Kellie Wells
That was the day when all previous knowledge became as antiquated as The Crone's sartorial taste. (How could you go wrong with a floor-length black wool skirt, an only slightly moth-nibbled shawl, and a knotted kerchief? the Crone wanted to know. Whether you were lurking menacingly at the periphery of a wedding, wailing at a funeral, traveling through a dark forest, stirring the cauldron, scrying the dismal future from a bowl of moonlit water, or divining imminent villainy from the slime trails of slugs, it was a versatile outfit perfect for any occasion). That was the day all previous knowledge, research, ideologies, longstanding theories, double-blind studies, widely disseminated wisdom, strong hunches, and empirical data went obsolete overnight, an epistemological apocalypse, which is just the brash and impetuous way obsolescence in those days worked (until it too became obsolete). The earth was not round, E no longer equaled mc², the medium was not the message. It would eventually be discovered that the earth was now shaped like a broken hammer, E equaled two flatulent mice, and ham sandwich was the message. The first person to notice all this was The Crone. This made her uneasy, accustomed as she was to floating invisibly through the streets or skulking subversively in the back alleys of life. She wondered if her senior discounts, which clerks sometimes doubled for her because of her beautifully molten appearance, would be lost inside this new physics. Pffft, it was always something.
The Crone had been working part time at the Feather Identification Lab, where she analyzed snarge, the remains of birds that could be found scattered on the ground after an Airbus had chewed its way through a flock. Although those crones who are avian shapeshifters harbor vocational affection for crows, buzzards, owls, and swans, crones of every stripe are well acquainted with all feathered creatures and can identify on sight the identity of a bird from a single plumulaceous barb. After the Day of Enveloping Irrelevance, however, birdstrikes were no longer the problem. Aerodynamics had shifted in such a way that birds began to walk everywhere, occupying every inch of available sidewalk, and crones were taking flight en masse, large flocks of them interfering with commercial aviation. While airplanes did continue to fly, they were only able to do so belly up, which meant passengers dangled from their seatbelts, making flight attendants more peevish and bringing the serving of in-flight beverages to an end. As for the flocks of crones that began nesting near airports and were seen defiantly circling air traffic control towers and occasionally colliding with jets, who better than The Crone to identify crone snarge: the decayed teeth, withered flesh, wiry chin hairs, and warts that were delivered to the lab every morning. "Oh yes," said The Crone as she passed a magnifying glass over the mangled evidence, "this is definitely crone in origin."
The scientists at the Feather Identification Lab suddenly busied themselves with the question of how best to deter the crones from nesting near major airports, going so far as to suggest spreading poisoned pickled herring in the enchanted woods that frequently surround them, to root out the problem at its source. The world had always been and would always be a place hostile to the very existence of hobbled old women, a tenacious bigotry that would survive, alongside cockroaches, the nuclear winter of any paradigmatic cataclysm. It was a wild and radical thing to be a crone, a defiant finger in the myopic eye of the world. "Hrrrgurmblefermp," grumbled The Crone sagely. Human beings, The Crone well knew, always needed to offer a sacrifice at the altar of their many yawning insecurities, and they had never forgiven women for so stubbornly persisting beyond their ability to expel—Pah!—human perpetuity from their loins. In this new physics, however, childbearing had shifted, wombs migrating to the feet of men, which began to balloon reproductively and necessitated the development of maternity sneakers. Men could now be seen kicking trees with panicked vigor, swinging golf clubs at the mass of cells teeing up on their toes, and shaking their feet violently as if trying to free them of a stubborn and strangely threatening sock.
It had been a month since the world went kerflooey, and on this particular day, The Crone discovered a new mole, always a pleasing discovery for a career crone, a sort of occupational validation. It was just above her sunken navel and she fingered it to try to determine the likelihood of it expanding and sprouting hairs—a girl could dream!—but when she did, her finger disappeared into her body up to the last knuckle. Curious, thought she, for she hadn't felt a thing, even when she joggled her finger. The Crone examined this, her favorite finger, the one she leveled at dimwitted children and used to extract plugs of snuff and the knots of silver hair that clogged the bathroom sink. It looked as it always did, hooked with joints beautifully knobbed, a rheumatoid constellation.
