was spoiling and dripping onto magic vegetables. Jars of magic honey were glowing like paper lanterns. The cheese had gone magic in its rind, still safe to sell and eat as long as it hadn’t curdled into curse territory.

“Rummy?” Mollywald asked on her next pass, stopping on her own when she saw his expression. “Nothing?”

“I’m sorry, but it’s out of battery,” he said. “I thought there was plenty left. There’s way too much magic around here to pick anything out.”

“And there’s more in here than out there,” the old woman said over Plumwine’s shoulder, cackling to herself as she wrapped the reeds in brown paper and mouse-cut twine.

“If I must,” Molly whimpered, drawing his eye down. He couldn’t see her under her RC pot’s controller, as she held it over her bowed bloom with both leaves, a squire presenting a sword to its new master. “Take the batteries from this. I will suffer being carried.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he assured her. “That’s got a D in it. I need three AAA batteries for this. Maybe we can find some out in the market.”

“Do people grow batteries?”

“No, but I’m sure people brought radios, walkies, electric thermoses… Somebody’s got to have some to spare.”

“You know there’s something familiar about you,” Plumwine said to the vendor as she took her scratchy sprigs that would soon be powdered and jarred over the washing machine back home. “Have I bought from you before? I run Knackle’s Magic Tackle. We do powder potions by mail, plus treats and bait for creatures and pets.”

“The old steel trap’s gone rusty,” the crone said, tapping her temple. “Couldn’t tell customers from cousins at this point, sorry. I hope I forget you again so we can meet once more.”

“I’ll keep some good memories if you don’t mind,” the witch said, closing her eyes and inhaling enough that her back cracked. “There. Can’t forget a smell as good as that. Good day.” She turned around and looked at her uprooted children. “And good day to both of you. I’ve got more shopping to do. Don’t go stealing any batteries now, you’ll get us kicked out.”

“Thanks Mom.”

“Thank you.” Rumraisin bolted from the tent, with Mollywald accidentally reversing six inches and then bolting in a more wheeled fashion after him, pot humming like a blender learning to till soil.

It Followed her Home

Unleashing them on the farmer’s market instantly dulled the dampening effect of the drained battery. Rumraisin let Mollywald drive into the lead and pick the first lane they would explore, since they planned on searching every corner for another agricamphor anyway. Keeping it organized in their heads would be difficult however, as the lanes curled and spiraled, forked and trailed off. Its layout was like a pressed fern where one frond had been lit on fire, another was trying to read the next page of the book, and another was trapped under the first two.

Only the harvestmen seemed to know where they were going, and in an extra dimension as well, climbing all the tents and posts, including upside down on the wooden slats of the upper level. Whenever the pair passed underneath the segmented shadow they heard the shuffling rumble of dozens of pairs of feet and looked up to see dozens more in the gaps that were too dainty to make such sounds.

Every fifth step was a new smell, and they were all so intensely satisfying to a freshly forgotten pit of the sensory mind that it was impossible to keep their trains of thought on the tracks. They’d jumped the rails and were now making rolling stops at every flower of the field.

An ogre couple, a large woman and a much larger woman, manned a hand-cranked steel candy tumbler half the size of a cement mixer. Its rattling endless avalanche of clove and peppercorn bonbons incidentally offered free samples that sailed through the air with each improperly-tuned crank. Rummy caught one in his mouth, cracking into a flash-bang of flavor, barely able to hear the smaller large woman chastise her larger large partner for letting the merchandise get away, but he did hear her immediately follow that up with a flirtatious compliment on the shapeliness of her pronounced bicep veins.

One of the flung candies slid along the inside of Mollywald’s pot lip as she took a sharp turn and led them into a straightaway of piled-up, no, mountained-up nuts. Sure there were walnuts and hazelnuts, but the acorns were the most plentiful and diverse. The oaks didn’t make eating them easy, it took a lot of boiling and freezing, so many of those for sale were bred and brought for different purposes.

Properly enchant a tree and the magic would carry over to whatever it produced. Rummy skidded to a halt in front of a tilted tray wider than he was tall, overflowing with warm light bulb acorns pulsing in every color. He glanced past them at the vendor, a white-bearded man with a mustache wound tighter than pocket watch springs. His eyes were hidden behind strange opaque spectacles that looked like tiny open books.

If he was reading them and turning the pages with the flutter of blinked eyelashes, it didn’t stop him from noticing Rumraisin. He reached out and tapped a paper sign tented on the tray: it would be rude not to touch them! The teen obeyed, scooping deep into the acorns with both hands and slowly lifting just to feel them tinkle off each other. Warm glass. Kind notes. Responsive light.

Further down he did the same to every type of acorn, unable to guess most of their purposes, as that tapped sign had been the nearest thing to a label in the entire row: wind-up acorns, locket acorns, aquarium and vivarium acorns, velvet acorns, popping acorns, wax acorns, eraser acorns, pencil acorns, bubblegum acorns, acorns that looked at him, valentine acorns, jelly acorns, fractal acorns, and top acorns spinning as much as his head.

Past that was a veil of cinnamon sugar he practically had to push through that wafted off a struggling pastry golem trying to escape its brick oven, beat into submission by the baker and their wooden peel dark with scorched runes. The oven’s arch was a caldera of crazed caramelization Rummy dared not get too close to thanks to the scalding sweet-heat, lest he wind up Rumraisin flambé.

Giving the sugar sauna a wide berth made him bump into a table, a serpentine slice of a redwood, covered in horsehair pottery (for sale) filled with brilliant orange kilnfruits (for sale) and loose salamander bones (buy one tail and get the other four free).

Mollywald visited venues on the other side of the aisles, driving mostly in the shade underneath their tabletops and cloths, getting a tour no less thrilling as she drove by dried lily pads skewered on a CD-ROM stand, a box of black and white fairy photos where the fairies were only sometimes there, hanging blood sausage necklaces beaded with garlic bulbs to keep the vampires from getting to them, a pickled pet pig somehow still alive oinking its way through a dream in its dog bed, truffles, truffle mimics, runaway acorns slithering like snails on sprouts, imp repellent spray, and a rock.

Driving was not her strong suit, and the truffle mimic sticking its polka dot tongue out at her was truly distracting, so it was no wonder she had collided with the rock. At least it didn’t have a price tag and a scuff. A quick reverse and swerve… and a rock.

“Wait a Dickens,” the flower muttered. She brushed her petal-bangs out of her eyes and stared at the stone. Just big enough to be in her way and the way to her immediate left and right. Mound-shaped, like cottage cheese dumped out of a bucket six and a half seconds ago. Gray with a bold stripe of milder gray. Otherwise featureless. “Okay.” She looked down at her controller and made sure to hit the right levers.

And a rock. “Okay! Yep! Move please!” It didn’t listen, but it did eventually obey in response to something else. Across the aisle of trampled yet resilient grass Rummy held up his Hengine as he asked an elven vendor with pop bottle glasses that undercut their ethereal woodsy beauty if the jumbo flashlight sat on the corner of their fool’s gold peaches table happened to take AAA.

Sorry, they answered, AA. Between woahs and wows he’d already asked about a stereo, a handheld air hockey game, and some kind of engineering mutt that was equal parts cash register, calculator, and abacus-centric board game: D, AA, and the money it just ate sometimes. He found himself recalling the shelves of Electronic Racket, the only boutique within a half hour drive of their house, and how the battery section was a wall of AA with the occasional AAA knocked to the floor with one corner sticking out from under the display.

Exasperated, he tried the hag stone raw again. The sight of all those concentric dancing lights and ephemeral sequins wasn’t quite as dense as in the crone’s tent, but it was definitely still a worthless jumble, like looking for a vitamin in a pile of fruity candy. He was about to drop it again when something struck his ankle rather hard, a few seconds after it had finally gotten out of Mollywald’s way.

Under his gaze the rock backed down, smacked to a natural position and sat perfectly still the way it was supposed to. Mollywald zoomed out from under a tablecloth and caught up, accidentally ramming it again, making full use of the front shock absorber their witchy caretaker had enchanted to work like a bumper car. (If only full-sized vehicles were as easy as doll-sized ones.)

“Careful Rummy, this guy’s causing trouble,” she warned, pointing at the culprit.

“Yeah I saw him. What do you want, rock?” No answer. “A wise guy eh? Try this on for size; it’s an eight.” Rummy tapped the top of the rock with the toe of his sneaker. Then a little more. It wasn’t cracking under the pressure. His tactics were about to get truly aggressive, he was going to make a boot scraper out of it, prevented only by the approach of a fellow teen who rushed over, fingerless mittens outstretched, long hair bouncing like a cape, zipped camo jacket noisy at the pits like snow pants.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” she huffed and puffed, apologetic yet not apprehensive about grabbing his leg and lifting it off the rock, pivoting the entire Rumraisin like a weather vane and counting on him to balance himself. “Bad Leaver!” she scolded the rock.

“If he’s got a name then he’s responsible for what he did to my leg.”

“Uhh, he didn’t hurt you did he?” She looked up at him while she stroked the rock, stunning him. It wasn’t that he thought she was particularly compatible with him in her cuteness (she had store brand cuteness that was all round eyes, button noses, and occasionally noticeable buck teeth), it was just that he was a fourteen-year-old boy suddenly the subject of a thirteen-year-old girl’s focus.

“No, I’m totally fine.” He brushed dirt off his pant leg that wasn’t there. “I was just startled. So… your rock moves.”

“But not when asked politely,” Mollywald added, driving up to the girl’s doorstep.

“Oh look at you,” she cooed at the bloom. “Is that a chimeric RC car and plant pot? So cool.”

“Yeah my mom bewitched them together,” Rummy added well before remembering his manners. “That’s Mollywald. She’s my best friend… and a flower. I’m Rummy.” She blinked at him.

“Like a drunk?”

“Short, it’s… I’m not short. It’s short for Rumraisin. Knacklevern. I mean, Rumraisin isn’t short for Knacklevern, my whole name is Rumraisin Knacklevern. That’s all of it.” He stopped slouching. The posture he found had never belonged to him before.

“Okay, well all of mine is Pepparuchow Mopwright. Pepper works. And Leaver has already rudely introduced himself.” The rock slid, jetting like a scallop from Rummy’s feet to behind Pepper’s.

“I’ve never seen a rock like that,” Rummy said, which wasn’t true. He had seen ten million rocks like that, most rocks were like that, he couldn’t pick that rock out of a lineup, but what he hadn’t seen was a rock that moved like that without a wizard ten feet away shouting a levitation incantation.

“This is my pet rock.” Those two words helped him understand, not just Leaver, but its master as well. Treating anything like a pet, loving it, especially over years, put a little magic in it. Magic feels, after all, including for the lonesome. Lots of rural kids eventually had pets like that, since there might not be a proper pet store in the whole county. “My dad’s a geologist. He teaches courses here part time, when he’s not out doing expeditions.

I went with him one time and I tripped over this big buried rock. I was little, so I don’t really remember why I liked it, but I did, so I asked him what kind of rock it was. He said that you call rocks like that Leaverite, like ‘leave ‘er right there’. He couldn’t see anything special about it. I did though. So I kissed that rock with my stupid little kid mouth when he wasn’t looking.

That put some pep in his step alright! That rock followed me home and banged on my front door in the middle of the night. My parents thought it was a prank or something, and it didn’t wake me up, so Leaver threw himself through my window! Shattered glass all over the place. But I kept him. I don’t want him getting so upset he does anything like that again, so we go everywhere together.”

“Except my ankle, he went there on his own.”

“Yeah, I don’t know why he- wait- is that a Hengine?” She pointed at his hand; he lifted it with fingertips only so she could admire its every feature, like his grimy fingerprints.

“Yup, the Hengine Trifecta ZR3 combo cassette player, ghost walkie talkie, and-“

“Hag stone! You were just using it right? Leaver likes other magic rocks. I’m sure he just wanted to say hi…” Since the rock couldn’t actually say it, they descended into silence, discounting the market’s endless background medley of crunching ice cream cones, shears gliding through butcher paper, middle-aged kobolds laughing like coughing donkeys, acorns whistling as they released steam, and harvestmen rolling ribbed pumpkins on their sides.

“Speaking of hi,” Mollywald said, poking what could’ve been Rummy’s bruised ankle with the extended antenna of her controller, “hello.”

“Oh right, sorry Molly. Pepper, two very important questions.” Now she corrected her posture, also to the wrong answer, the effort clear nonetheless. “Have you ever seen another flower like Mollywald here at the market? And do you have any AAA batteries?” Her face lit up, powered by her last meal unfortunately, nothing chemically stored in a very specific size and shape demarcated by the letter A in triplicate.

“This is your first time here, isn’t it?” she bubbled. Rummy nodded. “I practically live here when it’s open since my dad’s faculty and my mom’s restaurant gives out menus and looks for suppliers. She’s a head chef by the way. Seriously, they let her cook all the heads.” City boy Rummy wasn’t sure how much she was joking, since he’d never seen flame-broiled salmon served with the head still attached until they’d moved well outside Drycount City. “I know where all the good stuff is around here. Except…” She mentally took stock of the devices currently falling between the seats of her family’s hatchback. “No AAA batteries. Those are the dumbly small ones right?”

“Yes,” Mollywald griped. “So stupid. Idiot batteries. How many does it take to power a light bulb? Doesn’t matter, can’t find any!” She jabbed a button on the controller repeatedly, the headlights clicking on and off.

“Sorry to double your disappointment instead of tripling your A’s,” Pepper said, biting her lip, “but I’ve never seen a flower like you before either. There are a lot of flowers though. They might disappear into a bouquet and I’d never know. Does one of your kind owe you money or something?”

“Our souls are too beautiful for money,” the plant boasted sullenly. She drove off to mope briefly in the darkness of another tablecloth tent.

“She’s right,” Rummy told Pepper. “She’s something called an agricamphor. My mom’s a witch and she found an old book at the library, a farmer’s almanac, that talked about them some. There used to be a lot more because they worked with people as garden managers.

They can grow these long roots that tap into other roots and monitor how well the plants are doing, so they could tell you if, like, your peppers need more water or your rhubarb needs more sun, that kind of stuff.

Only families slowly stopped having gardens, since all the farming got lumped together. Agricamphors and tractors don’t mix. And like, they relied on the people they helped to transport their seeds and pollen and stuff. They would go to market with what their flower helped them grow and exchange reproduction stuff, the flowers’ stuff not the people, and they had kids that way.

My mom and I found Molly when we moved into an empty old house. She’s never even seen a photo of one of her kind. That’s why we’re here. I mean, my mom shops here sometimes for her business, but Molly and I are here to find another one so they can, you know, get flower-married or something. She really wants a boyfriend… and I really want to find her one.”

“Oh my god,” Pepper said, having hit the verge of tears halfway through his speech and already careened off it into the gorge of tears she was swiftly transforming into the lake of tears. “That is the sweetest saddest thing I have ever heard. I’m in. Let’s find that boyfriend.”

“You said you’d never seen one though.”

“What do I know? I can’t even find any AAA batteries. I know the CID-Knees! This place provides, if you know where to look and what counts as a door and what the secret knock is and which body part you have to use for it! How long do we have?”

