Walter knew from the dog’s expression that something was amiss. 

      It was the way the dog tilted her head, with eyes half shut, and that rolling bit of flesh dangling from her forehead that gave it away. The last time she had given Walter this look was the day his wife left him. That was almost a year ago. She'd driven off in her brother's orange van, and over the next six months managed to take from Walter the house, the Toyota, and Walter's collection of novelty candies: the Razmatans, Gorgeous Dave’s, and his favorite, the Wheeled Kentucky. The Wheeled Kentucky, or WK, consisted of chocolate, peanut butter, a strawberry paste, and bits of puffed rice in such trace amounts that many on the discontinued candy web forums claimed it didn't exist. Even the American president - he of the same hue as the brother in law’s van - had added his voice to the issue. It was that same morning that the Chinese government had at last admitted to its role in the previous year's “moon debacle,” (pronounced “dee-back-uhl” by the American president), when he Tweeted out the following: “WK must come out with truth about puffed rice or face consequences! Unfair!” 

Note: the moon debacle was a failed attempt to rid the moon of an indigenous populating that, it turned out, did not exist. How nearly five thousand Chinese and Russian military personnel ended up casualties of the operation may very well never be answered, though rumors persist.

Subnote: most people believed it was the result of too much celebrating after the Chino/Russo coalition won a record fifth term for the aging American President. They had been drinking heavily, the story went, and someone decided he needed to go to the balcony for some fresh air, forgetting he wasn't in his hometown, Parishev. The man opened the door, heard an unusual whooshing sound, thought, “Oh no,” and was sucked into the vast emptiness of space, along with everyone else in the room, who were also thinking, “Oh no.” “Classic Vlad!” someone joked, but by then he too was flying off in the general direction of Neptune, holding a bottle of Schnapps.

Sub-sub note: that story probably isn't true. 

      Walter's wife got everything - everything, that is, except the dog, Spartacus, and because of this Walter felt he'd won, and he was happy. 

      Happy, that is to say, for a middle-aged divorcee who is now living with his father and younger brother in the two-bedroom house he'd grown up in during that time of pandemic, dust, fruit flies, and bleak winters. During those sad winters all anyone seemed motivated to do was make plans to move somewhere, anywhere, as long as they didn't have to deal with all these brown months of summer, months that were - in those days - measured not by the rise and fall of the sun, but by the time it took for one Netflix true-crime series to end and another begin. 

      Walter was not a fan of true crime, though he had started his writing career with a series of detective stories featuring a jaded former detective, now private investigator James Earlbrand, and all the appropriate cliches were evident:

      “Don't test me, Chief! You don't know how far I'll go!”

     “You're a loose canon!”

     “I've got nothing to lose!”

     “He doesn't play by the rules.”

     “That's what makes him the best.”

     If nothing else, this collection of detective novels, short stories, graphic novels, and the whisper (though not a realization) of a limited television series brought him some notoriety, and enough money to quit his job and commit full-time to writing. Even now, on occasion, someone would approach him and ask if he was the guy who wrote “all those wonderful James Earlbrand stories,” and he'd tip his hat - or mine tipping his hat if he wasn't wearing one - and say “Guilty as charged,” which would send the person into paroxysms of glee because here again was another of the cliches that filled the pages of his stories. 

    “They could have met Shakespeare and exchanged lines from Hamlet and they would have been equally as ecstatic,” Walter would tell his former wife, aware, but not thinking that irony was wasted on her.

      So he obliged them their little moments. They could go home and tell their family members and friends they'd just met an obscure but moderately successful writer (“That's what I want on my gravestone!” he'd tell his wife, but, alas, irony.) and for a moment they'd be happy. Walter could give them that. 

      “What's up, Spartacus?” Walter asked the dog. 

      The dog walked to the open door and looked outside. Walter followed and together they watched the sky. 

      If you could take the currents of the ocean and paint each one with a thousand distinct colors, then watch them dance around each other, that's what the sky looked like just then, he'd say. “It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. There was magic in it, and life.” Others would report other changes: changes in temperature, humidity, and the strangest feeling that something was pressing down on them. Walter felt none of this, just the impression that wild, unrestrained beauty leaves on you. Some people thought it was the end of the world. 