The Crone scratched her left dug, which is what crones do when they're thinking. She looked down and admired her breasts, which lay upon her belly like two seals lazily sunning on a rock, and she thought they were coming along quite nicely. Crones hang weights from their breasts so as to hasten their sagging, in the hopes of prompting the word "pendulous" or some smirking remark about gravity. A crone's tits are her emissary, swinging into a room before the rest of her, two dachshunds there to flush the badgers from their burrows. Crones, who take as much pride in their work as any other skilled laborer, don't want anyone thinking their breasts are pert or perky or ample or firm, shudder. I am nothing, thinks The Crone proudly, if not fibrocystic and flaccid! Those unfortunate crones-in-waiting, whose breasts refuse to properly dangle until they're well into their golden years, the late bloomers, well, there's just not much call for them, the 'tweens. A crone's baggy body has to be so carefully cultivated, and it's quite difficult to bring about the necessary curdling of the flesh upon which successful cronehood depends, but The Crone is so tumored with benign protuberances her body resembles nothing so much as a bag of marbles, a poorly made gravy, a warty gourd, or a boxer' s lumpy mug after a championship fight.
But back to that beautiful new blemish abloom on her belly. Upon closer inspection, she realized that she couldn't actually see it—she just sensed there was something there, something whose existence was not empirically verifiable, something like. . ..an excess, an absence, a vacuum, a portal? What was it, this not-thing that nested invisibly in the cooling magma of her abdomen? She made an appointment with her dermatologist, who had been such a help to her in the past, encouraging her to bathe in the sun when it was highest in the sky and prescribing for her a lotion with an SPF of -50, an essential liniment that drank in the ultraviolet light in a way that leathered her skin on contact.
In the new order of things, it turned out that all dermatology clinics were now staffed by cane toads, for whom The Crone had always harbored affection because of the lunatic manner in which they belched all their replies. There was a sign on the door of the clinic that expressly forbade licking the backs of the toads, which was a disappointment to The Crone, but she took it in stride.
"Halloo!" belched the toad.
The Crone parked her carcass on the waxy paper that covered the examination table, feeling a little like a dollop of dough soon to be baked, and she parted her gown to expose the invisible mole, beneath which she now felt a faint intestinal stirring.
"Hmmm! Hmmm! I see I see!" exclaimed the toad, staring at her belly through a dermatological loupe. "Oh my oh my, good gravy Marie!" burped the toad, and with that the light in the examination room began to swirl, like luminous paint in the throes of being mixed. It twisted into a funnel cloud, its spout drilling the air in the direction of The Crone, who was feeling vaguely woozy, and when the last particle of light had found its way into her belly, the fluorescents winked out with a decisive snap!
"Oh dear, oh dear," warbled the toad. "I believe I've lost my tapetum lucidum!" The Crone could hear the toad's amphibious feet groping the air in front of her. "My eyeshine!" croaked the toad, "I seem to have misplaced my eyeshine!" The Crone could feel the sticky toe pads of the toad touch her belly, and the toad whistled shrilly, sounding like a train just entering the station. "It is my professional opinion, madame, that you are in immediate need of. . .an astrophysicist! There is little that I, a humble dermatologist, can do for you. Gooddaygooddaygooddaygoodday," sang the toad as it bumped about and eventually leapt out of the darkened room. The Crone cradled her gut, which suddenly felt heavier and more burbly than it did even on tuna noodle casserole night, blargh!
