Twenty-three Small Disasters

We are the middle children of the maker's many generations. The mud children of the first generation lurk below the porch, mostly, mumbling to one another, plotting coups with the frogs and snails and spiders, who prove to be an unruly army. They make occasional, sporadic forays toward the house, but they never get much farther than the screened-in porch, leaving smears of mud on the metal mesh. The mud children never learned to work hooks and eyes and sliding bolts and latches, and they are eternally frustrated, worrying over torrential rains that loosen their substance, worrying over droughts that leave them brittle and cracked. And the maker never even looks at them anymore; he can barely be bothered to scrape them off his boots when he comes in from the shed.

Our generation stays in the kitchen, close to where we were made, always ready to hop back into the oven if we're feeling soft and bloated with moisture, willing to touch one another up with dollops of frosting, to repair a decayed eye or crumbling button. We sometimes gather late at night, when the master sleeps, and pour over his cookbooks, trying to determine all the secret ingredients of our substance: ginger, cinnamon, brown sugar, molasses, flour, salt, water, eggs, heat. Somehow the maker mixed us, and cut us into little shapes—simplifications of his image —and baked us in heat, and brought us to life.

We try to reproduce his efforts, but the results are lifeless, just cookies, half-burned, no spark of life.

Sometimes the maker eats us, and sometimes he feeds us to his friends. He never talks to us anymore. We are divided on the issue: is being eaten by the maker an honor, or something to be ashamed of? We sometimes nibble on each other, just the extremities, but we do not like the taste.

The new generation lives outside, in the shed, behind wooden walls, and we hear the whine of saws, the hiss of blowtorches, the clang of metal, the thud of hammers. The maker is building bigger children now, and we hear them groaning in the night, half-made things trying to come awake.

We think they might be giants. Perhaps they have wheels, or wings, or grinding jaws. The maker comes in tired, later each night, pouring a glass of milk, occasionally, absently, snapping one of us in half and chewing thoughtfully. The mud children mutter under the floorboards.

Some of us suggest going to the porch, opening the door, letting the mud children in. Just to see what they'll do, we say. Some of us suggest taking knives from the butcher block on the counter and creeping into the maker's room at night, and then those suggestions trail off into things unsaid. A few suggest eating the maker. Those last are heretics.

We put them in the oven, and turn the heat as high as we can, and wait until they become ashes. We are simple people. We are only the middle generation. But still, we are men.

Tim Pratt's fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories: 2005, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places. His first novel, Mythopoeic Award-nominee The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, was published last year, and his next novel, Blood Engines, is forthcoming. He has been nominated for a Nebula Award, and for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. More about Tim at http://www.sff.net/people/timpratt