      Meanwhile, his phone kept buzzing, notifying him again and again that the president, whom he didn't know and never would know, needed to tell him something of utmost importance. 

      Walter took his phone out of his pocket and began reading the Tweets:

      “Bacon on pizza? Yes!!!!! Pineapple - no way!!! Boycott Hawaii!!! Boooo!”

     “Cheesy crust. Yayyyyy! Washington and Lincoln VERY happy with meltiness of cheese. Looking down on greatest president (me) and wish they were as good as me!!!”

     He put his phone away, though the buzzing continued - Yayyyy! - because ignoring the president's Tweets became unconstitutional twelve years ago when he realized that only nine people were following him. The rest had either grown bored with it or had committed suicide. 

      Walter's younger brother Matthew was now standing next to him. “Would you look at that,” he said. It was neither a question nor an exclamation, so Walter didn't know how to respond. “I've never seen anything like that before.”

     This may well have been the mark of their relationship. As a writer, Walter's job was clarity. Sure, there was plenty of room for ambiguity and interpretation, but at the end of the day readers understood what Walter's characters were after. 

      Private investigator James Earlbrand, for example, wanted to find the bad guys - the kidnappers, thieves, murders, the bad cops, the adulterous husbands - and yes, he also wanted forgiveness for having led then-rookie Scotty McCain into an ambush that left Scotty’s wife a widow and their unborn child fatherless. James would leave anonymous gifts - money, flowers, lotto tickets - at the widow's door. The wife knew who left the gifts - of course she did - because she was clever, and because James always left them on the anniversary of the ambush. 

      Also, James’ long-suffering secretary (“Personal assistant,” she would insist) was not-so-secretly in love with him, though she was half his age and beautiful. They of course end up marrying each other, but not until the series has run its course. Before finalizing the last draft of the last novel, Walter had - as he would describe it in interviews - “gone off the reservation” (an inflammatory faux pax that would have made the president giddy had he not been giving his full attention to golf and pizza) and written a scene where Scotty McCain burst through the church doors and massacred everyone in the room Tarantino-style. 

      The point is, Walter understood his characters. They wore the illusion of depth and complexity, in the way a movie like The Matrix is deep and complex if you're seventeen, but were really fairly simple people going through life the best they could. They would eat and sleep, have general views on good and evil, they'd have two or three bones in their closets, they'd fall in and out of love, and then they would disappear forever, either through death or those magical words “the end.” 

      Matthew, not being one of Walter's characters, was more a mystery. Matthew had never been married, seemed entirely uninterested, if not unaware, of the possibility, and yet he drew to him crowds of beautiful women the way some people draw greeting cards. Have you met these people? Greeting cards by the dozens from people they probably don't even know. Walter suspected they sent them to themselves. “I'm so overcome with happiness,” they would announce upon the arrival of the day's mail and another two or three hundred yellow, blue, and pink envelopes. “When will I find the time to open them all?”

      These are the kinds of people James Earlbrand would find murdered in pool hall bathrooms and hourly motels. 

      In fact, Matthew did make several appearances in his brother's detective stories. A character known only as Snitch appeared in about a third of the stories, though he was a fan favorite who served as both comic relief and an easy way to move the plot along when things were dragging. Snitch “collected broads,” his friends would say, because isn't that exactly what the friends of someone called “Snitch” would say? And while we're at it, isn't a guy called “Snitch” just the guy a bunch of drug-dealing gang-bangers hang with? Apparently the drug-dealing gang bangers in these stories had a better grasp of irony than did Walter's wife. 

      Walter didn't intentionally make Matthew and Snitch the same person. In fact, it took some convincing to get Walter to see what to Matthew was obvious: the physical description was the same: thin, blond, natural with a surfboard or skateboard, even at thirty. They had the same taste in women, and their romantic relationships were equally transitional. Snitch had a successful older brother who taught English at the local state college. Walter didn't buy the comparisons until Matthew pointed out the eternity tattoo on Snitch’s forearm, the same tattoo Matthew had gotten in a buddy's garage when he was in high school. Walter had forgotten about Snitch’s tattoo, but he couldn't argue with his brother given this evidence. 