“We’re here all day and camping in our car tonight for the fireworks. I guess we leave when everybody starts packing up tomorrow.”

“That’ll be about one,” Pepper said, nodding. “We could do a full sweep, but I’ve kind of done one already since I’ve been here every day. My expert recommendation is that we ask the hunger artist.” Rummy blinked at her. “He has walked this farmer’s market since its first year, way before there was even a college.”

“For real? How old is this guy?”

“Nobody knows. Definitely magic afoot, tangled up in his artsy-fartsyness. Could be immortal.”

“What even is a hunger artist? Does he make music with his stomach growls?”

“It’s even lamer than that. Hunger is the art. He lets people watch him… not eat. For like a really long time. It’s called fasting.”

“How long?”

“In his case, forever I think,” Pepper mused. “That’s why he’s always here, because there’s so much yummy food. Those guys who walk on hot coals can’t do anything without the coals right? I’ve seen him a bunch and I’ve never seen him take a bite or a sip of anything. Dude looks like a zombie.”

“And that’s… fun… to see?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m not old. People must’ve been really bored before TV and movies.”

“So where is he?”

“All the fanciest food is up on the premium deck.” She pointed up and over, to where upside down harvestmen ambled in lanes, presumably more organized than the shoppers on the other side. “We need a premium ticket to get up there. I don’t know how much they cost, because we never go. Dad’s only part-time; his pass doesn’t cover that. Mr. Hunger Artist, nobody knows his real name, has mostly stayed up there since they started putting it up a few years ago.”

“I’ve got some money,” Rummy offered.

“Good. I don’t. Gotta keep this little guy rolling in polish.” She rubbed Leaver with the side of her shoe; if he had been polished it looked like she had used sandpaper. “Where’s Molly?”

“Mollywald!” Rummy barked, the flower immediately shooting out from under a table into an unintentional wheelie. She managed to stop without crashing, facing them no less. “We’ve got a plan to get you a date. Pepper and Leaver are on the team now.”

Stone Soup

“Okay, for this whole team of yours that’ll be 240 dollars. Cash only.” If there had been a line at the ramp leading up to the premium deck the team would’ve been holding it up. Rummy froze, slack-jawed, folded stack of bills curling back into his hand like an embarrassed hermit crab.

There was a velvet rope keeping the less liquid out, and the first person kept in wasn’t the flimsy barrier to entry the student had proven to be, nor was he a bouncer type. Bundled up in a fuzzy branded sweater jacket, the logo over the breast at least twice the size it should have been, he was the only one between the knees who was sweating aside from the bakers and grillmeisters with good excuses.

His face was impatience incarnate, but only while looking at children. Whatever hair gel he had applied too much of, it belonged in a smarmier county, and a state other than Nowhayming too, maybe Old Dgers or Poorgun.

“Are you counting the flower and the rock?” Pepper asked pointedly while Rummy counted his money again (still only fifty). The slick seller said he was. “You’re not supposed to count pets and people that need help, like if they have roots instead of legs.”

“That’s for the general ticket kid,” he fire back with a clear desire to lord over her, impossible given that he refused to lean past the velvet rope. He’d have to settle for the seven inch and twenty-five degree high ground the ramp gave him. “We have a more exclusive clientele up here. Besides, that flower’s got wheels. Those are better than legs.”

“Oh no he’s right,” Mollywald murmured.

“We don’t all need to go,” Pepper suggested. “Rummy just you. Trust me, you’ll know the hunger artist when you see him.”

“We’re still ten short,” he said sullenly.

“Yeah, so skedaddle,” the seller said, clicking his tongue and hooking his thumb like he was ordering to hitch a ride rather than asking. “Vamoose.” Taking his job more seriously than the student at the front did not make him more intimidating, less in fact. His impatient breath and glare that jerked over his shoulder plainly stated that he wanted to be at the top of the ramp, rubbing elbows with the sorts of people that had 240 dollars lounging in their wallets. The team ignored him while they plotted further.

“Could we just stand off to the side and shout up to him? Would he come down?” Rummy asked. “And how long could we yell before we get kicked out?”

“Twenty seconds flat,” she said without having to think about it. “And he wouldn’t come down anyway. He only cares about food, or, you know, not eating particular food.”

“You think the hunger artist is coming back down here? Ha. Laughable. Ha,” the seller said. “Do you know what we’ve got up there? The big dogs, and let me tell you, they are off the chain: Amethyst Maize brand tortillas and chips with Old Empire brand Aztech salsa, Farmer’s Elect brand nightmare radish, caviar of the Great Lakes kraken, no fewer than ten pumpkin ales on tap-“

“But no stone soup, right?” Pepparuchow interrupted. He screwed up his face and his hand, like he was trying and failing to toss a rotten banana peel.

“Stone soup? Like the story? No. The only rocks they’re paying to eat are flaky salts harvested from beached-“

“Thank you for not helping and charging too much; we’re leaving now.” She grabbed Rummy’s wrist and started pulling him away. Molly’s reverse lights were blinking and beeping; the sound had the seller looking at her one more time.

“Hey wait a second.” Rather kindly, they gave him several. “What exactly is your little flower friend there?”

“I’m a-“

“What’s it to you?” Rumraisin asked, picking up the RC pot and holding it close. Mollywald understood the sudden elevation as a signal to hush up. Something human was going on that she was missing. Plumwine and her son were careful to teach her that very different things would happen when you put two agricamphors in the same field or two humans. Only one pair would invent fences.

“Not as much as it could be to you,” the man pitched, digging around in his stupid sweater (looking stupider each time his hand hit a dead end like a gopher trying to break through the artificial turf of a miniature golf course) until he found a green and graphite business card. Finally deigning to lean forward over the velvet rope, he tried to hand it to Rummy, who didn’t approach to take it. The man solved the impasse by turning his wrist and flinging it. Pepper caught it and read aloud: Cadwallader Prime, magic maker.

“What’s a magic maker?” the girl asked. “Are you a wizard or a warlock?”

“No no,” he explained. “I’m a facilitator, a logistics guy, which magic always needs. I put potential where it doesn’t belong and keep pushing until it does belong.”

“So you break stuff?”

“Ha!” He ran his hand through his hair. “Look through the entrepreneurial lens and you’ll see that everything is already broken. It’s then your job to fix it. I make magical connections. That’s why I’m here; it’s good networking. So is your flower even more magical than the talking and the little handy leaves imply? I know some people who could make use of something like her.”

“We’re going,” Rummy said, turning and walking away without waiting for a response, which came anyway in the form of ‘think it over’. It wasn’t until they put a few tents between them and the ramp that Rumraisin set Molly back down. The atmosphere hadn’t changed, except for the triangle between the three of them, temporarily full of levitating frosty needles. Someone had to speak to dispel them.

“That guy sucked a bucket of barnacle butts, huh?” Pepper asked.

“We know the type,” he said without returning her smile. “My mom and I would still be living in the city if it wasn’t for guys like that. They say they know where everything goes, but it just means they’re going to push you out to make room for something really stupid.”

“In the case of the Knackleverns, computers,” Mollywald elaborated, very much including herself despite not meeting her surname until the city was left far behind. Pepper’s father had a home computer for all his research data, and for all of his daughter’s research data, namely the games Floaty Floaty Umbrella World and Cake Decorator Express, and nowhere in her expertise did she see how such a pleasantly chirping and whirring device could displace an entire family.

“Lots of big companies are using computers to keep their records now,” Rummy told her. “They’re huge, like taking up whole floors in a skyscraper huge. And they hate magic. Whenever there’s too much magic it makes computers glitch out and record things wrong. My mom’s witchcraft business was across the street from one.

They bribed the people from the city to change something called a ‘zoning law’. Those tell you what kinds of business you can’t run in certain places. All that money convinced them magic should have to move to make way for computers. We kind of got evicted. And there was nowhere else to move in the city, because suddenly nobody was renting where magic was allowed. It was easier to get a place even if you had a dire coyote as a pet.”

“That’s messed up,” Pepper agreed, nodding along, but Rummy could tell there was something she wanted to say. He took a deep breath to give her an opportunity, incidentally smelling Mollywald, who always had a wonderful scent of old rope, sunflower seed, and honeysuckle.

“Luckily, I’ve got a plan. And that plan is called stone soup. Do you know the story?”

“Yeah, some hobo guy walks into a rich town and asks for food, but nobody gives him anything. So he says he’s just going to make stone soup and makes a big show of putting a rock in a pot and filling it with water.

Then people come to tell him he’s stupid and he says it’s almost ready, it just needs some salt. To prove him wrong they bring salt and then he says he just needs some carrots, so they get carrots, and on and on until he’s made soup with a rock in it. Everybody thinks it’s amazing and he got away with free soup.”

“Yeah, but here’s the thing… there’s a real stone soup. The recipe has been in my family for generations, and my parents have tweaked it so it’s even better now.”

“Okay, so?” His own impatience kept him from asking if the recipe came from the geologist side or the chef side of her family.

“You’re not getting it. It’s as good at drawing people in as it is in the story. It’s,” she glanced left and right for parents, not necessarily her own, “damn good. So good that you have to make sure people don’t accidentally eat the rock. If we make a pot, the hunger artist will smell it and he’ll have to come down in order to avoid eating it specifically.”

“Soup. The plan is to lure him with soup.”

“Like in the cartoons with the windowsill pies,” Mollywald said to help explain what he already understood. “We’ll reel him in; it’s genius. Genius worthy of this community college.” Rumraisin was far less sure, and said so in the form of finicky questions. Was fifty dollars enough to buy the ingredients? And time enough to cook it? A good spot to set up?

None of them gave Pepper pause, and she’d already worked it all out while he was talking nonsense about computers and zoning. They could split up and each take part of the preparations. Pepper would borrow a pot from a friendly vendor and find a spot to squeeze in while she split the list of ingredients and sent Rummy and Molly shopping, that way they could get to see more of the market too.

She was right about one thing: the market was supposed to be fun. If they didn’t find Molly a suitable suitor any fun had would be all they’d have to show for the trip. A nagging suspicion told him he hadn’t seen every single kind of acorn yet. He looked at Molly, and saw her focused on her controller and dashboard, enthusiastically tweaking what she could in preparation for her lone excursion. If she was having fun, not thinking about replanting cold roots in the backyard alone, then so was he.

Once he agreed Pepper warmed up her borrowing skills with some receipt paper and a miniature golf pencil from the nearest squashmonger, onto which she listed the many ingredients of Mopwright stone soup, insistent that all of them could be found in the CID-Knees. Molly’s excellent memory meant she didn’t need Pepper to rip the list in two, especially since she was only expected to acquire three herbs given her limited strength and trunk space. The rest was up to Rummy.

“Be careful,” he told the camphor as he peeled off a five dollar bill and gave it to her.

“I sprouted careful,” she assured him with narrowed eyes and gruff whisper before speeding off, vanishing into a shortcut under another tablecloth. The following sound, like marbles spilling across a giant saltine, wasn’t technically required to be the result of her actions.

Pepper pulled his attention back by grabbing his shoulders. Her look suggested they were about to go into battle at the gates of a fiery underworld, and with matching tone she told him the rendezvous point would be somewhere between the kettle corn and rock candy. And just like that she was off too, Leaver sliding along behind as if dragged by puppet strings.

There was no chill in the breeze, and yet one spiraled up his spine like a drafty old staircase. With it a sting of helplessness. He used to be able to navigate a crowd, no problem. Back in Drycount City his mom let him walk to the public pool, chase ice cream trucks, and go to the roof whenever he felt like it even though Mr. Barganza (sometimes also called rummy) was always up there training ravens to find and crap on his ex-wife’s balcony.

Never once did he feel this way, squishy and contracted like an anemone unsure how much it should hide inside itself. What his mother said dripped in his brain repeatedly. Back before total night. People out here scare easy. They have shotguns. Strange, that shotguns scared him more than the handguns in the city. Their range was worse, and they were harder to hide. Barked like barrel-chested dogs though. Bulldog guns.

Autumn meant the sun tired sooner, but with a glance he confirmed there was still a solid amount of daylight left. If he was quick, it would be mostly gone by the time the soup was finished, since Pepparuchow mentioned it had to stew for almost two hours.

If he was afraid of the people he wouldn’t be for long; he just needed to socialize with something more like himself first. Where was the nearest non-human? Everywhere in the market that answer was underfoot or overhead, and both times a harvestman. Rummy spotted one ambling across the nearest line of tables, bent-whisker toes threading the spaces between the goods with uncanny ease given the gangling bounce of the rest of the leg.

“Excuse me,” he addressed it, approaching. It politely halted, tablet of a body swaying with its halted momentum like a baby swing bearing a bowling ball. A gloss in its tiny cluster of black eyes melted his heart a little, as earnest as a marshmallow dropped in the dirt but still eager for the campfire. The matte red ochre of its smooth carapace was a sanded flame, noble and rustic. No matter how many layers of premium access were built atop it, this was their homeland, and he knew they had been there long before markets and long before men. When their community was reduced to their own species alone they hunkered down and became one mass of thousands, bodies like hugging mushroom cap clusters, waiting for the external warmth of good-natured jubilation.

“Sorry to bother you…” Its bounce suggested he should discard the notion and kick its can down the street. “Do you have bags for shopping?” The flourish of its mouthparts could have been a chuckle. The harvestman reached backward with one of its many limbs, tapping the leg of another as it passed.

That one passed it on to the next with a tap, and the next bathing in a batch of potpourri, and the next changing a radio station, and the next. Rummy lost track of the organic telegraph after that, but it must have kept on, losing no information, for ten seconds later he got tapped on the ankle, a touch careful to avoid the bruise left by a Leaver amorous for his hag stone.

When he turned around he saw another harvestman presenting him with a burlap shoulder bag of such loose weave it could’ve been used as a checkerboard. It would do well enough for his purposes, so he thanked the bug and the other five harvestmen nearest, unsure which ones were involved in the errand. Each bowed graciously before going along their ways, underneath, upside down, and across walls of canvas. Without a word they had helped, at least according to the ember in his heart. Now he felt toasty and compelled to turn that warmth into shopping fuel. What was first on the list?

Absorbagourd

Most of what Rummy needed to acquire was produce. The first crossroads he came to had an ordinary wooden sign pointing out several destinations, ordinary except for its slow rotation, which sped and halted when the teen stopped nearby. It told him produce was that-a-way.

First he had to wade through an arch of cotton candy dust bunnies, performatively animated by a wizard as his sugar-spinning assistant tossed them into the air. A charm like that was familiar to him, as his mother was capable of better, several of those betters forcing their car to life when the key in the ignition wasn’t doing the trick. The dust bunnies weren’t alive, just acting like it, bouncing around his head on absolutely nothing, giggly airily like ripe fruit falling on a trampoline by the bushel.

Lime green got away, cherry red skirted close enough to brush his ear, and raspberry blue taunted him. Then orange orange tried to do the same, only to suffer his viper strike. Rummy bit its ephemeral rump and chewed it down to nothing, like blowing bubblegum in reverse. His encounter with Cadwallader Prime and his gate fee made Rummy nervous, turning him toward the sugar spinners.

“These are free samples right?” The wizard chuckled, bent over. His jacket was covered in spray-painted rectangular pins, formerly the name tags of his menial day jobs, now the bangles of passionate craft.