Well well well, that was not quite as illuminating a visit as she'd hoped for. Nevertheless, it was more informative than the last visit she'd made to a doctor, a very general practitioner. She'd been feeling a bit vigorous and wanted to get that checked out, but the doctor, a tall and reedy man who breezed into the room with an impatient snort and whose salted hair was wavily coiffed in a way that suggested he secretly combed it at regular intervals, a man who had not been trained to see or speak to women, kept waving his hands in the air in front of him, in search of his patient. The Crone recited her complaints in as voluminous and stentorian a voice as she could muster, trying to sound worthy of diagnosis, and still the doctor groped his way around the well-lit room as though searching for a light switch. "Another no-show!" bellowed the doctor.
"Doctor! Doctor!" exclaimed the nurse. "She's right there before you!"
At which point The Crone walloped the good doctor upside the bean with her capacious handbag, in which she carried, for occasions such as this, a brick.
"Boof! Great blood and thunder!" blurted the doctor, giving his head a forceful shake, as if trying to rid it of dust or ignorance. "Why, there you are!" he cried, shoving a needle in her arm and an iron supplement down her gullet, and he flew from the room, lab coat flapping behind him, shouting, "Suffering cheeses! Neeeeext!" The nurse slapped a cotton ball and a Band-Aid on The Crone's arm and gave it an apologetic squeeze, then hurried after him. So it always went with doctors.
Hrrrmm, an astrophysicist, mused The Crone, perhaps that's just the ticket, and she turned to her familiar, a brown and white mottled Ancona chicken named Smudge, who roosted on her shoulder. Smudge clucked her approval into The Crone's ear, and The Crone made an appointment to see Dr. Bella Dellalightbender, preeminent star whisperer.
Dr. Dellalightbender stared out from behind rhinestone-studded glasses that winked in the fluorescent office light and thick lenses that magnified her dark eyes to a galactic circumference. The Crone admired her astigmatic gaze and the strands of silver tinseling her hair and considered recruiting her. The benefits package that accompanied cronehood had been reduced to peanuts in recent years, the 401k too paltry for the subsistence of even the most frugal retired crones, those who went without their medicinal shot of grappa in the morning and the occasional cheroot. This had depleted their ranks considerably, so The Crone was always headhunting new prospects.
Dr. Dellalightbender steadied The Crone in front of her. She asked her to disrobe and to point out the location of the suspicious mole. It took a while for The Crone to free herself of the woolen layers that concealed her body so handsomely lined with the many tributaries and distributaries of age. And when she pointed to the spot, an emptiness she could now feel taking on weight, her whole hand disappeared inside it, causing the lights in the room to flicker and her gut to rumble.
Dr. Dellalightbender bent closer to the gaping absence and peered into it one-eyed as though through a keyhole. "Aha, here's the culprit!" exclaimed the doctor. "There's a dwarf star dying inside you!" and she cackled with the delight of astronomical discovery. "Ohhhh, now that's a very intriguing density you have there beneath your navel. If I took a bit of your black hole and spooned it into a matchbox, that matchbox would weigh, why, more than a million Earths!" The Crone had been feeling a bit bloated of late and so had given up her evening potatoes, which she missed.
"And if you threw that matchbox between the sun and the Earth," said Dr. Dellalightbender winding up an imaginary pitch, "its unfathomable bulk would pull the Earth right out of its orbit, and. . ." Dr. Dellalightbender paused, then concluded her demonstration of a black hole's gluttony with a loud "Kapow!" causing Smudge, The Crone's most dependable appendage, to tighten her chicken claws on The Crone's bare shoulder. This in turn caused The Crone to jerk and stumble into the doctor, who then began to spin in a decidedly centripetal fashion. Uh-oh, thought The Crone, who was prone to vertigo in the presence of whirling things, even figure skaters on television. Dr. Dellalightbender's gyrations accelerated at a clip that caused Smudge to cluck nervously, and the doctor's blurred and whirring body flew apart atom by atom, eventually discernible only as twinkling particles of light, which the black hole at the center of The Crone swallowed in one thirsty gulp, grlllp.
So The Crone now had an ailing star on its last corona lodged in her kishkas, which might explain the burning dyspepsia that woke her at night. Additionally, she had an astrophysicist, spun to flinders, afloat in the interstellar mystery churning soundlessly inside her. Oof, what a day.
