“The Whittic,” called the master hunter to his assembled class, “is, quite easily, the most cunning of our prey. It knows nothing of up or down, and knows even less of left and right.”

Several of the older boys smirked, then with girlish giggles ran off to the woods. No doubt they went off in search of Brine Merchant’s Lost Tray-sure.

“Better still,” laughed the hunter at their escape, “more truth for the rest of us.”

There was little amusement at this level of education, but the students indulged their elding better with feigned laughter and remembered smiles.

“As I was saying,” the hunter said, “what the Whittic knows, the only one thing that it has in its narrow skull, is what you intend, and then, only what to do in reverse of that action.”

Now it was the youngest members of the gathering that made off for the woods, boys and girls, all given up to the school in the same year—five back from that year known here and now.

-This is wrong and you know it.

—Come again?

-Don’t give me that.

—I’m sorry. I really don’t get what’s happening here.

-Really?

—Yeah.

-OK, I’ll give it to you straight.

—Go on.

-There are dogs near here, lost ones with fondled tags, long gone, gotten off to something like three by now.

—What?

-Kings are found beneath the sage-like meadowbrushes, just outside the walking woundermills, broken astoniships of the old order.

-O! I remember them.

—Yeah. Well, I guess we’re not so different after all, and an all to the all to the hall of the long broken Dahl, roalding down these waskervilles in endless efforts to escape those feeding eyes.

-Feeding?

—Yes, in that one claims the absence of desire for such invasions.

-Invasions?

—Indeed, invasions of the privacy of the lord and lady and son gonemighty.

-O.

—So, one claims a detest for such intrusions, yet, althewhile, demands them for the providence of bread and the proliferation of more and from which the more bread now grows, less expensive when balanced against the approaching inevitability.

So, as I was saying: “The Whittic, to speak its name is to violate a trust, to challenge a bond made in the sleep of visions. To call any vision out, to place it naked before the uninitiated, is to castrate the image once seen, to change divine to scene.

Personal and delvonic truth becomes ghosts when thrust into the harsh light of words.

But the bodies they found that night, violent and broken in a single expression of their frozen muscle and skin, were the bodies of the captain’s children and wife. They wheeled them out, one-by-one, and not one of us cried; not Travis, who seen the truth of them knifes; not Meg, the recipient of three of them wilkhife snaps; not even me, and anyone who’s been knowing me’s been knowing I cry like I was built for nothing more.

And when I dug them graves, one for the hunter and another for each of his cubs, I gave a bunch of thought to them things I’d done. I wondered if old Jack remembered the first session before he turned around and down into himself, till he got lost in the easy pull of the endless pills. There was one for every color of now, which was as good as any old buried tray-sure. Why, it was better than any of that from where I’m standing. Can’t say I regret a minute of it, not an ounce of what I done.

“Stop tape,” the recordist called.

That was the last he heard of it until he got his copy of the magazine. It got ferreted in by some insides, the sort that could never get enough of knowing that they’d helped him. But none of them felt the same when he cracked out of there. They never got the letters they’d hoped, nor the calls he’d promised. In time, they were just one more lost memory of the television and the radio.

“Which was among the saddest of your bits to date.”

“Yeah, call again Hazel [beat] when you’re dead.”

The bartender poured their drinks.

“See,” the accountant said, “that’s why I listen to those guys.”

And that’s how we all knew it was true, because it made him so uncomfortable, so red, that it couldn’t have been false.

Timestamp: 10.21.06 at 04:34 PM. Filed under: Fiction.