“Sure are kid. This is one you have to pay for!” As he came back up from behind their machines an inflated garbage bag came with him, then slipped off of something that expanded to the size of a hot tub. Nonetheless he held it above his head with one hand as the fibrous mass of cherry red and lemon yellow swirl wobbled playfully, jabbering with a simple fissure mouth. “Five bucks! For you? Four bucks, since it might eat you first.”

“No thanks, I’ve got to see somebody about a gourd.”

“Ah, Gene probably.” He swayed, stretching the cotton candy blob to the right. “Don’t touch them without asking. No free samples down there.”

“At least nothing that’ll eat me, huh?” Rummy joked, only for the candy makers to clearly laugh at something else. Shrugging off what were probably stories of devoured children going back to the Dark Ages (or the Darkest Ages when the cosmic shelving hadn’t even been built yet), which you had to a lot at the CID-Knees, Rummy kept on and tried to keep his internal clock ticking down.

The produce section was overgrown, the dust of fertilizers and plant foods magical, engineered, and secret family recipeed coating and coaxing every wooden post and tabletop back to budding life. Leaves rustling was either a harvestman underneath or a leaf that felt like rustling. A sunset of glossy bundled peppers hung overhead every few feet, making the air a little spicy, tempered by the loam clinging to potatoes, turnips, and beets.

An opening between tents was well-walked, and Rummy heard talk leaking out. A swell of warty green convinced him there was a field of massive gourds out there, and that perhaps they were arguing with each other. He walked through.

Just on the other side was a different world, judging by its still air. Gourds twice as tall as he was stood slouched side by puddling side, looking like they’d never even thought about getting jobs. Green bled into bright orange, the wider bottoms cloaked in overlapping bumps like cheesy bubbles atop cooking pizza.

A lavender-skinned elf with the longest and droopiest ears he’d ever seen was doing most of the talking, chastising the gourd next to him for trespassing and pawing his property. Rummy listened in from behind quietly to figure out why the gourd wasn’t considered part of his wares. Turns out it was, and he was actually addressing the contents.

“The sign says very clearly, no touching!” the elf snapped. “It says no touching in five languages! It says no touching in ultraviolet paint only the bugs can read! Whatever you are, you knew.” He spat out a sunflower seed, not a snack, as on contact with the grass it grew seven feet high and bloomed. Then the elf kicked it over in frustration. Rummy caught its collapsing head and snuck a few seeds into his coat pocket, hoping his mother might find them a useful ingredient for her own projects.

“I didn’t touch it,” something inside the gourd shouted through its thick flesh, something capable of spirited movement, as the whole fruit rocked.

“Then how did you get in there?” the elf asked. “They aren’t vacuums.”

“It surprised me. I bumped into it on accident. So more like it touched me.”

“Hogwash.” The elf was about to spit again, so Rummy spoke before he was just as buried in vegetable matter as the gourd’s occupant.

“Excuse me. I don’t want to interrupt, but I need to buy some absorbagourd.”

“Take your pick,” the elf said, gesturing to all the behemoths around them. “It’s two fifty a slice and three for a big bag of roasted seeds. You need an adult with you if you want to buy any stems.”

“Don’t buy me,” the voice in the gourd requested. “I just got stuck.”

“How’d that happen?” Rummy asked, only for the elf to answer with a bit of a rant.

“There is in fact only one way that could’ve happened young man.” He did a double take at Rummy, choosing not to say anything about the non-man parts of the kid his elven eyes caught, not while there were gourds to defend. “A certain someone ignored the sign and touched it. Then they got sucked in, straight through the skin. This magical absorption works on flavors too, and that’s why they’re so sought after that you’re standing right here, admirably not touching any of them.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rummy said. “So they can’t just push back through?”

“It’s one way,” the elf explained. “If they start pushing,” his head rolled to the fruit, “don’t you dare by the way, they’ll break it open and it’ll start going off. I can only carve and sell them one at a time. So whoever those grubby mitts belong to needs to agree to buy the whole thing before they break it.”

“I don’t have enough,” the voice lamented.

“So they stay in there,” the elf barked, actually cracking a seed between his teeth this time, with their source unknown, as he hadn’t put more in his mouth the entire encounter, “until they decide they actually do have enough or until they suffocate and the gourd digests them to make more gourd.” Rummy looked around. Saw gourd.

“Is there one open right now?” he asked the vendor. The elf said no. “So can I get a slice of that?” He pointed at the talking one. “A slice big enough for them to slip out through?” The elf turned and sniffed, looking the fruit up and down and around in a specific circumference before reporting that it would take at least two slices to make a hole big enough, three if they were rotund, five if they were an ogre.

“I can buy the other slice!” the victim insisted. “And I’m not a fat ogre.” Rummy showed the elf his money to do the rest of the convincing. A resigned sigh transitioned into a brief trip behind the gourd, rounding the other side with an implement somewhere between trowel and saw made to cut through the rind, the blade long enough to guarantee no actual skin to skin contact.

The gourd’s prisoner was advised to stand back while it was driven through. A vertical slice, then a circle cut around it. Rummy readied his bag, held it open while the elf pried one half loose. Pale yellow flesh thick as a dictionary fell, heavily securing his first ingredient. He hopped back to make room for his business partner’s escape.

What emerged, festooned with stringy gourd-guts like Halloweve cobwebs, was another elf of ruddier complexion, Rummy’s age in appearance and maturity, probably working out to his thirties in terms of actual years. They shared a mischievous kids’ knowing nod and went their separate ways with their respective slices of absorbagourd, the young elf holding his at a distance and eyeing it warily.

Next on the list was salt lick sauce, parenthetically described as jarred, so Rummy headed for the tallest tower of jars in sight, its growth only halted by the premium deck acting as roof to the glass skyscraper. Manning this miniature fort built from their own product was a frazzled woman addressing a long line of people who had questions about which seasons and moons the pickles were picked under, a line Rummy didn’t have the time to wait in.

Luckily there were baskets set up atop the exterior wall of jars, each informing that the honor system was in place and magically guaranteed, which was really not the honor system at all, but Rummy also didn’t have time to address that. He squeezed into a lane of jars on both sides and took a near-round trip behind the hubbub in search of the sauce, which was almost out of reach three tiers up, between some crazed tea eggs and sparkling yeast extract.

A good stretch would get him there, or a single step on the air if the sun had been put to bed, but there was an unusual obstacle between him and his prize, in the form of an open jar of wild honey serving as a washtub for the biggest bumblebee he had ever seen, banded burgundy and black. Its top arms rested on the lip as it luxuriated and stared at him with eyes of curving bottomless black. All its fur was completely matted down with honey, and its bottom feet kicked extremely slowly in the viscous substance.

“I’m allowed to be in here,” the bee said, voice clearer than the elf in the gourd, buzzing only slightly.

“Okay.”

“It is okay that I’m doing this, because we bees make the honey.” It swished back and forth, spilling some over the rim. “We take it back sometimes. It’s an arrangement.”

“Okay.” The bee submerged, never broke eye contact. Reemerged. Blew a bubble of blood red amber.

“I didn’t make this honey. It was a friend of mine. They know I’m doing this too. It’s all squared away. Everybody’s doing what they’re supposed to.”

“Enjoy the honey then. I just need to reach over you and get that salt lick sauce up there, if that’s cool with you.”

“Everything’s cool with me,” the bumblebee said a little too sluggishly, pausing after the worst possible word in that sentence. “Because I’m allowed to be here, doing this. Go ahead. I won’t sting you or nothing. What you want to do with that sauce is none of my business.” Rummy went for it, choosing not to look at the bug while he cast his shadow over it. His outstretched finger had to coax the sauce loose by spinning it a little before it fell into his palm. By the time he was off tiptoe the bumblebee had vacated the jar, his shape still being filled in by pooling honey. There was no trail, and he hadn’t heard the bumble of flight they were so famous for. No time. The CID-Knees must’ve been so busy every year because people kept coming back to solve the mysteries that eluded them on the prior visit.

Two down and an amount he couldn’t count at a glance to go. Having already bested people-eating pumpkins and some kind of undiagnosably delinquent insect, Rumraisin did himself a favor and assumed he could handle just about anything else. All he had to do was keep his eyes peeled, his nose sharp, and a better count of his remaining funds than the number of ingredients on the list.

Doing so helped him acquire the picnic bouillon, the red asparagus, the creamery potatoes, the rib bones of a rapids-rusher, the poor man’s celery, the poor man’s parsnapple, the middle class leek, the smoked zippy paste, the zipped smoky paste, the cloud’s silver lining extract, the ink of an anti-squid, something called calcium’s foe, and a roll of licorice ramp.

Pepper really had done him a favor with the way she arranged the list, as he felt like he’d gotten the best the market had to offer, below the premium deck at least, without compromising the mission. He would’ve realized he was having some of the best fun he’d ever had sooner if it wasn’t background fun, crackling like a fireplace at a party.

It wasn’t that everyone was friendly, the dragon cultists hocking their broiled trout certainly weren’t. Everyone was present. The adults were there for specific experiences of the senses, nostalgic tastes, smells, and sounds, and the prickle of neck hair when they ran their fingers across peach fuzz. The children they brought along took it in all at once, as confetti falling and shaping into a theme park. It bustled.

The last time he could remember being among the bustle was before they’d been financially squeezed out of Drycount City. The CID-Knees market was like the street food cul-de-sac where all the immigrants sold the cheapest most portable bastardizations of their native cuisine they could. It was where the cultists (different dragon, a sewer wyrm) handed out pamphlets bewitched to perpetually burn at the edges. Water elementals paraded out of the hydrants until the smell of untreated water got to be too much, then stuffed themselves back in. Five minutes later the fire truck would show up hoping to catch one with their big stupid rubber nets that they used in their annual funding-drive sack races.

When a place bustled it didn’t matter if you had family or friends; you couldn’t be alone. If you were hurting enough somebody would take notice, and everyone else would feel bad enough about not seeing it first that they would join in. A community wasn’t a community until everybody had to look at everybody else’s faces. Otherwise they were all surly absorbagourd farmers telling the trapped behind an opaque wall they needed to settle their debts before anything at all could be done.

The only difference between the bustlings was that young master Knacklevern, son of a witch, son of an other, didn’t have confirmation that he could safely be himself at the CID-Knees. His mother didn’t seem to think so. If she got her way he wouldn’t find out either, only the interior of their car would experience it, and it already knew since he had finger-crawled weightless across its roof so many times before.

Thinking about it doused his background fun, gave him the icy seeds of tears behind and under his eyes, so he shook his head and check his progress by opening the nearly-full bag and staring into it. The list sat on top, and it had no more instructions for him. It was time to rendezvous with the other agents of Operation Budding Romance.

Operation Budding Romance Status: Critical Risk

Somewhere between the kettle corn and rock candy, Rumraisin and Pepparuchow met up and showed off their success. His new friend had stuck to her claims, and to the sides of several adults like a barnacle in order to pester them into lending her supplies that included a sturdy, portable, black iron burner, a cauldron with the banding logo mostly stripped away, a bag of loose kitchen utensils all good for stirring in particular ways, and the pocket knife she had to supply herself seeing as no amount of pestering would get a blade turned over to the kind of child who befriended medium-sized stones that threw themselves through windows.

Leaver carried the cauldron, meaning it was balanced atop the sliding rock, forcing it to go rather slowly as it pulled up to the burner. It was exchanged for the sack of stirrers, then they took stock of Rummy’s shopping. He’d gotten the right variety of absolutely everything, and all they needed now were the herbs and spices Mollywald was sent after, which Pepper claimed would come in tiny envelopes with seals of emerald wax, or cadmium red if they were spicy.

“Where is she?” the girl asked, looking around at Leaver level, checking behind her pet, frantically lifting the burner in the hopes she hadn’t crushed the flower. The agricamphor wasn’t flattened underneath, or anywhere else in sight for that matter. “She should’ve been the first one finished. Is she really slow and bad at stuff like this?”

“I don’t know, we’ve never done this kind of thing before.” With his hag stone still running on empty he couldn’t find her magical corona through so many overlapping layers of homegrown goodies. She was one as well after all. There was a way to find her. It required he run around and locate his mother, whose parental fears were always mitigated by the ability to perform multiple tracking and summoning spells, the sorts of things that were more effective the more familiar with an item or entity you were. One of them was the most common spell in the world, since it made missing car keys dance jangling out of their hiding spots.

But if he went to her it meant they couldn’t handle the CID-Knees by themselves. Next time they wanted to do anything out of the house or yard they would need an escort. Rumraisin sucked on the shame of it for fifteen seconds, staring at a tablecloth in the hopes Mollywald would come zooming out of it. Fifteen seconds was all he would give the urge to make bad decisions. She might’ve been in trouble. If summoning her back required bathing in blood and twirling nude in public he would do it.

“I can find her, I just have to go ask my mom,” he told Pepper. “Can you stay here and get started? I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“Yeah, no problem. Hope she’s alright.” She looked down. “Leaver, hand me a whisk.” The rock backed up and inch, scooted forward an inch. The bag fell open slightly. “Good work.” She leaned down to take it, and by the time she was back up Rummy was gone, slipping between people with unexpected grace from a boy who barely ever took his hands out of his pockets.

Now that he’d navigated most of the market he knew which lanes to check, as Plumwine the witch would be much more interested in powders and tinctures than absorbagourds, blackberries, and laughing cabbage. Somewhere near the tower of jars seemed a good place to start, as it marked an entry into the section of goods that were more preserved than fresh.

Blowing through the baskets, making enough of a wind to pull a stack over behind him, Rummy checked in the broom nook. His mother had never learned to fly, but she had one with green straw she liked to hover around on from time to time. Everything there was too pricey for such dalliances, so he moved on.

The bone sourcer was lousy with witches picking through jumbled skeletons, no need for shopping bags once you bewitched the incomplete chimera skeleton of your intended purchases to follow you around. He found out the gait of an opossum with three chicken legs and two frog legs, but not the location of his mother.

Secondhand spell books proved more fruitful, though that wasn’t what Plumwine was buying. The Knacklevern family grimoire, twenty percent her own contributions at that point, was the one and only tome she swore by for personal magic use. She sometimes told Rummy he needed to learn a little more formal magic if he wanted to inherit it, otherwise an ancestral ghost might whisk it away upon her death, thinking they could get better use out of it. Nothing had gotten him to crack it yet. What happened at night was all the magic he wanted, with no effort at all.

Chalk was what she bought, for summoning circles, handy since one was about to be required. When she whirled around and spotted her son stood there alone she already had a sense of what the problem was.

“Did you get separated?” she asked. There wasn’t much open space to set down the bags hanging off both her forearms, so she gestured for him to come and take some from her. They spoke while setting everything down in the grass out of the way of the shoppers.

“We’ve got a good plan,” he deflected, “but we needed to split up and buy some things. She was supposed to meet us by kettle corn.”

“Us?”

“We met up with a girl who agreed to help us after her pet rock attacked me… unprovoked.”

“Oh good you made a friend.”

“Except we’re trying to make a boyfriend. And even if we do he can’t date anybody if Molly’s not around.” He wanted to tell her to hurry up, pointless as that was, since she’d already torn open her freshly purchased cerulean chalk and begun preparations for a summoning circle. Without any floor or pavement for canvas, Plumwine improvised by turning her shopping bags on their sides and arranging them in a circle around her, then drawing on them.