The Crone felt saddened at the thought of the star dying inside her, sad to think that she was the repository for light that loses its will to shine. And she felt bad about Dr. Dellalightbender, especially because she seemed to have possessed the chutzpah and osteoporotic potential necessary to become a crone's crone. Smudge pecked at The Crone's ear sympathetically.
As The Crone and Smudge creaked along the path toward home, The Crone cradled her gut, which was one astrophysicist heavier and felt like it. She peered up at the darkness gathering above the tree tops. The moon rose slowly and appeared near at hand, bloated and bilious with illumination, a super moon, a super duper moon, thought The Crone. That low-hanging, bright burning colossus looked as though it had gorged on light, the luminous glutton, and she thought she could hear it moaning regretfully. Smudge shifted her weight on The Crone's shoulder, and suddenly The Crone had the peculiar feeling that she was being followed. The Crone, invisible as she had once been, had crept silently behind many an unsuspecting mark and reached her bony mitts into their pockets, liberated them of their fat wallets, and never once had she been detected hovering at their heels, never once. But now she had the feeling that she was the followee rather than the follower, which she didn't care for at all.
One thing The Crone hadn't figured on was the way that crone cachet, something that had not existed before The Day of Irreversible Irrelevance, would skyrocket. Suddenly crones were being celebrated for their enduring wisdom, their stubborn refusal to give up the wizened ghost, their recipes for the perfect borscht, and for the many malodorous liniments with which they oiled their bodies' creaking hinges. There were festivals, roasts, monuments, week-long jamborees, commemorative coins, even a line of moth-eaten headscarves and frowzy frocks that were flying off the racks. It had made it difficult for The Crone to float through the world on the air stream of her invisibility as she once had. Even her colleagues at the Feather Identification Lab, who, at staff meetings, had had a habit of repeating, verbatim, what she'd just said, which only then caused others to nod appreciatively, even they had suddenly taken to leaving ingratiating bran muffins at her desk, and, ack, actually listening to her! Which meant she could no longer sing suggestive limericks at her cubicle:
There once was an insatiable crone
Who spoke in a throaty, hushed tone
She whispered desire
By the light of the fire
Then ravened the meat from the bone. Snort, snort.
Another covert pleasure stolen from her, rats!
The Crone tried not to look behind her, to tip her assailant, but she felt a tug in her abdomen and when the temperature of the air around her dropped to that of a meat locker, the cold creeping beneath her shawl and causing Smudge to shiver, and the earth quaked beneath the worn soles of her ancient shoes, The Crone couldn't help it: she turned on her heels, and there it was, good gravy Marie, the Moon! In all its frosty effulgence. It had fallen from the sky and sat shining at her with a look on its cratered face of what The Crone could only describe as adoration. This caused Smudge no small amount of unease, and she jumped from The Crone's shoulder and flapped at the Moon as scornfully as she could. Smudge was scrappy, took her charge as The Crone's familiar seriously, and she had no intention of letting a besotted celestial body knock her from her rightful perch, no siree bobwhite! The Moon rolled ever so slowly in the chicken's direction, and she squawked and disappeared between The Crone's legs. The Crone looked down to see Smudge's red-combed head peering out from under her skirts. She thought she heard the Moon panting, and then it sat back on its haunches, as if waiting for a pat on its glowing muzzle. Thunderation, this was all she needed, a giant orb mooning at her moonily with its moonstruck mug. She'd never be able to pick another pocket beneath the cold exposure of this spotlight. "Shoo! Shoo!" barked The Crone, and she snapped her skirts at it.
The Crone was no stranger to stray creatures, but the last critter she'd taken in, a wary sewer cat with a bent ear, had been stricken with the feline dropsy and had cost her a fortune in vet bills. The Crone thought she spotted a patch of mange on the Moon, nuts.
