NEWDIE STEADSLAW

Jum Burie stood at the duck pond in location alone and had height the pond’s peak could not claim, for she stood upon a bus—or rather, the dead body of a bus, bobbing morbidly in the fetid water, blinker fluid leaking into the juvenile sea. It looked to have been bitten three thousand times by a shark—or perhaps once by three thousand sharks—which meant... what? Oh, who cares? She was tired. She was too tired to be frustrated, but perhaps she could find the strength. Somehow.

“Nothing further from here?” said Tuberlone.

Jum Burie blunk and turned to Tuberlone. She slowly shook her head. “I saw no further.”

“Very well,” said Tuberlone. “Find someone and pick up the trail. There’s bound to be someone nearby.”

Jum Burie allowed some of her shoulders to sag. The weariness about her was growing momentarily. Tuberlone’s demands were surely meetable—but costly. So she lifted her head and said, “It’s tiring.”

“What, this again?” said Tuberlone. It cast skeptical looks over her. “That’s not a possibility. With your might? With your potential? Nothing can be tiring to you.”

Some birds took off from a tree over there; they were going to be late for bingo if they didn’t hurry.

“A strange comment,” said Jum Burie. “I thought you were counting on that.”

Tuberlone looked at her carefully with all of its eyes and perhaps wished it had some more. “Not I,” it said. “Jum. Your strength is endless. This is beyond doubt.”

“And yet,” said Jum Burie, “it tests me so.”

Where she stood to watch the water she made firm, and was like the tree’s mighty trunk following a branch-stripping winded storm, stood fast and unmovable. And Jum Burie’s arms hung limp at her side, for she did not need them and would not use them until she did. There was no branch-stripping winded storm currently, but a lazy breeze that came and ruffled her beautiful dress. The most beautiful dress in the land, of course, for the most beautiful lady in the land.

“And yet,” said Tuberlone, “you have passed every test sent your way. Nothing is greater than you. Nothing can overwhelm you.” Tuberlone—still not a goat with glasses—leaned toward Jum Burie, peering at her in examination, searching for signs of her waning strength. If it found any, however, it did not say. “Now, come,” is what it did say, and then, “and do your duty.”

Jum Burie said, “Fine.”

No one was around enough, so Tuberlone made to fetch some of them, and slapped the surface of the water with a frying pan, emitting a waving ripple—or a rippling wave—that emanated outward, a signal to all and sundry that may have cause to heed it. Shortly it was answered when a shark’s fin emerged and began to circle the bus, and then two sharks’ fins, and then ten, and then a hundred, and then a thousand, and then two thousand—but not one more. One of the three thousand sharks from before got called in to work, but the other nine hundred and ninety-nine unaccounted for were slain by the bus, their corpses obliterated by the strength of its blows, before it was slewn in turn.

Hector, still the leader of the sharks, now bearing new scars and mummesque bandages, said, “Wing wang wajumbo, fing fang facundo! Behold our handiwork in the ended bus! For that was merely a warm-up, and now we’re plenty hot and raring for more!”

Jum Burie said, “Tell me what became of the bus’s passengers.”

But the sharks were in a frenzy, a rage, and their best new vests. The idea of talking was not of them, you might say. Well, you probably wouldn’t say that—Roby might, that’s her style, but she’s not here—and besides, you probably wouldn’t expect sharks to be talkable in the first place, but if you haven’t gotten used to private relativity by now, I don’t know what to tell you. But forget talking—these sharks weren’t even in a listening mood, and so Jum Burie’s request went unheeded.

“Quickly is as does!” said Hector. “We’re battlers, not tattlers! So, have a jab and a stab and years of heartbreak, won’t you?” Now the sharks swam this way, and now they swam that way, and they each had a sword and a spear and an axe, and they reared up like warriors, and the sun glinted on their shiny skin, and the water ran down their skin in little rivulets, and they roared like beasts of old, and came to Jum Burie in a great charge, encircled her, and closed in on her in rings, so that she had no escape, and she made no move to escape, and so surely she would be as consumed as the—

The sun did not shine on Jum Burie, who stood in every light, but she had hair of gold and all of her eyes were pitch-black, and she stood taller than them, taller than they could ever reach, and she raised up all of her hands and held the sky and said in a voice heavy and wide, “You, begotten of the deep, lying at the deepest depths, liars of the deepest depths; you pale forms before me, traitors to hope, and sad misfires of destiny, listen now: your time is overspent, your name overspoke, and you appear only as relics and myths, as useless as love, as devout as hate.”