A circle for the universe. Another smaller one within, for the Earth. Lines dividing the segment between the two: the gazes from beyond. Emotions from outside the universe, of the ultracelestial audience, who watched and thought they didn’t intervene, were considered the very material of magic. It feels because they do. Inside those segments Plumwine drew specificity into the circle’s aim with a combination of natural runes foraged from living wood under the bark and dream symbols sent to her in her sleep, which had to be cataloged in a mental library and never drawn except when used.

The two sets helped her spell out what she was looking for: a family member, a flower, a magical creature, a toy car, and someone who wanted to meet with them in turn. The more specific the better, as vague summoning circles could call forth all sorts of things that might not want to be displaced, like demons, petting zoo animals, or the stuffed prizes from coin-hungry crane games.

Rumraisin took a step back as his mother hopped out of the circle and raised a flat hand directly over it, palm down, to figuratively catch what would be tossed out of the portal between two places. Plumwine pronounced the runes and symbols, eyes half-lidded so that only white was visible, though it changed to the blue of the chalk as both began to glow.

Her son didn’t listen to the growled and whispered sounds, since he didn’t earn them or learn them. That was how you went mad, and there were only so many economic opportunities for magical people who had gone bonkers, usually involving a crooked stone watchtower deep in the old growth. One of them in a national park had blasted a satellite out of orbit last year, and they had to raid the place with curse-proof and bulletproof vests because they didn’t know which implements the occupant was more likely to use.

Thinking through that whole news story kept him distracted until she was done making dangerous words out of thin air. As soon as her mouth closed there was a burst of colorful smoke at the center of the circle, all of it quickly siphoned into Plumwine’s palm, leaving behind a thankfully intact Mollywald, looking both wilted and nervous. She shook with the sound of wind through corn.

“Oh, the sun!” she peeped, opening her petals wide toward its already hazy descent. “I thought I’d never see it again!” Her leaf-hands gripped the rim of her RC pot, its presence surprising her. “And you got my car back too!”

“Are you okay?” Rumraisin asked, swiveling one shopping bag open like a gate so he could get on his knees in front of her, breaking the circle in the responsible manner. Leaving one open was usually a fine if its maker could be identified, bigger the longer it was left unattended.

“I was underground,” she said without actually answering his question. “That guy was chasing me and I took a sharp corner and tipped over and I couldn’t right it so I had to leave the car and go underground and then it was too deep and I didn’t know which way was up and there was a tunnel-“

“What guy?” Plumwine asked, down on her knees with Rummy, fully recovered from whatever she had checked out of her dream library.

“The guy from the ramp!”

“He’s selling tickets to the top layer,” Rummy explained.

“Yeah him! He must’ve been on break, and on break from being a good person because he started chasing me and waving business cards. So many business cards. He was covered in business cards, like a monster! He said he wanted to ask me some stuff but I know he wanted to kidnap me and sell me up there.” She pointed at the wealthy layer, coinciding with someone’s joke, so they seemed to rain laughter down on her claim.

“Don’t worry, I’ll go and have a word with him,” Plumwine said to calm the bloom. She very much doubted anyone trusted to work the gate at the CID-Knees would attempt to kidnap anyone in the middle of the market, no matter how pocketable the mark. “What’s this about a tunnel?”

“There’s a big tunnel under this whole place,” the agricamphor said, peering down as if to make sure it didn’t terminate with the summoning circle. “It’s new though, not an old mine or cave or anything. It’s concrete with no cracks and there are big cased wires running around the outside, so I bet it has lights in it.”

“Molly I’m glad you’re okay,” Rummy told her, gripping the pot and jiggling it to reorient her back to their goal, “but did you get the goods?” His meaning dawned on her; in the harrowing aftermath of the exaggerated sense of pursuit created by the difference in scale between chaser and chasee, she had misplaced the memory. When she found it she dug under her own roots and extracted from the potting soil three little envelopes with vibrant wax seals.

“Did I get the goods? I got the bests.”

“What are you two up to?” the witch asked, only up to her full height at the moment.

“The plan involves soup,” Rummy said to keep it mysterious but also make it sound harmless, for he already knew her next question.

“Do you need to stay with me the rest of the day?”

“No, we learned our lesson. Don’t split up, at all. We can’t be hurt by anybody’s business cards as long as we stick together, right Molly?”

“Right! Please Plumwine? I think we’re really on to something.”

“With soup?” she asked skeptically, though less so than an adult who hadn’t once started a fire by trying to magically toast and butter bread at the same time.

“With harmless soup,” Rummy confirmed. “We’ll blow on it first.” The witch wasn’t convinced, not until both of them were giving puppy dog and weeping willow eyes. She didn’t have to say it, as they both knew what a nasal exhale meant in this situation: they were free to go, but if they were one second late for the nightfall curfew the punishment would be severe. Only Rumraisin would receive it of course, as she had no technical authority over the agricamphor whose land she was squatting on. Experience was a double-edged sword however, and she also knew that any punishment delivered to Rummy would be suffered by both, as Mollywald would join his confinement willingly in solidarity.

Once she had warned them with her nostrils they took off once more, leaving her to right and rearrange all her shopping bags. It would be prudent to stash them in the car, before she bothered trying to track down the business card monster and sass him into a slump for chasing impressionable sprouts. Such was the burden of having two special children in an evermore shrunken and concrete world. Crafting a curse to do something about it was a daydream of hers, but that was for much more committed witches who traded their capacities to eldritch things and became more wart than skin. But if she ever found the middle ground she would traverse it without hesitation.

Back by the kettle corn, Pepparuchow had made the most of their absence, and the most was a cauldron full of steaming soup. She beamed at their return as she stirred it with a borrowed wooden spoon big enough to belong in the broom nook. To Rummy her efforts seemed magical, as he hadn’t purchased enough materials to fill such a large vessel. He knew enough about soup to guess that plain old water was the basis of the stock, but it still seemed extremely diluted, only by volume however. Its bouquet was fully in bloom, smelling like celery root, mashed potatoes, and the most pleasant notes of creek mud. The color was plenty rich as well, more amber than beer, more concentrated than those little bowls of scallion soup served at the Yapon steakhouses before they cooked right in front of you. A thought happened. Silly, but genuinely possible from Pepper.

“Where’s Leaver?” he asked. She pointed down into the cauldron. Rummy leaned forward, got a nose full of a scent that made his stomach rumble, and saw the gray blob sitting comfortably on the soupbed. “Leaver’s the stone in stone soup?”

“I mean he doesn’t have to be,” Pepper defended, “he’s just good at it and we’re kind of improvising. Whenever we have it at home we usually use him, and if he’s up to my mom’s standard he’ll be up to the hunger artist’s. If you’re worried you missed the splash, don’t be, because there wasn’t one. You put the rock in first.”

“I don’t eat, but I bet it’s really good,” Molly offered, “judging by Rummy’s tummy.” He wanted to argue that she did eat, just in a ritual sense, as she also sat down with the family at dinner time to have her shot glass of spring water with powdered dashes of nitrogen and phosphorus.

The market was testing him sorely, as he wanted to try everything, but didn’t want Molly to feel left out, especially if they got back in the car without a single boyfriend to their name.

“How close to ready is it?” he asked Pepper.

“It has to simmer for at least another hour,” she said, aware of the time constraints. “We don’t need an egg timer or anything though. When it’s done the hunger artist will show up. I know it.” Her mission partners looked crestfallen and wilted, respectively. “You guys can go enjoy the market if you want. I’ll keep Leaver company while he’s stewing.”

“You would stand here, in one spot, bored, for a whole hour, for us?” Mollywald said, choking up. Being still was no imposition on her, she did it seasons at a time before the flurrying activity of her human family, but she knew they didn’t like being idle for long, her excessive sympathizing exaggerating the idea into literal torture. She turned to Rummy: a three point turn. “We cannot let her make this sacrifice. We must stand around bored with her.”

“I was about to suggest the same thing,” he agreed.

“I didn’t borrow any chairs,” Pepper said gravely. Finally, an opportunity for Molly to show off some of her particular talents in botanical supervision.

“I’ll take care of it,” she said, upper stalk swelling with pride. “During a recent underground terror I met some lovely roots who would be happy to help.” The flower then rocked back and forth in an attempt to tip her car over. Wheels left the ground, without success. She looked at Rummy like a toddler demanding to saddle the nearest pair of shoulders.

“We’re not supposed to be out of each other’s sight,” he reminded.

“No, we just can’t split up! Which we won’t. I’ll only go straight down. We’ll still be inhabiting the exact same longitude and latitude. It’s a technicality and I’m prepared to use it. Are you?” He couldn’t back down from the challenge, so he tipped the RC pot over with the toe of his sneaker.

Molly overlapped her leaves into an arrowhead and dove into the soil, practically slurped down into it like vermicelli. While she was down, to alleviate his nerves, he explained to Pepper all about agricamphors and how they used to help rural people manage their crops, teaching the plants to do things like hide underground when a swarm of locusts flew by and then pop back up.

Most of these stories were secondhand from Molly, so he was careful not to exaggerate, as she had likely done so herself already. Among the ones she’d heard about from a literal grapevine were a camphor that could convince pumpkins to grow into functional sleds, one that bred lily pads into trampolines, and a were-agricamphor who turned into wolfsbane every full moon and chased all the feral dogs away.

He hadn’t run dry on her species’s wonders before a minor one took place. The soil swelled and opened like rising banana bread on two patches behind the pot of simmering stone soup. From them grew a pair of deck chairs made entirely of twisted roots that would definitely stain the seats of their pants with moist earth but were otherwise perfect for their needs.

“Tah-dah!” Molly yelled as she emerged next to her overturned pot and tried to contort back into it. Rummy assisted and righted her before taking the seat she offered alongside Pepper. They weren’t very comfortable, but both kids were accustomed to the desks at public school, which were far worse, so this was a sit in the park.

There was nothing left to do except wait and gauge the time before curfew not by the sinking sun (behind them), but by the chill on their forearms (no goosebumps yet). Languishing there, quiet as his dead batteries, only made Rummy’s prospects for their trip seem worse, and he was getting hungrier to boot. Mollywald was so talkative that he’d forgotten being with people who took turns starting conversations. Starting one with Pepper could cement their friendship. She thought much the same, and beat him to it.

“So did you guys get hobby goblins when you lived in the city?”

“No, just bed bugs. What’s a hobby goblin?”

“We call them hobby gobbies for short.”

“That’s not shorter.”

“Huh, I guess it isn’t. Anyway they’re like household spirits you know? The friendly ones with the waxed beards all live in Swodenland and they do chores for you if you leave them cinnamon cookies and butter pats. And when they fold your laundry it stays warm, like it just came out of the dryer.

But here in Americca our gobbies are way trashier, like they literally dumpster dive and stuff, and they just pull pranks and yank all the film out of your tapes.

The hobby part is because they can kind of trick themselves when they break into your house. Household spirits isn’t really specific, you know? It can mean a lot of things. Like, I’ve got a game console, the Wandboard^tm 2, and my favorite game is Farmdown.”

“That’s the one where you farm toys right?”

“Yeah. There’s a house your character lives in in the game. I was playing it one day and there was a hobby gobby in that house, inside my save file. He’s not messing with me, but he is messing up my character’s life in the game, which stinks, but I’m glad it only stinks virtually.”

“So he’s living in a fake house full of electric mannequins and he doesn’t even know it?”

“I don’t know if he knows it. There aren’t enough pixels to see if he’s smiling. He hasn’t left yet though, and it’s been months. Sometimes I play just to make sure he’s still in there. I don’t really care about him, all the Americcan ones are jerks like I said, but I realized video game graphics and stories are so realistic now that they can fool a gobby. My Wandboard^tm is as cozy as a house. Maybe it’s the wooden sides that make it look like one, I don’t know.

It just got me thinking, about machines vs. magic. A machine that can make coziness is doing something magic can’t really do, right? With magic you change something about the world in order to feel cozy. You really do the feeling yourself, because magic is feelings.

The machine makes a fake house; it’s just really good at not changing anything. It’s like a shortcut. Magic is hard because you have to do it, machines you just buy because somebody else did it in a specific way once a long time ago.”

“My mom sells magic stuff.”

“Yeah sure, but it’s just her right? She does the feeling. If she wanted a bigger business she’d have to hire more people, not build a factory.”

“Right. That’s why factories and computers suck. They’re useful, but they shouldn’t do what we’re meant to do. Even my Hengine is limited edition, because all the magic is in the hag stone, and you have to find those in nature.”

He almost told her what would happen to him shortly, nightly, since it didn’t seem like she would judge him or be frightened. Her best friend was a rock and they were trying to summon a living skeleton together. She was cool, and cool people didn’t freak out when you peeled yourself and showed them what twinkled underneath.

Twice he nearly said, said he was the son of a- Then his stomach growled, feeling like his turn in the conversation since the others heard it. Pepper’s did the same, and if their stomachs were talking to each other the soup had to be done.

“He should’ve been here by now,” she said, standing to crane her head even though it didn’t give her a better angle to see the people walking around on the top layer. “I know I did it right, so if he’s not here the smell isn’t reaching him. The winds must not be in our favor.”

“Should I fan it?” Mollywald asked, going ahead and waving her leaves as hard as she could. The steam’s path did not deviate. If anything it deviated even less than before.

“We need distribution,” Pepper suggested.

“What, sell it?” Rummy asked.

“No, we’d get in trouble for that since we’re not an approved vendor. You can give out all the free stuff you want though.” She took a deep breath, and was about to use it when she remembered she was part of a committee and it might be better to run it by the others first before she went off full-throated. “I’m gonna yell. You guys okay with that?”

“I know not the ways of the soup,” Rummy sighed with an exasperated grin.

“Teach us great one,” Mollywald added with a bow. Pepper freshened up that deep breath.

“Hey everybody!” Her cupped hands amplified her voice so well that Rummy wondered if she knew a little magic and this was all of it. “Free stone soup! BYOB! Bring your own bowl! Free soup with a rock in it! Finest rock you’ve ever tasted!”

Ears perked, some quite easy to see thanks to their furry tufts or colorful ribbing. Heads turned. The denizens of the CID-Knees were much more familiar with actual stone soup than the Knackleverns, as there wasn’t a skeptical look in the bunch, mostly wry amusement. Yeah, tens of them decided, we could go for some stone soup right about now. It’s not cold yet, but the dark would bring the chilled wind soon enough.

Most of the people who had bowls to bring were vendors, so they threw up ‘be right back’ and ‘don’t touch nothing’ signs as they picked out something watertight enough for soup and thick enough for rock. One lucky woodworker sold seven burl bowls in the following minutes.

Everyone lined up politely to receive two giant spoonfuls from the cauldron, each of which smelled even better when poured. Only so many could source their own spoons, the rest sipping and slurping straight from the lip, from mason jars, sampling saucers, and thermoses. One fellow even dumped his cold coffee and went straight for the soup without rinsing it out. Nobody else judged however. You did what you had to for a free bowl of stone soup.