The Crone and Smudge stole down the less traveled paths of the forest, trying to give the Moon the slip, but it kept up, ambling along behind them, occasionally stopping to sniff a bit of rot.
When The Crone got back to her cabin, she wished she'd taken Baba Yaga's advice and built a house that could lift itself up on its giant chicken legs and hastily hightail it across the forest when it needed to scram. The Moon curled up on the stone path that led to the front door, and soon The Crone heard it begin to snore. The light shone so brightly through the windows that The Crone felt a little irradiated and was unable to get a wink of sleep. This made The Crone a little cranky, as sleep was something for which she'd always had a gift. The world suddenly made even less sense than it had the day before yesterday, and The Crone felt a bubbling chaos astir inside her belly.
The Crone's mother was a gnarled tuber she kept in a gold box on her nightstand, next to a bottle of grape Nehi, which was the only thing that slaked The Crone's 2 a.m. cotton mouth. When The Crone was a child, already beginning to perfect her hobbled gait, her mother warned her of the world's hostility, and she taught The Crone how to outpace it, like a hare that zigs then zags beyond the reach of the wildcat's snapping jaws. Her mother had not known, however, that the world would one day change overnight, the base metal of hostility suddenly transmuted into the most peculiar kind of gold, which has its own tariff.
The Crone took her mother from the box and cradled her in her palm. Since the Great Kerflooey, The Crone's mother had been pronounced, by fashion magazines across the globe, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, and so it was up to The Crone to protect her mother from the incessant snap-snap of the paparazzi. Here in the enchanted forest, her mother was safe from the prying eyes of nosy tabloids. Smudge hopped onto the bedstead and The Crone laid her mother on the pillow beside her. When her mother was a girl, she had spent most of her time nestled in the sweet smelling soil, but it had been a long time since she'd put down roots, and she missed the comfort of being in the cool, dark custody of the earth. The Crone could see her mother was in the grips of a fond nostalgia, and she detangled and combed her mother's long-shriveled rhizomes and tucked her beneath her cheek and fell asleep.
In the morning, The Crone slowly unlocked her sleep-stiffened limbs, sat upright, and tucked her mother back into her gold box. She couldn't tell the source of the light that limned her curtains and she decided not to look. Fate, a capable gumshoe, always knew where to find you. No need to meet it on an empty stomach, thought The Crone. Smudge hop-flapped to her shoulder and they headed to the kitchen.
She warmed her porridge then slopped it into the bowl, and she snapped on the small television that sat on her counter. There, on the TV, as every morning, sat the Dictator, the one who had replaced the previous dictator when the world went funny, that dictator a howling megalomaniac who repeated nonsensical phrases like a deranged parrot and who sported a bad comb-over that flopped to the wrong side of his head in the presence of airplanes. The succeeding Dictator was a blind rabbit who had, before the calamity, been subjected to laboratory tests by cosmetics companies. The current Dictator insisted on presiding over the morning newscast, lest ridiculous propaganda about the world being cruelty free be spread, and he comported himself with silent dignity, his long silken ears erect, looking dapper and statesmanlike in his blue suit and tie, blinking his cloudy red eyes. Beside him, a journalist sat reciting the previous day's many disturbances. The big news of the day was the tides, which had become erratic, sea levels rising and ebbing haphazardly, causing all manner of seafaring craft to veer wildly off-course and sea creatures to be spat unexpectedly onto shore. Then there were the wolves, who, grudgingly, had begun to howl at the sun. Also, a menstrual tsunami was tearing across the planet, blood pouring from every imaginable uterus, folks doubled over in pain "from here to maternity," quipped the newscaster, causing the Dictator to give him a disapproving sideways glance and a scornful twitch of the whiskers. The Crone clutched her own gut, in which her breakfast now sat like a stone. Digestion, thought The Crone, was becoming more trouble than it was worth, brrgurrbulblurp.