In the fields, where the drying sun shone upon waves of wheat and corn, golden in the light, unhewed by the wind, the farmers began to take in the harvest, marching in a drove, silently, their knowledge replete. Backbreaking work, they dreaded the labor, yet cherished it, and their hearts were light, for it was through this effort that sustenance would be won, the children fed, their plates and bellies filled—no fools they, not a complaint was uttered, and they put all their strength to the chore, both of which were considerable, and they made the duty done. And so it came to be that afterwards, when the great work was complete, they all gathered to celebrate, and toasted to their success, and praised one another’s virtue, and basked in the light that shone from tomorrow. No one spoke their secret, but let it lie, and stepped upon it on the path homeward, for there would be a tomorrow, one bought by their labor, and the reward it bore was labor evermore. The farmers returned to their work.

The sharks were dead—except for that one that had to go to work, so he was going to be in for a surprise when he got back—and Jum Burie stood with a cool ease. She did not break a sweat. There was a silence broken only by the soft sounds of water lapping over the bodies of the sharks. Tuberlone emerged and surveyed the event.

“Well done,” it said. “How do you feel?”

“Your concern is touching,” said Jum Burie. She was being sarcastic—she could be anything she wanted, after all.

“Presumably these sharks have seen something,” said Tuberlone. It looked upon the scene of the duck pond, the acreage of dead sharks floating around, untellable wounds upon and within them, their blood a secret to the gods that were never born. “There’s certainly enough of them.”

“I’m not eating them all,” said Jum Burie, turning toward Tuberlone.

“Eat as many as you need,” said Tuberlone.

“I’ll eat one,” said Jum Burie.

Tuberlone said, “And if we need more information—”

“I will eat one,” she repeated. She added nothing else to the comment.

Jum Burie stepped down from the bus toward its sunken end, where the dead corpse of Hector had drifted close, and she took it up into her hands and raised it up, and with her hands she took him apart, piece by piece, and therein found his brain—what little there was—and ground it up into dust, and put it into water and made a dough, and baked it as a loaf into bread, and when it was warmed and cooked she took it and ate it, and—

She ate and—

Ate and ate and ate and ate—

And the darkness came about me, the darkness came about me, the darkness of the deep, of the void, came over me, in me, and through me, and I became of it, and it became of me, became my breath, became me, and took me with its currents, and I swam in the deep, in the dark of the deep, alone in the deep, one with the deep, I am the deep, the deep is in me, of me, the deep is my breath. Alone in the dark of the deep with blood, the blood flowing into the deep, the blood tracing its path in the deep, the path to me, the path to the feast, and so I follow. Follow the blood of the deep and feast and eat and drink the blood and breathe the water. I am the deep. I will always be the deep. I will come to know the deep and be it, be all of it, come to be one with all of it. I am the paths of the deep, the paths of the deep, the currents of the darkness of the water, the paths of the rivers like roads networking like vessels of blood and the heart always pumping, pumping, the blood always flowing, flowing, and I flow with it, flow with the blood, seek the blood to feast, to eat, to drink, to breathe, always, one with the deep and the darkness and then there was light, waxing and waning, the light as cities rose and fell, as nations lived and died, as the roar came and went, I came and went, and went deep, into the darkness of the depths, the darkness of the void, away from light and sound and blood, the void became of me, filled me, and I drank it and breathed it, into the darkness of the deep. A wave comes. A wave comes. A wave comes and it lifts me and my darkness is gone and I have lost the deep and the breath in me has left, the light shines on me, the air soils me, the light and the noise that came took my breath from me, the blood of the feast is all around me but the breath is lost, I am lost from the deep dark void, I am lost and my breath—

My breath—

Her breath—

Jum Burie took a sharp deep breath and her pitch-black eyes snapped open and she came to lying half-submerged on the sinking bus, Tuberlone standing over her. Her hearts were racing. She sat up and breathed deeply, quickly, again and again.

“You’ve come back?” said Tuberlone.

Jum Burie didn’t say anything. She tried to slow her breath as the brackish water of the duck pond ran down her once-beautiful golden hair and her once-beautiful material-unspecified dress. Her racing hearts slowly calmed. Her breaths gradually slowed. She became herself again. She had passed another test.

“Jum?” said Tuberlone.

She turned to look at it.

“Ah. It’s you,” said Tuberlone.

“Of course it is,” said Jum Burie.

“It seemed you may have been lost,” said Tuberlone.

Jum Burie turned and gazed at the water, and sat there for a moment, saying nothing further to Tuberlone. This was a familiar place. The memories of the ancient shark’s long years were hers now. This place was her home. She had been killed by a stranger and lost everything.

“Well,” said Tuberlone, “if you can’t see the path—”

“I know this place,” said Jum Burie.

Tuberlone paused, not because it was shocked or anything, but if Jum was going to keep being like this, it would rather not humor her and just wait it out.

Jum Burie stood up slowly. She was no longer the stolid and immutable trunk she was once; she swayed like the highest boughs, gentle and unsteady.

“I have an idea,” said Jum Burie.

“Leave those to me,” said Tuberlone quickly.

Jum Burie turned to Tuberlone and gazed at it with all of her pitch-black eyes. She said, “No.”