Many compliments were delivered to the chef; Pepper used the opportunity to ask a favor in return. It would be very helpful, once you had your soup, if you could wander around, preferably away from the cauldron, to spread the smell.

An upright man with a downright sneaky shadow left a few disposable cups after he took his serving, giving Rumraisin the chance to taste it for himself. Pepper shuffled aside so he had room to scoop. He got his nose as close as he could. At that distance there was another penetrating note to its aroma, almost stark, like a storm-blown twig tearing through your umbrella. He knew he was about to taste something he could never forget. It would always be on the tip of his tongue now, another flavor on the spectrum, and perhaps nothing else would satisfy it. Still, better to crave than lead a grayer life than necessary. Down the hatch.

Its fortitude blasted past his mental defense, which consisted of the sole thought that he was consuming some of his friend’s pet’s waste. Here was a soup. Not there. Canned soups on grocery shelves were there, right where they were supposed to be, where they were expected. Stone soup was here, on his taste buds, between his teeth, curving with the stomach like a welcome mat.

The taste of vegetables petrified to the taste of the underground, to salt boulders breaking loose and caving in. Metallic notes became sweet. The presence of chalk settled into crackling herbs toasting off his body heat. As a soup it was so good it made him question the necessity of solid food. All of the solidity was in the stone, so why bother with it anywhere else?

“Leaver tastes great,” he said, draining his cup slowly only because it was still quite hot.

“Good thing he’s too underwater to hear you say that,” Pepper commented. “It would just give him a big head.” Now who they wanted to have a big head was the hunger artist, as a bigger head would mean bigger nostrils and an easier time detecting what they were hoping was more than a smoke signal. Pepper had to cut everyone off when the cauldron was two thirds empty, otherwise there wouldn’t be enough left for it to leave a trail their target could follow. When the elves, ogres, and that one creature wearing onion chain suspenders cleared they hoped the artist would be revealed, but they were alone. Unless you counted the sound.

A slap had joined them. It was in the process rather, getting louder, a very bare slap, like a salmon belly flopping back into the rapids. The closer it got the woodier it became, until they could see that woodiness in the slight shift of the floorboards overhead. Something ran across them and then treated the railing as a hurdle.

Rummy had seen plenty of strange things fly and fall, himself included. This one took the cake, except he didn’t, because he was the hunger artist and that was his whole shtick. His otherworldly shape fell like a jellyfish suddenly cursed with bones, like a bad dummy on a movie set tossed out a window. Only his tattered burlap pants, patched more than a quilt, billowed in the air. His limbs instead wobbled, as would cotton swabs balanced precariously on the nose of a sneezing rhinoceros.

His landing was strangest of all, soft as a feather, touching down on cracking tiptoe. Rummy probably weighed twice as much, and he wondered how the artist’s feet had managed to make so much noise on the premium deck with hardly anything attached.

But then the hunger artist straightened out and stared at them, them including their soup. Pepper greeted him. Rummy and Mollywald could not, disturbed as they were by his appearance. The man had so much artistic integrity that he had expressed himself all the way to undeath, judging by his corpse-gray pallor, lips retracted from his teeth, eyelids retreated from yellow eyes dry as sandpaper, and hand wrinkles that could serve as drinking troughs for pigeons. Bald. Bearded with tangled gray wire. Supremely skeletal. Naked but for the pants. When he began he had worn a proper outfit, time had taken it off him, and he never took note of any article lost.

“Forgive me I don’t remember your name,” the hunger artist said to Pepparuchow, bowing to her, spine crackling like packing paper given an accordion squeeze.

“It’s Pepper.”

“I remember the taste of pepper,” his eyes glided over the soup steam, “but not of this. What is it exactly?”

“This is my family’s secret recipe for stone soup,” she said proudly. “And we made it just for you to not eat Mr. Artist.” She grabbed Rummy’s shoulder and pulled it against hers while he picked up Mollywald to complete the picture of their collaboration.

“How kind of you,” the artist said graciously. “I must get straight to work.” The children backed away from the cauldron to give him plenty of room to not dig in. Arms folded behind his back with disturbing efficiency, the skeletal man slowly circled the pot, periodically leaning over its lip and inhaling the aroma with all the chest he had left. “Oh, spectacular,” he muttered, when he wasn’t muttering ‘sublime’, ‘incomparable’, or ‘flawless’.

Rumraisin wondered when it would be appropriate to interrupt and ask if he had ever seen any agricamphors in the market. Artists could be finicky and pouting, he knew, prone to tantrums and uncooperative behavior if their impenetrable processes were even perceived as interrupted. He could wait, but the sun couldn’t. If he was in need of a flashlight to find the car they were going to be in big trouble.

The hunger artist ended up telling him exactly how long it took to not eat something when he stepped away from the soup and put his hands on his hips: six minutes and fifteen seconds. For another moment he just stood there, staring at the steam dissipating into the autumnal sky, granting a little more vigor to the tumbling of some wine-red leaves.

“Thank you children,” he said, voice somehow thinner than before. “That was my masterpiece. The single most scrumptious thing I resisted eating, so deep in my fast that even I have lost track of the duration.”

“Wow, it was that good?” Pepper asked, wiping her finger across the cauldron rim and licking it to check again. “I’m not a pro.”

“No you are a novice,” the hunger artist agreed. “And novices are at the height of their passion, pristine before weathering experience. Yet wisdom is present in this dish as well, as it is a family recipe, refined and enriched as it was passed hand to hand. The ingredients too, so natural that you might trip on them. Why do you think I chose this market?

Congratulations to all of you, on perfecting the form that truly has no effect on me whatsoever. I’m thankful. And I know now, there is nothing more to hunger.” He closed his eyes and looked up. Rummy was about to ask him for a favor. A crack. Not like his joints, but still definitely his. Like someone squeezing baklava. Then the hunger artist collapsed, not to the ground, but into a dusty pile of himself. A puff of him quickly settled. Most of the bones were gone, only the skull and jaw left aside from the pants that now looked like the deflated casing of an ash sausage.

“What…” Mollywald uttered.

“He’s… He died.” Rumraisin said in a rather unsalted tone.

“We murdered a guy!” Pepparuchow screamed, tugging on her hair. “We’re murderers! We’re going to jail!” She kept screaming, without words. Rummy just stared at the gray heap, empty eye sockets.

“I didn’t ask him if he’d seen any agricamphors,” he said in a voice dead enough for a departing spirit to hear. The invisible hunger artist reached back down and worked his own jaw like a puppet to answer.

“Ask the harvestman.” The call of eternal oblivious peace kept him from elaborating, and he also wanted to get away from Pepper’s wailing. The living surrounding the children did the opposite, swooping in to help, several having witnessed the artist’s final performance. None of them were shouting the word ‘murderers’, a good start to calming them down.

“Breathe in before more out Pepper,” an adult advised her, kneeling to her level and holding both her shoulders. They must’ve been acquaintances. Somehow Pepper screamed her inhale, like the last slurp of a pool drain. Someone was patting Rummy on his shoulder, saying similar things. Two harvestmen scurried between adult legs, one with a metal dustpan strapped under its body and the other a stiff brush. Working together they scooped up the hunger artist’s remains, skull disintegrating at the first sweep.

Rummy wondered if either of those two were ‘the harvestman’ in the artist’s last words. The CID-Knees was chock full of harvestmen, each as mute as a jammed doorknob as far as he knew. Did he even mean the bugs? Weren’t most of the vendors technically harvestmen, selling their harvests? It was an antiquated term, but the boy had no idea how old the artist had been, only that he looked 3,433.

“We,” Mollywald said, drawing his eyes. She stared up at him, shaking like her leaves. “We killed a man… with soup. We told your mom it was harmless soup.”

“It was,” Rummy argued through the defense attorney frog in his throat, “he didn’t have any. It was poisonous to not eat the soup.”

“You two ki- you alright?” a green man, normally of the old growth except on his cheat weekends, asked them. He was about to call them kids when he gave Mollywald a second look. His botanical brows and beard suggested he might have some distant familial relation to the potted plant, but they were of different environments, agricamphors keeping to meadows and fields when possible. Since he couldn’t tell how old she was he likely had never seen her kind before either.

“Are you arresting us now? We’ll go quietly when I stop crying,” Molly sniffled.

“Don’t fret,” he told them, rephrasing the talk Pepper was getting on the other side of the cauldron. “That’s been a long time coming. I expected it ten years ago. It’s just unfortunate, and rude of him, that you had to be involved. Nobody thinks this is your fault, alright? You’re not in any trouble.”

The consoling notes continued as Rummy’s thought sank into the event’s undercurrents. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about their victim, just that thinking about their mission felt so much lighter in comparison, more soothing than the valiant efforts of the adults removing all traces of the body as quickly as possible.

Before Rummy was fully consumed by the failure of Operation Budding Romance (casualties: 1), he got the sense that the artist wasn’t particularly liked around the market. Nobody had applauded his magnum opus, or gasped when he went poof. Of course, it wasn’t difficult to imagine how his art might have interfered in the regular operations of the event. Having a famished almost-corpse stand beside your edible wares and yet never partake didn’t send the best message to other prospective customers. Perhaps Rummy, Pepper, and Molly were being so carefully coddled and insulated from the interaction because they’d forever rid the CID-Knees of an insufferable nuisance.

When their temporary grief counselors were satisfied they’d prevented long-lasting psychological damage they went back to their business, reuniting the team, the humans also joined by reddened cheeks.

Pepper apologized for ruining their chances of finding a boyfriend flower and brutally murdering a starving man in front of them. Rummy said it was fine. He wasn’t mad. Just sad. Molly wasn’t mad. Just sad. Lucky Leaver had been spared the trauma thanks to his protracted dive. His owner fished him out and wiped him clean across the grass to keep him from getting sticky. Her sniffles as she complimented him indicated he would never learn the horrible truth. The rock was able to slide away obliviously, toward the college, where Pepper’s parents waited for her evening return.

“Do you want to come watch the fireworks with us?” she asked “We’ve got a spot between the absorbagourds and the hay ride truck.” If he came it meant they were still friends.

“I can’t, my Mom has to watch me at night.” Her brow furrowed at the statement meant for younger voices. She asked why. “Because people are scared of the dark.” If he let her speak she would only keep on, so he mumbled something about hopefully seeing her tomorrow and rushed away, Mollywald still held close to his chest. She didn’t ask to be let down so she could drive on her own; they were heading back to a stuffy car anyway.

Night fell, and the market fought it off with strings of lights, bonfires, the yellow fluorescence through all the windows of the college, and neon safety wristbands that were really just bent glow sticks. Altogether it was a call for reinforcements, and out of the surrounding woods came both scarlet fireflies and electric blue lightning bugs.

Night Sky Left Ajar

Back in the car, Plumwine Knacklevern locked the doors with plastic pegs and the push of a button. Then she locked it from sight with an incense stick, its blue tip producing a garter snake of white smoke that obeyed the hissing witch, writhing around the vehicle’s interior until it had encircled all the glass and filled it in with opaque smoke that smelled like nothing but the woody powder in the corner of an empty cupboard.

Now no one could see inside, except for one brief moment where Rummy pressed his fingertip through the smoke and left a smudged copy on the glass. His jacket was off; the transformation might damage it. The pieces were easier to pull out with fewer layers in the way. Mollywald was back in her seat beside him, calmly describing the events of the day to the witch’s concerned eyes in the rear-view.

Instead of assuring them they’d done nothing wrong with the hunger artist, Plumwine reminded them that it could sometimes look very bad from the outside when a committed person reached their goal. The more concrete that goal the more finished the person might be afterward. Finished to a fine grain.

“Keep looking tomorrow,” she encouraged them as she passed back a shoulder bag full of snacks, some from the road and some from the market, to serve as their dinner that evening: a bag of cheesy Dragon’s Hoard, a jar of pickles so mixed there was only one of each item, cinnamon-filled tube cookies, birch soda, uncrustified tavern-style snack-pies with microwave and magic instructions, fresh Snow White apples cut into rocking chairs and greased with almond butter, with enough silphium-thyme popcorn to fill in all the gaps.

And Rummy didn’t reach for any of it. It would only weight him down, even the airy popcorn. A desire and a question were doing the same thing, chaining him down as if his seat belt was buckled. The tickling itch was already there, under his skin, sizzling micro-candy dancing between his compressing forms. As midnight approached they approached each other, touched into a coin, applied pressure until one face flipped to the other. Let the wants out, before the needs take over.

“Mom I wanna go watch the fireworks with Pepper,” he said at outdoor volume. Her eyes were in the rear-view, her reflected eyes, showing much more magic that way, an indigo tempest not quite buried in her pupils. He couldn’t tell if it was mom-fury without seeing the bend of her lips or the barrel-rims of her flared nose.

“Rummy, we don’t know these people. We’ve been over this. Give it a few years.”

“I do know them,” he insisted. “They didn’t even shout at me when I killed that guy. They’re not going to care. I know it. This place is like the city. The aisles are the streets. Everybody’s nice because they have to be; they’re all working together.” He tried to swallow the awkward silence, but nothing was staying down, and everything was rising with the moon. Mollywald stepped in.

“I don’t think anyone will even notice him Plumwine. He was easier to see in the city right? All the tall buildings were the background. Out here it’s just more night sky, so he’ll blend in. And the fireworks will distract them too.” Her attacks were smart, but the rear-view eyes stayed silent, and their storm still churned. They did not lecture her, her of all witches, on the night sky, she who knew its flavors and had seen the cracking collapse of a cosmic shelf as a gushing gulf of frosty slushy blue.

“And I want to go with just Molly,” Rummy added. He’d already pressed his luck, more wouldn’t hurt. “I want this place to feel right Mom. I need to be on my own here. Otherwise you just brought me, like a dog, or a shoulder toad.” She could’ve lectured him on shoulder toads, as they always came in pairs, one red and one white, each croaking along different ends of the moral spectrum. Instead her eyes rumble-lit in the rear-view. Then her hand reached out and wiped a swatch of smoke away from the windshield. She looked out and up, judging the conditions.

Rummy frantically fiddled with other thoughts that could get cobbled together into more things to say, as long as he said them quickly, before they conceptually toppled in his own brain. Something about the hunger artist, and how Rummy didn’t want to die like that, some dried out piece of repression jerky that designed their entire life around denying themselves pleasure.

A click. Narration from car stereo. Someone was about to take someone else out to dinner at a restaurant built into the lip of an active volcano. It was one of Plumwine’s books on tape. The witch sighed and reclined, turning her head a moment later to glance at the creatures in the backseat sideways.

“You’re still here?” she said, smiling. Rummy grabbed Mollywald while the flower thanked her. He threw the door open enough to rock the car. “Warn her first.” She didn’t need to say that, Rummy thought as he bolted across the grass. It slapped his ankles wetly, catching them less and less with every leap and bound. His gait was already a little moonish.

Pepparuchow Mopwright had suffered a terrible fright that day, with the artist’s collapse. Rummy knew better than to perform his transformation right in front of her without saying anything first, but he needed the time to say it, which dwindled rapidly. Molly shouted directions at him as he tried to minimize the jostling; she remembered exactly where Pepper said she was watching the fireworks with her parents. They needed to loop around the gourd field and find a big truck shedding hay.