The Crone went out into the dooryard, and there in the same spot sat the Moon, who now leapt up and began racing around her, occasionally snuffling the clover and snapping at insects. A ground squirrel chittered and scrambled by, its tail as straight in the air as if it had been starched, and the Moon tore after it, looking a little like a comet, and when it lost sight of the squirrel, the Moon began to bay. "Great galloping grimalkins!" exclaimed The Crone. "You're a noisy piece of cheese!" And she shambled down the path toward work.
At the Feather Identification Lab, The Crone didn't want the Moon wandering off into traffic, so she found a bit of rope and hitched the Moon to a parking meter outside the front door. Passersby stopped to admire the Moon and ask about its pedigree, and she slapped their hands away when they tried to pet it.
In the office, The Crone asked around to see if anyone might be willing to foster the Moon until she could figure out what to do with it, but as much as her coworkers now wanted to win her favor, no one was willing to take in a creature whose infernal glowing might well augur distemper. The Crone had no idea how to treat a Moonbite. Were there shots for that?
Awaiting her in the lab were the remains from a particularly brutal cronestrike, a 747 having plowed through a large flock of crones on final approach. While the airplane made a safe, if wobbly, landing, the crones were not so fortunate. Spread out on the table in front of The Crone were, she immediately recognized, bibs and bobs of some of the most active members of the UCAW Local #189, the United Crone and Aged Workers Union, for which The Crone served as a rep. There was the foot of her friend Gladys, the kidney of Esmerelda, a set of dentures belonging to Beatriz, the lung of Mazuba, the left eye of Margaret, the lips of Alinoush spread out in front of her as if awaiting assembly. Yes, these were all croneparts, she confirmed, all members in good standing of Local 189. Smudge cluck-clucked and lowered her head solemnly to her feathered breast.
This made the black hole lodged in The Crone's abdomen burble uncomfortably, and she headed to the loo. In the bathroom, The Crone decided to inspect the roiling absence into which Dr. Dellalightbender had been drawn and which was now, she surmised, causing the Moon to trot along behind her so devotedly. She lifted her skirts and there it was, she could see, the glittering privation, an expanse of spacetime into which unsuspecting matter was drawn and from which it seemed little would likely ever escape, that expanse having a much stronger gravitational will than everything that surrounded it.
The Crone felt dejected, and as she and Smudge walked through the lab, her colleagues cocked their heads and smiled at her ruefully (except for Marcie in Accounting, who had an inexplicable fear of chickens), and this made The Crone feel like a rusty bucket of lead. Never before had she been visible enough to warrant the least bit of sympathy. It didn't suit her. And so here was the tally of her despair: her closest comrades, her bosom cronies, were spread out on the snarge table; she carried a corruption of spacetime in her loins; and the one scientist who could help her get to the bottom of the bottomless interstellar conundrum babbling soundlessly inside her was now at the bottom of said conundrum; and if that weren't predicament enough, she seemed to have inadvertently adopted a lonely and luminous stray that even the most humane shelter would likely close its doors to. She didn't like to kvetch—you didn't get to be where she was by sniveling at every unbudgeable jar lid and bursitic stab—but, well, this was an unparalleled pickle.
She trudged outside, and there sat the Moon, and when it saw her it went down on its front legs and waggled its behind, then lolloped excitedly around the parking meter, winding itself like a tetherball, until it ran out of rope and strained to reach her. She felt time contracting inside her, as time is sometimes wont to do, and already she missed that one billionth of a second. It had been her favorite. One day there would be no time to spare. She clutched her gut. It gave off light. The Moon bayed at her. Wolves appeared in a circle around them, then grunted and fell asleep.
The Crone felt pregnant with absence. It had always been The Crone's fate to be one step behind her own insubstantiality, like a child carrying an unwieldy bowl of water, but this was different, and it was this difference that The Crone knew she needed somehow to expel. And then she could return to being a collection of atoms imperceptible to those naked eyes she had previously capered so freely in front of. She bore down on the scrap of spacetime trapped inside her and breathed deliberately, Puuussshhh breathebreathe puuuussshhh! Nothing, bupkis, not even a fart. Smudge snoozed, her head tucked into her downy back, and the Moon sat luminously panting. Then The Crone felt something—was that a. . .kick? From. . .Dr. Dellalightbender? The Moon sat up and began to growl. That's it, thought The Crone, that's what I need, an ultrasound, of course! I must visit the Dictator!