      The fact that Snitch, an unintentional version of his little brother, turned up so rarely and was such a fan favorite probably gave him much to think about concerning his relationship with Matthew. But mostly it just irritated him, because he knew that two or three superficial similarities does not account for the enormous depth of what it really is to be a living thing. “We are oceans,” he once told an audience at a book reading of his most successful series of books - The Cottage Series - “but we trick ourselves into thinking we are puddles. Why do we do this?”

     He looked around the room of middle-aged women, his most rabid and vocal fan base. They stared back with hope and confusion in their eyes. They hadn't come for the lament of the unfulfilled artist; they'd come to hear about Carolina, the heroine of Walter's Cottage books. They wanted to be reassured that she hadn't really died upon the heaths in sight of her childhood home. 

     “I can see the cottages from here,” she said, imagining the ghosts of her childhood living that old, mundane life that had been taken from her all those years ago. 

​

      Carolina was a happy child, and adventurous. Her school teachers called her  Little Devil, that she would Never Amount to Anything. She was the Product of Whoring, they'd tell her, though this wasn't true. Her parents had loved each other, but war had taken so many of the men in town, and Carolina’s mother was left husbandless. Eventually, after a series of poor choices and even poorer relationships, she died of heartbreak, as is so often the case. 

      Carolina went to live with her blind and kindly grandfather, who, even if he wanted (which he didn't, because he adored his granddaughter), couldn't control her wild ways. One day, Carolina comes home from school, sees several men running away from her house, and finds her grandfather on the floor unconscious. He dies, and poor Carolina, free-spirited and untamed, is alone in the world. The town that refuses to tolerate her doesn't know what to do with her. 

      This is when a mysterious stranger arrives - a man in black, a Dark Magician - and immediately charms the townspeople with false promises and shallow charisma. He tells stories about the dreaded Other, who lives “over there, on the other side, just beyond where you can't quite see.” Other had his Eye focused on them, though he never explained why. He didn't have to. War had come, as had Plague, Famine, and Contention. They had seen it all up close, seen loved ones devoured - they'd seen it with their own eyes, hadn't they? So how much convincing did the Dark Magician have to do? Not much. And eventually they were handing everything over to the Dark Magician, even Carolina, who saw through the lies and charisma - no, that's not entirely right. She didn't “see through it” because she didn't believe there was anything there to begin with. He was, quite literally, the manifestation of the town's fears and insecurities. He was the creation of their collective imagination, but unfortunately not the bright, popping imagination of someone like Carolina. 

      What to do, then, with someone like Carolina, lacking family, who fit in to this place like a rose blooming among ashes?

      In the end, it was decided, after careful thought and thorough review, that the only logical solution was to give Carolina to the Dark Magician, that he, because of his great care for them and knowledge of Other - of Other’s lurkings and scheming, even now - that he was most qualified and able to properly raise the child, whom the town had taken to refer to as, simply, The Girl, in a way that attempted to abbreviate her entire existence into two convenient syllables. Even her origins were shoveled out of memory, her parents and grandfather forgotten, and she became something that had appeared from nowhere - yesterday, last week - and had to be dealt with. The Girl would go live with the Magician, and somehow then everything would be okay.  

     

That is where the first book ended. It came in at just under two-hundred-and-fifty pages, and though Walter's fan base that took such comfort in the predictability and stability of his detective stories, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. And though Walter would never reach the Olympian heights of a Stephen King, Dan Brown, or JK Rowling, his Cottage stories would elevate him high enough that the words “respectable,” “known,” and even “formidable” could reasonably be applied to him. He was the answer to trivia questions and the guest of honor where adoring crowds of thirty or even forty people would show up. He was the you-know-him?-oh-yeah-I-know-that-guy guy who seems to live in every American town. He was simultaneously a nobody and a somebody, never quite famous, but not unknown either.

     “The world is definitely coming to an end,” said Matthew. They were still looking at the sky from the front door.

     “Well,” said Walter, as if it wasn’t the first time.

     “Probably the Russians,” said Matthew.

     “Or the Chinese.”

     “You’re probably right.” 