Around was too slow, Rummy decided. At the sight of the first gourd he took a flying leap, emphasis on flying. He’d carried Molly along like this a few times, still unsure if her yipping was glee or terror. She wasn’t too fond of heights otherwise, but most things instinctively felt flying and falling differently even without the rush of wind.

He’d misjudged how light he was slightly and needed to tap the absorbagourd with one foot to clear it. Luckily the woody stem didn’t have the same quality of the rind, so they weren’t sucked in and trapped. More scattered gourds needed to be hurdled, but he was lighter each time; they’d have to hop to get him. In another stroke of luck, the hopping squash was only in season on leap years.

The last obstacles were the sides of the hay ride truck, built up with old fencing, straw knots tied around the neck of every loose nail. One tiptoe tap, two. He thought heavy thoughts and touched down, curling his toes to kill momentum and appear heavier.

A dozen families were set up there, on a slight hill, blankets unfurled and anchored with picnic baskets and wine bottle corners. Their attention was on a show that hadn’t started yet and the large flashlights that would primarily distract the younger children. In those flashlights were five different varieties of battery, one eaten white with gremlin acid, none AAA. Nobody spotted Rummy’s landing.

“Hey!” Pepper called out to him from her blanket once she’d seen him approaching, Leaver on one corner, performing even better there than in the soup. She jumped up and ran over. “I thought your Mom had to watch you.” He was out of breath, and Molly was so frazzled from the flight that she was holding her petals and counting them to make sure they were all still there. “Uhm, these are my parents.”

She gestured over her shoulder at a mismatched couple arguing over which jars to open for their charcuterie spread and which to save for later. All four of their hands were wrapped around the lid of something labeled Truffle Kerfuffle.

Her father was a beanpole in round spectacles who looked like the second cousin of a pitted green olive. Anyone who described him shortly after meeting him would assert he’d been wearing a sweater vest even if he hadn’t been. He was wearing a sweater vest.

Pepper’s mother had the squashed hair of someone who worked the kitchen all day, hybridized with the bedhead of someone who dreamed up food all night, wispy strands shooting up and drifting back down like tethered beetles. Her parka had her restaurant’s logo on it: a cutaway mountain with a turkey roasting inside.

“You must be Rumraisin,” she said without relinquishing her position in the kerfuffle. “Pepper was telling us all about you.” Not all, Rummy knew. She was about to get the all.

“Leaver is better behaved at home,” her father claimed through a gritted smile as he tried to yank the jar away, very unsuccessfully. Pepper had probably told him about the collision that introduced them, and as a geologist he felt it was his duty to explain he had trained their pet rock more than its exuberance suggested.

“Nice to meet you,” Rummy said, voice fluting strangely. Molly covered once more.

“Yes and I’m Mollywald. We were hoping Pepper could help us…” she spied some fireflies and lightning bugs in a desolate little corner of coiled cables, faucets, and concrete, “…catch some of those bugs. I’m looking for some good pollinators.”

“Oh, that’s fine!” her mother blurted, relieved that their only child wouldn’t have to watch how ugly it was about to get over a white truffle spread. The embarrassment wouldn’t be worth it until they got to fuchsia truffles at least. “Go on Pep, the show hasn’t even started yet.” The girl sensed the urgency in her friends, the weirdness too, so she grabbed Rummy’s hand and pulled him along, out of everyone’s sight.

It was a good spot, Rummy realized when they got there, almost a cave of overhang from the college’s sunken corner and the backs of several clustered stands. The groundskeeper hooked up hoses there, came and went through a door that was now padlocked with an aluminum Celtic knot. Previous pairs of children never explicitly allowed there filled up water balloons, caught crickets, and drank spritzers they incorrectly assumed to be alcoholic.

“What do you guys really want to do?” Pepper asked as soon as they were alone. Rummy set Molly down so she could steer herself away from his metamorphosis. Then he held himself, to keep together a bit longer.

“Pepper, you were so great to us today,” he said. Surely she could hear it now, the cosmic harmonizing in his voice, like he spoke to three different layers of reality. “I wanted to thank you. That crazy artist guy really got in the way though. And I wanted to show you… that I’m not human.”

“What are you?”

“He is half human,” Mollywald said from beside her ankle, “on his mother’s side.” Rummy took off his shirt and cast it to the wet concrete. Then he grabbed his skin, around the collarbone, and took it off in much the same fashion. It broke up before it reached the ground, hung about only as a haze like low morning fog.

Rummy rose straight out of his shoes effortlessly, hovering. He still had a surface, one he shared with the night sky, so black it was blue. Distant nebulae were somewhere inside him, showing through purple, red, orange, in brief bubbling columns like the surfacing breaths of the drowned, before the bluing black swallowed them again. And there were stars, icy hot, intensely white, screaming silently in the shafts of their spearing light.

“Woah,” Pepparuchow stated, as if stamping her new friend with the official wax seal of coolness. “What’s his half now?”

“Rummy’s not a he now,” Molly explained, “but a they. And they’re a star jam.”

“That goo that falls from outer space? I didn’t think that stuff was alive.”

“No that’s star jelly, common mistake,” the flower said, having earned her degree in galactic exofauna from three quarters of a television documentary at three A.M. “Star jelly is just flecks, cast off from messy eaters up there. A star jam is fresh from the jar, still has bodily integrity. In order for one to reach Earth somebody up there has to be klutzy enough to drop a whole jar.”

“So Rummy’s dad was… food?”

“Everything is food for something else,” the star jam said, crawling along the overhang with their fingertips like a catfish dragging its barbels across a lake bed. “Unless somebody decides to be a hunger artist.”

“Ms. Knacklevern met Rummy’s dad when she was looking for mooncalves in a pasture,” Molly said. “A giant jar, one of those fancier flat ones, fell like a meteor not far from her. She used magic to pop the lid and out came a spread that shaped itself, well, like that.” She pointed at Rumraisin, who tumbled through the air as if underwater, careful not to pass the overhang, where the crosswinds might take them. Blue lightning bugs and red fireflies took notice of the swirling lights within the adolescent jam, inquisitively swarming and matching the acrobatics. “The two of them really hit it off, and they, you know, pollinated.”

“Right after they met?”

“There wasn’t a lot of time,” Molly said, petals limp. “If you’re having a picnic you definitely notice if the jam is missing right away. They had to say their goodbyes when an arm came down and put the lid back on and… took their snack back.”

“Oh…” Pepper said. She wanted to shout at the sky, but even at her tender age she knew people never got anything out of that, except perhaps noticed by someone who would like them to pipe down. There was no arguing with the notion that jam was food, and especially no arguing it when they had essentially spent the evening licking a rock. “What flavor was your Dad?” she asked Rummy.

“It was a space one,” they answered. “You wouldn’t be able to taste it.”

“Are you the same flavor?”

“I don’t know.”

“So… I’m glad I’m in the club that knows you’re from space… but it’s a secret right? I shouldn’t tell anybody?” Molly answered for Rummy, and they didn’t really listen to what she said, trivial as it was to get lost in thought when your brain was gelatinous darkberry matter pasteurized in a stellar furnace.

Was Rummy’s nature supposed to be a secret? It wasn’t in the city, and that wasn’t a problem until all the corporate computers were trucked in and bolted down. Sure, it was true that Plumwine’s magic business put static in the air that slowed their operations, but Rummy radiated much more at night, and all of it roamed around. A star jam in a modernizing city was a bird hitting the power lines, and because everybody knew it was Rummy there was no hiding behind a daytime face. They were evicted by name.

Plumwine was afraid of her child being reported as a UFO and paraded across the local news. She was afraid prudes and chastity fundamentalists would interpret uniform jammy flesh as entirely obscene, while Rummy simply needed to lighten the load to fly, and needed to fly to feel right. It was more like ignoring gravity, and a shrieking prude had somehow mastered the tangling claw-digging drag-down better than gravity itself.

Rummy had a little of those fears too. Some things about the country seemed less civilized. The hunger artist’s death came to mind, as his dusty remains had been swept up and possibly discarded so quickly. There was no fuss over his croaking, like he was nothing, and perhaps only because of the sin of being different enough to annoy, to make small town tranquility bristle.

Or maybe they just understood death. Rummy thought, at first, that had the artist collapsed in Drycount City he would’ve at least been acknowledged enough to earn a chalk outline for a day or two. Those who glanced at street performers would slow and wonder if they should’ve given him change.

That acknowledgment wasn’t celebration though. It wasn’t a funeral. It was procedure, a gesture toward humanity that allowed everyone to go about their business with just a sidestep. At the CID-Knees market death was everywhere, often at a reduced price. All the beautifully polished apples were dying off the branch and all the peppers had been pulped and pureed into spicy liquid mortality that went great on arepas. Everyone knew that everything had its season and was dead the rest of the time, sometimes dressed in its best, and sometimes sitting gray in a dustpan.

Rummy feared that, as food, they might get treated the same way as the dust that had been the hunger artist, but, they realized, food was celebrated at the market. What they had done in the city, rolled over and left, was what they’d done wrong. They should’ve stayed, flew proudly no matter how many memory banks crapped the bed over it. Cowering in anticipation of assault gave evil what it wanted without it having to lift a finger.

Next time they went to the CID-Knees there would be no hiding it. Rumraisin Knacklevern would come dressed in glass, maybe even sell some of themselves to the curious. For now though, Pepparuchow Mopwright knew. That was a good start. Their mother deserved obedience enough for Rummy to keep the rest of the night calm.

Drifting jammy thoughts came in handy just then, taking Rummy from the edible dead things of the universe to the utility of the live ones. They saw a spark jump between lightning bugs. A spark was just miniature lightning, and lightning was just electricity. Three or so lightning bugs lined up were about the size of a AAA battery.

Only their pants remained from their daylight ensemble, but they hadn’t emptied their pockets, until just then, producing the Hengine. They gently depressed the plastic to slide out the battery tray and presented it to the cloud of bugs to see if any were interested in lending a hand or six to Rummy’s cause.

“Sorry, I only need the blue guys,” the space jam informed the red fireflies that carried in their abdomens a different illuminating primordial element, gently nudging them away from the blue ones that landed, lined up, and filed into the cassette player. Carefully, Rummy closed the tray, making sure there were no stray antennae getting crushed.

Experimentally, they hit the power button. It clicked, spun, lit up, came to life in the artificial ways of plastic-clad mechanism. Rummy peered through the hole in the hag stone. The lightning bugs did the job better than the batteries. Magical auras were everywhere, but not blown out and blinding as they were with the raw stone. Now everything was crisp concentric circles of color, easy to separate, judge distance and character.

Now they could properly scan the whole market for another agricamphor that Mollywald could fall in love with. Or in the morning rather, since now was minutes from fireworks that would make it impossible to hear romantic banter or barter with whoever might control access to her hypothetical boyfriend. For now Rummy told the lightning bugs to go ahead and have a sleepover inside the Hengine.

Before they turned the device off their gaze through the stone lingered on the nearest string of auras, belonging to the small lights put up along the overhang, which swooped down and went along the stands as well, all of them, all throughout the CID-Knees. Rummy hadn’t noticed them during the day because they weren’t on yet, and they were much plainer than almost anything else present.

Swimming through the air, the star jam reached out and held one between their fingers, the digits deforming around it. It looked like a pineberry, a white varietal of the strawberry, which didn’t light up normally as far as they knew.

What was different about these ones? Their fingers followed the wire, or was it a vine? Whether rooted in a socket or the soil it was somewhere far from that stark puddling corner. Rummy contemplated taking a bite to see if the berry would go dark, or if the flesh would glow brighter, or if glass would cut their tongue, but then they remembered they had no tongue and no mouth to house it. Just jam from the cosmic shelving of the ultracelestial audience, still far from the universe’s expiration date.

“Pepper?” they asked, lower half of their body sinking as if treading water while they cradled the fruit-shaped light. “Are these plants or machines?”

“I don’t know; they put them up every year though. They’re just the pineberry lights. Newer than the hunger artist, but older than me.” Rummy snickered, their nocturnal snicker, so much more resonant than their daylight laugh. It was a sound the crickets, thankful they weren’t being caught like those jailed and exploited lightning bugs, chirped along with.

Nothing knew what Rummy was laughing at except the jam themselves. It was just so perfect, that’s all. The college probably paid a few publicists big bucks to manage their reputation, when all they needed to do was point out the pineberry lights thrown up so casually whenever it was time to celebrate in softened light.

The berries/bulbs were the epitome of the school’s mission, a plain statement of the power of integrative design. Magic made them at least look like they could grow. Science lit them, perhaps. Rummy couldn’t know, only appreciate. Pineberry lights could’ve been put up on every street corner in Drycount City and everybody would understand with the gentlest epiphany, a moth landing on their ears, that magic and machine could cohabit so successfully that they could bear fruit.

Nobody actually had to move. You didn’t have to put your head down, put a hood over it, and shuffle away with your hands in your pockets just because somebody started working a wallet like a sock puppet and making it talk. The pineberry lights were a silent argument that didn’t lose, so long as someone could look at them and make a bad guess as to their whole deal. Rumraisin was part fruit themselves; if they broke one open they could probably learn the truth. No fun in that though. Just let them glow. Hang with them, in the night sky ajar.

Pepparuchow was happy to watch Rummy swim in the fishbowl of their dim corner. She’d seen fireworks before, never a star jam. If Rummy was particularly light, and Leaver appropriately heavy, could he anchor them? A hundred such questions also swam in her head, keeping her from noticing that they’d incidentally offended the fireflies.

Both types of insect were genuinely useful as lights, and rare was the occasion where one color was favored over the other. The red ones didn’t quite understand why Rumraisin had no use for an ember inside their toy. Star jams were from outer space, so perhaps that explained it. They were just unfamiliar with firefly utility. Best demonstrate it with antennae held high.

Scattering in all directions, the tiny red lights searched for anything they could power or ignite to show Rummy and Pepper what they were missing. All they needed was some tinder. Evening fog had fallen and turned everything damp, except for things kept purposefully dry, on high tables and under lid or cloth.

The nearest ideal target was a stack of fireworks shaped like warlock towers crossbred with corn dogs, blue with yellow stars. Burning something blue appealed to the red bugs just then as well. The fuses were hanging off the side for anyone to light. It was so easy; all they had to do was land on the tips and wait a moment.

Sparks, again, as if the fireworks mocked them too. More fireflies lit more of them. Nothing on the table would escape their helpful efficiency, until the first fuse was spent. Then one did escape at a rather high speed. Horizontally. Its journey was short but storied, through two tents, skittering along the bottom of the upper deck, looping through the ring you aimed for on the mermaid dunk tank, lighting up a raked leaf pile golem into a waddling bonfire, and exploding too close to the ground and too close to someone’s classic convertible that wasn’t too classic to have an alarm triggerable by firework proximity.

And that was just the first. It got everyone on their feet, thankfully made them aware enough to duck once more when a few others shot off at chaotic angles. A lot of what happened next could be called dancing, whether it be the dancing of people leaping over a screaming rocket taking a path normally reserved for a chipmunk or the smug spiraling of the fireflies who were sure they’d made their point.

An absorbagourd was blown to pulpy pieces. Its owner would’ve made a bigger stink about it had the rupture not freed three middle-schoolers who had been at that point, in the eyes of law enforcement, ‘missing’ for fifteen minutes.