After escaping from the products testing laboratory, the Dictator, then only a wounded hare down on his luck, wrote a memoir about his experience of being repeatedly subjected to the Draize eye test by a large cosmetics company. The book, entitled Long Draize Journey Into Night, detailed the many days the rabbit had stood pilloried with his eyes pinned open, the icepick ulcers on his corneas audibly sizzling. The book sold through its first printing in a matter of hours, making the rabbit an overnight sensation and a highly sought after speaker at rotary clubs and commencement ceremonies. This media attention and the income it afforded the rabbit allowed him to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming an obstetrician. On the day the laws of the universe went bananas, the rabbit was just about to head up the High Risk Obstetric Unit at Mercy General, and then, suddenly, in the blink of a cataclysm, he found himself installed as the dictatorial head of state, surrounded by people asking him foreign policy questions about remote, but geopolitically pivotal countries he'd never heard of. He'd blink then ask, "Do they allow animal testing?" exuding the sort of equanimity only a sightless red-eyed albino rabbit who had been subjected to unimaginable "irritancy procedures" and lived to speak of it can exude. He'd then launch into an impassioned screed, nose wildly atwitch, on the suffering he'd witnessed, cage after cage of it. Beauty, he pointed out, had a long history of also poisoning women, who had been encouraged, over the years, to slather their lips with rat poison and lengthen their lashes with coal tar. "This," concluded the rabbit as he blinked his hardboiled eyes and cocked his ears at an accusatory angle, "was of course back when the world. . .made sense." His closest advisors, portly men with creased necks, exchanged looks of vague alarm and sputtered, "Sir, we're hurtling toward certain catastrophe if we don't act quickly!" to which the Dictator responded, "How far apart are the contractions?"
The Crone decided she would steal away in the middle of the night, but no sooner had she picked her way silently across the cobblestone path leading into the forest than the Moon awoke with a snort and started gamboling behind her. This startled Smudge, who flew at the Moon feet first, clucking angrily. The Moon yelped and rolled on its back, and The Crone hissed at them both to behave. The Crone wondered if she threw a can of pennies at the moon if this might deter it from following them, but the Moon now had a droop-eared look about it and she decided just to wobble onward and ignore the silvery shadow she couldn't shake.
The Dictator's house was part of a complicated warren inhabited by other fugitives of toxicology, and a vast network of disabled rabbits limped by The Crone as she searched for the Dictator's address. Both the Moon and Smudge were discomfited to find themselves underground, and the Moon, gripped by claustrophobia, began to whimper and sweat beads of light. It contracted itself to the size of a soccer ball so that it could ooze along inside the tunnel, which was spacious enough, but no place for a celestial satellite, however elastic. The rabbits, many of them blind, nevertheless sensed the Moon's presence and stopped to waggle their noses as it passed. The Crone couldn't stop belching, and each time she burped, a cloud of light puffed from her lips.
Finally they located the Dictator's dwelling, and he invited them in, his long ears pointing the way with a rakish tilt. On the trek there, the Crone's gut had begun to burgeon under her shawl like a magic trick, and she hoisted herself with an oomph onto the examining table. "My, my, you're overdue," said the Dictator, rubbing his whiskers pensively. The Dictator parted the Crone's worsted layers and laid against her belly one of his ears, the silken tip tickling her nose. Smudge perched on the goose neck lamp next to the Crone, and the Moon attempted to hang in the corner but was struggling to contain its cramped girth. "Lamaze partner?" asked the rabbit as he nodded at the Moon, and the Crone sighed windily. "Well, let's see what we have here," said the Dictator, and he cocked the lamp, irrelevantly it seemed to The Crone, so that the light shined squarely on her abdomen, which was roiling now like an angry sack of snakes. Smudge gave the rabbit a wary side-eye then jumped to the ground, and The Crone belched a corona of light, which circled the Dictator's ears briefly before dispersing. The Moon trembled.