     “I’d prefer the Russians,” said Matthew.

     “Why’s that?”

     “I don’t know,” said Matthew. “Seems like they’d kill you more reasonably.”

     “Less painfully, you mean?”

     “Don’t get me wrong,” said Matthew. “It wouldn’t be pleasant either way.

They’ve both had centuries to figure out how they’re going to kill everyone.”

     “Why the Russians, then?” Walter asked.

     “Because they’d all be drunk, I suppose,” said Matthew. 

     “Wouldn’t that be worse? I mean, if they’re aiming for an organ, they could miss. Things could go very wrong very quickly.”

     “They always do,” said Matthew, taking several steps into the front yard.

     “Well,” said Walter.

     “Well,” said his brother. “It is what it is,” repeating the phrase that had become the National Motto a decade ago. The National Logo was an image of the president in front of a church holding a Bible over his head with the words “It is what it is!” in papyrus font at the top. If you look closely you can see a spot of red on the Bible from when the president used it to bludgeon children moments before the photo was taken. 

    “We’re all going to die, I suppose,” said Bruce, Walter and Matthew’s father. He had emerged from his room for the first time in days. He pushed by Walter and stood near Matthew.

     “Why do we always jump first to death, anyway?” asked Matthew.

     “Don’t forget alien abduction.” 

     “You forget your cane?” Matthew asked his father.

     “What cane?” Then, “What do you think it could be?”

     “Walt thinks it’s Russians,” said Matthew.

     “I didn’t say that.”

     “Walt always thinks it’s the Russians.”

     “Do I?”

     “You know it’s true, son,” said Bruce. “Only last week when that woman cut you off in the dairy aisle you blamed it on the Russian conspiracy.”

Walter had no memory of this, but he didn’t see the point in arguing, so he said,      “That’s true. The Russian conspiracy.” 

     “Which Russian conspiracy is that, Dad?” Matthew asked.

     “Doesn’t matter, son. Let’s just hope whatever this is” - he said this while waving his hand around at the sky - “isn’t part of it. Otherwise we’re in real trouble. Like you wouldn’t believe.”

     “It’s probably nothing,” said Walter. “Just something with the weather.”

     Matthew and Bruce looked at Walter as if he’d told them he appreciated some of the more nuanced points argued by the flat-earth society. “Something with the weather?” said Bruce. “How long did it take you to formulate that hypothesis?”

     Walter thought about this. “Not long,” he said.

     “Have you ever seen anything like this in your life?” asked Matthew.

     “Well.”

     “Clearly,” said Bruce, “there is something much greater at play here than ‘something with the weather.’ I’m not saying, for example, it’s extra terrestrial, or even supernatural. But the instincts I developed working for the government - ”

     “The mail service, Dad?”

     Bruce looked at Matthew, then at Walter. He pointed a finger at his son. “There are stories, Walter, I wish I could share with you.”

     “Don’t do it, Dad.”

     “No! Because I can’t! Don’t ‘mail service’ me, son. I have stories. Stories!” 

     “You’re a paradox wrapped in a mystery, Dad,” said Walter.

     “I don’t know what you’re playing at,” Bruce shouted.

     “He’s just teasing you, Dad,” said Matthew. 

     Bruce looked at Matthew, at Walter, then at Matthew again. “This is the work of the government,” he said. “This has ‘military’ written all over it. They’ve moved beyond chem trails. Now they really have figured out how to control the weather.”

     “Why would they want to control the weather?” Walter asked, as if he hadn’t heard all this before. 

     “Any number of reasons. Mind control, for one. Ozone and oxides. It’s all part of the master plan. It’s been going on for thousands of years. They all knew about it.”

     “Who knew about it?” asked Walter.

     “All of them. Michelangelo, Darwin, Socrates, Plato, De Vince, Galileo, even Shakespeare - all the biggies!”

     Walter and Matthew looked at each other with exasperation.

     Bruce saw his boys looking hopelessly at each other, and knew he was the cause of their peevish reaction. “Fine, fine, don’t believe me,” he said. “The world burns and all anyone wants to do is Tweet about how rolled ice cream has changed them.”

     “It certainly has changed me,” said Walter.