Rummy, Pepper, and Molly were just as aware as everyone else, more so, since they were able to notice the sudden absence of the red lights that had been there a minute ago. The star jam urged their friend to rush back to her parents so they wouldn’t come looking and promised her they had their own escape route. She couldn’t hug them while they levitated, so she saluted the pair and took off, disappearing behind a tent.

“Get to the car,” Rummy told Molly. “I’ll catch up.” The agricamphor and her RC pot would’ve been too heavy for the jam to fly with, resulting in a slow awkward hover like a retracted turtle on an air hockey table. On her own, Mollywald also saluted Rummy bravely and took the nearest exit. “I can do this,” they told themselves. On to the proving.

A star jam is a blob, exceedingly skilled at sitting and jiggling. Sitting in zero gravity is sort of like flight, so you could be forgiven for thinking Rummy could fly with purpose easily like a hungry pigeon or a frightened pigeon or the falcon frightening the pigeon. No. They needed a push, or to do some pushing.

They took one last look at the pineberry lights, their white suppressed by the cavalcade of flickering colors from the errant fireworks, and used their fingers to turn around against the corner’s ceiling. The inverted crawl to the wall was painfully protracted, especially with bangs behind them that made them flinch every time. And as a blob, when you flinched your whole body kept the flinch going for an encore.

Once they reached the back wall they turned around again, planted their feet flat against the wall, but not so flat as to create suction. Rummy pushed off, launching with all their jammy might. Their body was lighter than air, their pants heavier, creating a typical height of ten feet off the Earth.

They had to exaggerate it to clear the firework chaos. After threading the needle of two overlapping signs and their support posts, Rummy grabbed the second and used it to angle their momentum upward, into an arc. The slow leap took them over several lanes of the market, where they saw the traffic of rushing bodies and turning heads and bobbing elf ears.

A sting of guilt hit. Normally it would strike the heart, but the heartless jam felt it dispelled throughout, a morally neutral tingle at the fingertips. They were just a celestial condiment, yet sitting on those grandest of shelves still put them far above the ants of Earth, who might get a bite of the picnic Rummy was part of, but would never understand what was passing through them.

If each one could be sat down and spoken to Rummy didn’t doubt they could become fast friends no matter what form they took. The fireworks, the biting darkness between their bursts, and the crowding made that impossible. Adding another shock wouldn’t do them any good, so Rummy tried to get back to the car without being seen.

Two more successful leaps got them over and past the pyramid of multicolored autumnal cabbages and the entries of the sugar loaf-licking sculpture contest. They were almost home free when one last firework didn’t quite collide as it spiraled up around them. Its wake stalled the jam’s momentum and sent them into a spin, and when it burst above their head it revealed their silhouette against the starry dark that was supposed to camouflage. Some folks of the market saw, almost as starry-eyed as the jam and the sky. Pastel elves and green men and a mermaid who dunked herself and a field trip of nocturnal kobolds and all the harvestmen saw.

What they saw most of them couldn’t guess, only that it was man-shaped and not falling the way man-shapes usually did, especially after a day of eating at the CID-Knees. Rumraisin saw them back. Fear shot like guilt, tingled as naught but sensation in fingertips and air-rudder tiptoes. It was nice to be seen and not yet be judged, to be discovered, to be stumbled upon. Maybe some of them would try to rename Rummy, scientifically, affectionately.

The jam’s reactions dissolved in their viscous flesh, in contrast to the feelings that welled up on their own, originating in their very soul. Rummy wanted their acknowledgment so badly that they felt it everywhere, and felt it sad, and felt it yearning. it was like being a tear drop balanced precariously on an eyelid, the one that determines if someone is sobbing or if they’re just misty-eyed.

Please, they thought. The kobolds waved at Rummy. The mermaid too. A smile here, there, flashing as better pearly white fireworks, excellent companions to the pineberry lights. If it was up to Rummy they would’ve taken the lights from their teeth and made them a third kind of illuminating insect.

Then the unscheduled fireworks were over, and no one was sure if the scheduled ones were still intact, or if it would be in poor taste to continue when there might be a grandmother scared three quarters to death somewhere already, clutching her emotional support coin purse. It was the market’s decision, not Rummy’s. They used the darkness to descend and pulled themselves through the tents and stands, as low as possible, like a shark gliding through the skeletal limestone layers of a metropolis reef.

The escape suffered no further incident, unless you count knocking over a rack of hand-painted postcards all highlighting locations within the great state of Nowhayming like Kraken’s Den water park and the world’s largest replica of King Arturo’s rounded table. The rack was enchanted to right itself, the cards suffering a minor rearrange, no real harm done.

A final stretch of grass was a challenge, since it was the only thing to grab. Rummy pulled himself along handful by handful, careful not to tear it. Then they lunged for the car door, pulled it open, and curled themselves inside, once again hidden by Plumwine’s window smoke. The book on tape was already paused, as Mollywald was back in her seat, laughing nervously and telling the witch she was wrong to worry since her child was in one piece, as if they were scooped fresh from the jar.

“How much of that was your fault?” Plumwine asked them sternly, unsatisfied with the rambling equivocating answer the flower had given. Rummy took a breath to seriously consider and tally.

“Ten percent,” they said breathily as they rolled along the roof to face her in the rear-view.

“Twenty and you’d be grounded.” She meant during the day of course. To contain Rummy at night was like putting an anchor on your goldfish. “Is that ten enough to tie it to you? Are you getting me kicked out of the CID-Knees come morning? Because it might be better for us to vanish into the dead of night and spare everyone the embarrassment.”

“No I think we’re safe. Only Pepper knows. Some fireflies and lightning bugs saw, but they’re not gonna talk.”

“They better not,” Molly warned no one at all as she punched the air with two curled leaves that could charitably be called fists and more accurately called moist towelettes. “I might have to mess somebody up.”

“My player is working again,” Rummy told their mother to lighten the mood and convince her to linger past dawn. They dug the item out to show her, sliding open the battery compartment. Lightning bugs poked out their heads as if they’d been enjoying a hot tub with the cover on and they had just been rudely interrupted.

“Oh, you gave them a cool ride,” the witch said, “and you didn’t bring any fireflies along too did you?”

“Well they would’ve melted the plastic; this thing was expensive.”

“Tell me about it,” the witch grumbled. “At least that explains the fireworks. I assume you’ll be making a quick and quiet sweep of the market in the morning?” Rummy and Molly both confirmed. “Alright. Give those little zappers something for their trouble so they don’t leave.” Mollywald pulled the snack bag to the lip of her pot and dug around for anything sugary and crumbly, selecting one of the tube cookies filled with cinnamon goo. After she strangled the cookie with all her might, producing several crumbs, Rummy handed them off to the fireflies. The bugs retreated inside the Hengine, closing the tray themselves to enjoy their dinner in peace.

Then there was nothing to do but unwind. Rummy bobbed against the roof idly, respiring across their entire hide. They would probably fall asleep before they started turning back, a process that took around an hour and began with the cresting light of the new day.

First their limbs would start to hang like oars off a dinghy. Next came patches of skin, growing out of the dark: island chains rising out of a deep sea. When coverage was around eighty percent their bottom would touch the seat. Coming to ground returned Rummy to masculine identity, and to awareness of mundane things he would rather leave behind permanently.

For example, only after sealing his skin again did he notice that he was shirtless, and that the corner with the pineberry lights was shirtful in his place. Reclaiming it was a lower priority than seeing the CID-Knees through his properly calibrated hag stone, so Rummy slipped his jacket on and zipped it all the way up, hoping his mother wouldn’t notice. If she didn’t until they got home it couldn’t compound with his offenses at the college. Everybody knew a different location reset the behavioral record.

Oh, he told the self that was him once more, don’t forget to ask the harvestman… whichever one is the right one.

The Harvestman Halves

The final hours of the CID-Knees didn’t have as many goodbyes as Rummy was expecting. Many of its customers, and its denizens, wouldn’t see each other for another year, but they treated it as a matter of course, just the closing of a seasonal door. Their friends would reappear with a knock or a ring as soon as they had a bushel of something to share. And if they didn’t reappear because they’d finally fallen from the tree of life some new shoot would have taken their place, green behind the ears and on the thumb, with eyes on prize ribbons rather than the quietest slots for the stands that always got reserved first.

Plumwine allowed them to go off by themselves one more time, not because she trusted them to stay out of trouble, but because she had one more errand that she wanted to take care of without them watching. This ‘business card monster’ still needed a visit from a witch by her estimation. Going by her wards’ account, he might be guarding the ramp to the premium deck again.

Her approach was empty-handed, making her look much more purposeful, as she transported no produce, only a message. So striking was her harbinger’s arrival that the monster immediately perked up at the sight of her. If he didn’t know she was a witch by her wardrobe, he must’ve seen it in her gait or her expression. Like most witches she was usually the one catching people off their guard, and when she wasn’t it was her own child besting her.

“You look you’re about to turn someone into a frog,” Cadwallader Prime said to initiate. The witch stopped in front of him, hands on her hips. “It’s not me, is it?”

“That depends, are you the one who chased an innocent little flower around so much yesterday that she had to visit the moles to get away from you?”

“Oh,” the magic maker said, straightening himself out as if fewer wrinkles on his shirt made him more trustworthy. “This is just a misunderstanding. I was trying to give that flower my card; I want her to have it even more now that I’ve seen her dig like that. I’m in the need of tunnelers… and witches by the way. Know any?” Her glare killed his smirk in the cradle.

“So there is something under our feet?” she asked, tone ordering him to answer honestly.

“Yeah, of course. The college has funds for seed banking, so there are tunnels down there leading into the hills, lots of cool dry spaces. And it turns out there are cave systems around here too.” He looked both ways to see if a speeding opportunist was about to swing by and pinch his idea; the coast was clear. “Three underground spaces, each only separated by a couple hundred feet of dirt: the seed bank tunnels, the natural caves… and the Drycount City sewage canals.” Now it was Plumwine’s turn to perk up.

“Really? That far?” There was a speeding opportunist there, and he produced a business card faster than he could wink.

“The misunderstanding was that this was clearly meant for you,” Prime chuckled. The witch took it, read it, lost interest. He wanted her back on the hook, and chasing her seemed like a particularly bad idea. “I’m the best kind of coordinator, the one who knows how to get out of the talent’s way and let them do their thing.”

“What is it you plan to do with all this underground thinking?”

“A brand new industry, invented problem and provided solution all in one. Do you know anything about corporate computing?” He breathed deep for a five minute spiel.

“Yes actually.”

“Oh. It’s like we’re working together already! Drycount’s got new computing infrastructure, and it sneezes if it even processes the words ‘fairy dust’. New zoning has every mom and pop magic shop pushed away, like a shock wave in the local economy.”

“You don’t say.”

‘That’s all I do! Here’s some more, and this is the really juicy stuff. The laws don’t cover anything below street level.” Plumwine was suddenly an opportunist as well. Both of them were salivating, and it had nothing at all to do with the steaming trail mix pie carried behind them. “All I need is a few good people of the hex to work their craft underneath the corporate headquarters of West&Smithy Tabulations.

Then they’ve got errors out the wazoo, no idea where they’re coming from, and no solution but the one I’m selling. They’ll pay us through the nose just for us to stop working. It’s the perfect plan, at least until someone like me comes along on their side.”

Plumwine made a more serious analysis of his character, done with a kind of silent magic accessible by most women. It might also be called a scumbag meter. His reading was high, but there were other polluting elements. The witch guessed he had at some point had a positive formative experience with a magic wielder as a child, given the high respect he afforded them, expressed via job offers, the best thing he could bestow.

“What kind of money are we talking?” the witch asked.

“Who knows how long it’ll work, so weekly pay, no long term contract. Two thousand.” Plumwine accepted the card, despite already holding it.

“I’ll call you. Don’t chase more innocent flowers; you might step on them.”

“I’ll step under them from now on,” Cadwallader swore, hand over his heart, an organ that was sometimes less present than Rumraisin’s in the dead of night. The witch cut off his ability to pursue with a dramatic and threatening flourish of her coat, moving it much more like a cape. Working with him wouldn’t put a good taste in her mouth, but sticking it to the neckties that deposed her would: the suckable cheek-sequestered sweets of revenge.

Two thousand a week was enough to bring the city to them with mail order catalogs, a big screen television, and a car that held itself together without the redirected will of the universe. In preparation Plumwine went ahead and shifted some of her focus away from their vehicle, to Rumraisin and Mollywald, an investment in their luck for the rest of the morning.

They needed it. Even with his Hengine working properly there were countless false positives all around the market. Much of the produce was at least a little magical, their auras complete with leaf and petal-like projections that made them mistakable for an agricamphor. Every time Rummy had one he bent down and let Molly look through and make her own judgment before they bothered to try and chase it down. Each time she sighed, pointed out that they weren’t moving, and suggested a new direction.

And the only other lead was what the hunger artist’s jawbone had said. Rumraisin depressed the switch on his Hengine that put it fully in ghost walkie-talkie mode, then rolled his finger across the frequencies in search of the artist’s spirit to see if he could get some elaboration, but the man was nowhere to be found, except at peace. Even if he had been hanging around, spectral activity was much stronger at night.

Asking the harvestmen worked as well as they expected. Mollywald drove in front of each one she saw on the ground to force them to stop, asking them if any of their kind was referred to as the harvestman and where they might be found. They bowed respectfully, their clearest no, and lifted themselves right over her hanging head.

Rummy asked the same of those ambling across the tables and atop the tents with raindrop footsteps. They carried potpourri bombs, fishing bait, saucers of cream for stray haggisnipes, dropped change, umbrellas for the lost and found, donation cups, sign-up sheets for the next market, runaway pet rocks, somebody’s car keys, eggplants, litter, half-finished bags of candied nuts, peppermint bark, a teacup barking puppy named Peppermint, pears, and a hundred and three other things, none of them answers.

The only thing they found they were genuinely glad to see was Pepper, who popped up with Leaver around the spot where they’d slaved over a cauldron full of stone soup. Even the depression in the grass was gone, but she had Leaver make a new one.

“Hey guys!” she shouted, waving them over. “Any luck with the boyfriend?” Mollywald drove up and swerved, pointing to the back of her pot.

“No cans on strings,” she said, “and no ‘just married’ sign. What’s a girl got to do to find a man around here?”

“I think they have belly dancing lessons here sometimes,” Pepper offered. “I hear that works. Leaver, show her what you’ve got.” The rock slowly spun, like a cake rotating in a bakery display case.

“Nice moves,” Rummy complimented. “Are you guys leaving soon?”

“Yeah,” the girl said, kicking the grass. “In a few minutes. Can I give you our phone number? We could talk and stuff, maybe go camping before the next CID-Knees. My mom knows how to forage, and you can find a whole dining table out there if you pick the right spot.”

“As long as it’s not in the middle of a cornfield.”

“…It might be at the edge of a cornfield.” Out of her pocket came a scrap of a grocery list, torn along a scribbled-out item still legible as ochre truffle something or other. It also had her number. Rummy pocketed it. “It’s cool,” she whispered, “what you are I mean.”

“Thanks. I’m glad Leaver tried to eat my hag stone or whatever.” She shrugged.