The Dictator squeezed a large dollop of gel onto The Crone's undulating abdomen and then strapped the transducer to his paw. He gently slid it across The Crone's belly, while aiming his sightless eyes at the monitor and clacking the keyboard. It reminded The Crone of the cashier at the old Milgrim's, whose left hand advanced the groceries with lightning dexterity while her right hand quickly keyed in the price. In between gestures she tucked renegade wisps back into the meringue of shellacked hair that frothed above her head and she never got a price wrong. She had a gravelly voice and a perennial sty, and children dared one another to steal candy cigarettes when they thought she wasn't looking.
"Oh, my!" exclaimed the Dictator as the monitor hummed then went black. A deep drumming sound ricocheted around the room, low frequency static, the interstellar lub-dub at the center of everything, and somehow the Crone realized that the black hole inside her was breech, resistant to being birthed, and she tried again to expel it, but no dice. Meanwhile, the Moon had also begun to pulse and throb at a superluminal velocity, and it split open like an egg sac and out poured hundreds of tiny moons, crawling everywhere, scrambling hastily toward the Crone, whose body lapped up the light like a kitten's tongue to cream. The Dictator dropped the wand and covered his eyes.
So the world is finally ending, thought the Crone. She had thought it would happen differently, a sonic blast sending everything sideways followed by a radiant exhalation that would incinerate the world, and she'd hoped she would be sitting in her favorite chair and swaddled in her black granny square afghan when it came, waggling her gnarled feet in the warmth of the fire, the world simply making good at last on the absence she had always been the very shape of. Her neverness come home to roost at last.
But this, this was no way to end things, with the universe sucked into the gravitational vortex whirring inside her. She had no ambition to be the Shepherdess of All Extinctions! She had a hard enough time managing the inquietude of her own gut; she could not be responsible for the rumbling Stomach of Everything.
The Dictator, the ultrasound machine, the gooseneck lamp, the crinkly paper on the exam table, all of it, the very atmosphere was folding itself into The Crone, but the deflated Moon drooped woozily in the corner, and the Crone summoned it to her. "Come, Moon, come," cooed The Crone, and the Moon obediently trotted toward her, or tried to, but there was a repelling force that pushed back against the Moon's diminished mass, and The Crone could feel the tides inside her shifting stormily, thrashing her shores. "Push, Moon, push!" bellowed The Crone, and Smudge got between the Moon and what was left of the wall and pushed against it with her yellow feet, pushpushpush, until finally the room filled with the interstellar gas that wells up in the nuclei of galaxies, and the moon began to spiral, spiral, whirling itself into a silver helix. Into The Crone the Moon went, and as it did jets of luminous particles blasted from her, and there was the World, magnificent, dazzling, ugly and cruel, an insatiable spectacle of being, the great storm of it raining around her as The Crone flew backwards through the air like an unknotted balloon, and out popped. . .Dr. Dellalightbender! Still myopic, glasses askew, but intact, mouth gaping, wildly agog. The Crone could see that the dark and dreamless time the astrophysicist had spent groping around in the cosmic murk of the black hole had been professionally instructive. As The Crone flew ass-over-teakettle through the darkness dotted with light, she restored the world as it had been before the Great Quantum Muddle, spraying the chewed-up snarge of existence, no worse for wear, back into its pocket of the ether. And when the world was reconstituted enough to bear her weight, here she would again be as unseeable as those things passing before the savaged gaze of the obstetric rabbit. And this was the Here where she would once more dodder through the world, kicking the shins of its benign indifference, Smudge perched pluckily upon her shoulder, and pick the bulging pockets of greedy men.
In memory of Zach Doss