“Maybe he’s looking for a girlfriend.” Her name was called; Rummy recognized the tone as at least the third attempt. “Gotta go. Bye Rummy, bye Molly.” She took off, Leaver hot on her heels, quickly obscured behind two people carrying a disassembled tent. There went his first human friend since getting pushed out of the city. If he wanted more he might learn to forage like Pepper’s mom, collecting friends where they temporarily existed like mushrooms, as opposed to bumping into them around every corner like he did outside their old apartment.

The roving tent blocking his view of Pepper wasn’t the only one. Everywhere the CID-Knees was unfolding, origami reverting back to a flat sheet. Truck engines growling to life overpowered the worst live band, Oaty’s Jug Blowers, whose time slot on the schedule now made sense. People atop ladders took down the pineberry lights, which were a much duller cream yellow in daylight without their incandescence. A barefoot green man swiped one of his soles across patches of grass burnt by last night’s low-flying fireworks, restoring their verdant luster. Any free samples were now freer than ever before in order to keep from becoming litter. Impromptu signs on folded receipts urged leaving customers to take one at exclamation gunpoint.

As their search for an agricamphor wore on, the pair started to round corners and find bald spots, individual blades of grass springing back from days of compression almost audibly, like the community college cracking its knuckles. Worse, some of the corners were gone, and thus couldn’t be rounded. the whole place was starting to look like a field.

The wealthiest secluded patrons of the premium deck were in full exodus, filling up the exit ramp as if disembarking a luxury cruise. By the time they were finished there would be nothing left up there to search.

“We sure did try,” Mollywald said as they reached the empty petting zoo and its entrenched stench of feathers, pellet food, and jackalope leavings. She checked her tires to see if she’d driven too far into the animals’ invisible restroom and gotten gunk in her grooves. She had, far too much to scoop out quickly, so instead she just stared at the sheer amount of it while slowly reversing. “I’m gonna get this in the car,” she sniffled. “The bigger car.”

“Don’t worry about that Molly. Hey, what if we rush the entrance? Everything’s choked up in there trying to leave. It’s the best chance we’ve got left.” The flower hummed her willingness, since words would’ve sounded too defeated. “Petal to the pedal to the metal then! Rush means rush!” He took off sprinting so she would have no choice but to put that D battery to the test. It whined behind him as he ran, pretending it was midnight and he weighed less than nothing.

Moving faster than everyone else created the illusion they weren’t yet leaving, one last glimpse of the market’s bustle, with most of its hustles snuffed. Everyone looked that special kind of tired that only occurs from too much shopping, their faces like worn sandal soles, arms limp, posture taking the rest of the day off. Unsold wares were shuffled box to box, some surprise wet corners of cardboard maligned with hissing swears. Rummy saw one last type of acorn getting scooped into one of those giant plastic bags that usually held popcorn: the exotic shaving brush acorn.

They found the crowd they were looking for, a foot traffic jam that would’ve been impenetrable even to an amorphous star jam. Mollywald skidded to a halt, spraying mud that rummy caught with his pant leg so it wouldn’t splash any of the patrons and embroil them in another incident. Having killed a man and bombed the marketplace they were probably on thin ice.

Rumraisin hoped, actively, before he lifted his Hengine and started scanning everyone’s backs and backpacks for any aura that might fit their target. Mollywald’s aura was green, like dancing leaves, and its like was nowhere to be found. Plenty of pockets had the purple coronas of magic-infused gems, the gold of charmed things that were hard to lose, the silver of slippery ones that were so easy to misplace that you could never be sure you actually owned them, and the fiery orange of doodads that would burst or break if you set them down wrong because they were enchanted on the cheap or amateurishly.

“Anything?” Mollywald asked, receiving no answer. More crowd settled in behind them, limiting their range of motion. Now they were being shuffled toward the ticket booth at a constant pace. If they passed it, the trip was over. Anticipating the pain of anticlimax, the agony of having to ride all the way back home with a Mollywald who was trying not to cry, Rumraisin did the only thing left to him, a spin.

A blur of green. He spun back as the people pushed, as Mollywald started and stopped to keep her pot between his rotating feet. There. A green circle, dancing leaves? A little too far to tell, but something rose above the crowd in that direction: a tent not yet taken down.

“I’ve got something!” he blurted, drawing eyes, hoping actively again, this time that people would think him strange enough to give him space to maneuver. No such luck. He tried to bend down to pick up Mollywald, and found he couldn’t do that either. “Stay between my feet,” he instructed her. “I’m cutting across.”

Doing so was definitely rude, but some of those offended did forgive him when he muttered apologies and justified it with on-the-spot adages about finding true love. Some of them had found it, and had used it to justify the kind of cutting that bled, so whatever this boy was up to couldn’t have been so bad. True love could break curses, get you backstage, make you forget you hated your job, and make cheap food taste better.

Both of them broke free of the trudging fatigued mass and recognized the tent as the first one they had entered the previous day, where Plumwine had purchased several items. Something his mother had said grew loud and faded in his memory, like a truck whizzing by. The witch had idly commented that there was something familiar about the old woman and her tent.

And it was familiar to Rumraisin too, he realized. The tent was dull army green. It was the same shade as the tarp over the back of the truck that they’d tried to pursue. Tent and tarp were one and the same, just with different shapes and underpinnings. That meant the aura his eyes were locked on through the hag stone was the same one they thought they’d lost. But the driver had been going to the CID-Knees after all.

Mollywald realized the same thing, squeaked repeatedly along with her tires as she fumbled with the controller she’d suddenly forgotten how to operate. Rummy saved time by scooping her up and whisking her into the tent, entering like a wrestler who’d suddenly lost sight of the person he hoped to grapple. The haggard vendor was right where they’d last seen her, seated with her back to a bundle of four posts that gave the tent its shape. It looked like she hadn’t moved, except she was packing a box of things that had been out of reach the last time they’d seen her.

“Did your mother want to pick something else up?” the woman asked them, at the threshold for her ability to remember passing faces. “I’m about to hit the dusty trail again.”

“You have an agricamphor!” Mollywald practically vomited, wiping pollen spittle from her lower lip.

“Have?” the vendor repeated, then snorted. “He lives where I live, if that’s what you mean.”

“He!?” Molly cried, voice straining safety belts that had never been tested. “There’s a man in here with us!?”

“Let me snag him.” Reaching behind her back, the woman lifted an old welcome mat draped over some crates that had formed a miniature fort within the tent, producing a pudgy vase with Inkan gladiators sacrificing part of their harvest to fictitious gods across its curve. Above that, sticking out of some musty redwood chips and sticks that might have once been cinnamon, was an agricamphor of a character so in contrast to Mollywald that Rummy wondered if it was a different subspecies.

He was clearly her elder, with longer creased leaves like on a cornstalk. The bumps across blooming face were much larger, eyes over two of them, putting his pupils at diverging angles. A silky mass around his mouth was somewhere between lichen and beard. The vendor placed him in her lap and snapped her fingers in front of his face several times to wake him from a nap that had lasted longer than the kind-of-long drive to the market and its entire duration.

“Hmm? And what dream is this?” he asked at the sight of a flabbergasted Mollywald, in a voice that wasn’t so old as his face, sounding like some of the silver foxes in Plumwine’s books on tape, his breath the crispy-crackle of a record player casting off fallen leaves.

“This dream is entitled… Mollywald,” the female agricamphor said sweetly, regaining composure with every word. “And your name, good sir?”

“Poppydopolous, transplanted from a hill at the tip of sunken Greece. Passenger on the Titans’ Ick. Americcan immigrant, naturalized by red wood bed. Regular listener of 107.7 ‘The School of Hard Knockin’ Boots’ rhythm and blues.”

“And most of that was forty years ago,” the vendor added with a cackle. “Now he’s too much of a sleepyhead to chat up the customers like he used to.”

“What customers? Ahahahaha!” Poppydopolous laughed, Mollywald joining in even louder. “Now then, why am I awake but not on the road?”

“Oh that’s because of me,” Molly said. Entire days of sitting in a quiet field memorizing different speeches for this moment had popped like bubbles. “I’m, well, look at us! Two peas in a pod haha! I’ve never met another one of us before, and so I went looking, and we found you! I was hoping you and I could, I mean, I don’t just have this pot. I have a whole field to myself. My friend Rummy here and his mom are squatting, but other than that it gets pretty lonely. It could be your field too. We could-“

“Hold your horses there Miss Mollywald,” Poppy urged her, brow suddenly burdened. “H, can we get some privacy?” he asked the vendor.

“A’course,” she said, reaching out one hand. Rummy gave Molly to her, and with surprising dexterity she wrapped her arms around both sides of the post bundle and deposited the agricamphors in the makeshift fort. “Let’s give them a minute.” Rummy nodded and watched as she busied herself with her packing. He offered to help, and was instructed that the pile of tiny bottles behind him, each filled with the sand of a different beach, could go in the barrel etched with dolphins and otters.

“So where did you and Mr. Poppydopolous meet?” he asked as he worked.

“Can’t recall where, I’ve picked up so many things over the years. “I’d buy all sorts at garden markets and plant them together just to see what would happen. He kept happening year after year and begged me to take him to the markets, since none of the vegetables were making decent conversation.

I was born to be a farmer, seeing as I don’t need a ladder to pick any fruit, and I don’t need to wait for it to drop either.”

“Huh?” Rummy turned and looked at her, saw someone who needed a step stool to wash their dishes.

“I’m sitting down kid,” she sort-of explained. “And this is standing up.” She reached over her head and pulled a loose end in the rope knot tying the tent’s bundled supports together. As soon as it fell away the four of them separated without falling, like the skeleton of an umbrella opening. The vendor was lifted off her seat. Rummy didn’t know if you actually could call it standing, as her feet were nowhere near the ground. Trouble was, he was looking at the wrong feet.

‘H’, as Poppy had called her, shook her shoulders as if trying to shake off gathered snow, then shook her four knees, not the two below her waist, but the four above. The motion threw off the whole of the tent, destroying the shop’s secluded atmosphere as the chilly damp air rushed in.

What had provided the tent’s structural skeleton had come to life, and now held H aloft by her back, between her shoulder blades. Like the color of the canvas, he now recognized her unusual parts from earlier encounters all over the market. They were the legs of a harvestman, scaled up of course. H was a hybrid, magical or otherwise, a state of affairs into which Rummy knew he shouldn’t pry, seeing as he was one himself. Ultimately he didn’t have to, as she noticed the way he ogled her spindly grandeur.

“These old things?” she said, pulling a giant leg closer and smacking it with the sound of a slapped bamboo pole. “You see, my father was a harvestman… and my mother was a harvestman! Ha!” Unlike her joints the joke never got old, keeping her laughing as she tipped over her barrels and rolled them in the direction of her truck with the tips of her tent poles.

The hunger artist had a real clue for him after all. Surely this double harvestman, this harvestman squared, this harvestman by way of harvestman, was the only creature in the CID-Knees who could be called the harvestman. The others were just harvestmen.

H couldn’t fly as well as he could, but he treated her the way he would’ve liked regardless, inquiring no further, simply accepting the reality of her magic and the magics that made her. There were barrels to roll while they waited; he pitched in some more. They left the fort alone as long as they could, with H only lifting its cover for a peek when everything else was in the bed of her truck.

“Come get your friend kid. We’re gettin’ outta here before the weather turns; I can feel it in my knees, and not just the ones as high as weather vanes.” Rummy did as she said, lifting Mollywald out by the pot. Her face was down, looking at a velvet drawstring pouch held in her leaves, and it was apparent from Poppydopolous’s similarly downcast expression that he would not be coming along.

“Molly, everything alright?” he asked softly.

“Mhmm,” her voice fluttered. “We can go now, please. Thank you Poppy, goodbye.” Once again Rummy did not stick his nose where it didn’t belong, especially since doing that with flower business usually earned you hay fever. The best he could do was get her to the safety of their car, which he did. Then he gave her the lacking safety of the seat belt and moments later they were off, leaving the College of Integrative Design and its raised stone knees behind.

“Awfully quiet back there,” Plumwine said, the first to speak once they were back in the interminable fields of corn and billboards that hadn’t had their biannual crow waste removal in five months. Rummy took the liberty of describing everything that happened that morning, skirting around any implications of what might have happened inside the mini fort, leaving an empty spot for Molly to jump in when she felt like it, to tell them both what was in the drawstring bag. “I knew something was familiar,” the witch muttered, snapping her fingers, having forgotten that gesture was involved in the casting of some of her car spells, causing the gas cap to pop off. Its own journey rolling home would be much longer than the windshield wiper’s.

“He didn’t want to come live with me,” Mollywald finally told them. She could cry. The car was the world, and no one in it would ever harm her. “He was a lot older than me, but I don’t care. I would’ve been loving. We could’ve been in love.”

“It sounds like he’s visited a lot of the world,” the witch said, “and he just wants what he’s already comfortable with now. You’ve still got so much life ahead of you Molly. He was looking out for you.”

“He gave me this,” the flower said, pulling open the pouch and looking inside, careful not to make the opening too wide. “It’s pollen. I can make seedlings… if I want to. Poppy doesn’t want us to die out either.” She made a sound like a tire indecisive on deflation. “I thought about this so much, but I never thought about only getting some of what I wanted.”

“That’s all we ever get Molly,” the witch somehow told both of them. “I wanted a lot more jam.”

Rummy thought about what he wanted, remembering who had saved them in their hour of need. He rolled down the window and stuck his Hengine out. When he pulled the battery compartment open the lightning bugs departed one by one, off to tell the fireflies and make them jealous all over again. Something else would burn.

Another adventure was on the horizon, and Rumraisin Knacklevern had his family, his Wintermix Puffins jacket, and his tape player right where he needed them. Somewhere in this sea of corn, in a maze of dead end plazas that weren’t quite malls, in the shadowy back of an electronics store guarded against power surges by a whittled thunder bird totem, sat a package of AAA batteries.

Having everything he needed for that journey gave him an idea that he quickly shared with Mollywald, which turned her mood a little toward the sun.

A few weeks later Pepparuchow was called in from mudding and gold panning, Leaver sliding along after her with a sparkling skirt of semiprecious silt. There was someone on the phone for her, or so she thought. After she kicked off her boots on the kitchen tile, ran across three different carpets, and flopped onto a bed that would bounce her as soon as Leaver jumped up too, she picked up the receiver expecting to hear Rummy’s or Molly’s voice.

Instead, just a frustrated sound, like a postman jamming an envelope into a mailbox. Even stranger, it wasn’t a sound passing through a phone, just a sound inside the phone. Ever the problem solver, Pepper unscrewed the round grate on the hearing end of the receiver only for it to pop off on its own once sufficiently loosened.

There was an envelope stuffed inside after all, jumping out and un-crinkling on the covers. It was addressed to her from Knackle’s Magic Tackle. Rummy’s family business was often by mail, and apparently there were a few ways to hurry that mail along with an encouraging or insistent spell. She tore it open and was rewarded with a very brief note and a single loose seed twice the size of a sunflower’s, spiral-striped candied gold and meadow green. She read.

To making new friends – Mollywald Knacklevern

And to growing them – Rumraisin Knacklevern

The End