     Matthew shook his head at his older brother. He said, “It’s not that we don’t believe you, Dad.”

     “It’s that we think you’re crazy,” said Walter.

     They both looked at Walter.

     “Sorry,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. “Kidding.” 

     “It is what it is,” Matthew said to his dad. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”

     Bruce was pacing the front lawn. He’d shed ten years in his frustration, and new energy vitalized him. Then he stopped. His gaze was fixed on something far away.

     “What, Dad, what?” asked Matthew.

     “Did you boys see that?”

     They were looking where he was looking. “No. What?” said Walter.

     There was a long silence while they glared at the horizon. “I swear,” said Bruce, taking several steps back toward the house, “when the world is ending my two boys are gonna be laughing at cat memes and arguing how to pronounce ‘gif.’”

Matthew followed his father, and when he passed his brother, Walter said, “No we won’t. It’s a hard gee, right? Gif.”

 

Carolina was fifteen when the emperor’s nephew and his entourage of more than a hundred announced they would spend the coming summer in their town. Summers here were known for their long days, moderate temperatures, and scarcity of rain. It had been the traditional summer dwelling of past emperors, but that era ended generations ago, and no one of true royal blood had visited since William the Eighth, and he had died there after having contracted rabies from a vampire bat.      This might explain why no one had returned for so long. 

     But here again was a member of the royal family, called Charles the Handsome, twenty years old, tall with curly blond hair, blue eyes, and engaged to the youngest daughter of the king and queen of Prussia, called Margareet. Being the youngest daughter, Margareet had no hopes - or at least she was told - of ever attaining the crown. She was, however, the most beautiful of the five daughters, the most ambitious, and wherever she went adoring crowds followed. 

     The Dark Magician knew the town was not equipped to host Charles the Handsome (or for that matter, Charles the Dull, Charles the Boorish, or even Charles the Extraordinarily Average - note: none of these were real names, but the people they described were real. That epithets were so common among members of the royal household, it was only natural the practice would filter down to such notables as William the Flatulent, Andrew the Noncommittal, and Barnaby the please-put-on-some-pants-you’re-embarrassing-your-children). So he brought in slaves from the surrounding territories and had them erect a massive hall they named Herot in memory of the famous mead hall from the Beowulf epic, an arena for sporting events, and lodging. Having slaves do most of the work seemed like a grand idea to the Magician, but he quickly realized forced human labor brings a litany of headaches he hadn’t foreseen. For one, it turned out that people didn’t particularly enjoy being told what to do all the time, especially by those who claimed to own them. Second, they too had to eat and sleep from time to time. And though they didn’t require the same quality food or lodging as Charles the Handsome would when he eventually arrived, it was pretty annoying nevertheless.

     “Can’t we just work them ‘til they die, then bring in new ones to replace them?” mused the Dark Magician one day.

     “No, we cannot,” said Carolina, who did not like the idea of slavery one bit, even at the young age of fifteen. 

     It was the finality of her “no, we cannot” that gave the Magician pause. It was spoken with such confidence and, dare we say, aplomb, that ideas began to form in his mind. Call it Destiny, call it Fate, call it Luck, but not one second had passed after Carolina spoke her famous “no, we cannot” that the Dark Magician strode into his foreman’s workroom - his second in command, his cohort, his le sous-fifre - and summarily dismissed him. “You gotta go!” he announced, inviting Carolina into the inner-sanctum that had never before allowed anyone below the level of a fishmonger, let alone a woman. The men there were appalled - and yes a bit titillated - by her presence, but too afraid of the Dark Magician to argue. They would wait until he wasn’t around to harass and undermine her efforts, no matter how reasonable. “She’s in charge,” the Dark Magician informed them.

     “Of what?”

     “Everything. You lot are too stupid to get anything done by yourselves. Listen to Carolina. She knows what to do.”

     Carolina, sometimes referred to now as the “no-we-cannot girl,”  tried to tell him that she had no idea what to do, that a mistake had been made, but with everyone staring at her - they assumed she had brought cakes - she remained silent. 

     That she had no choice in the slavery matter would haunt her for the rest of her life. Of course it did. Walter was all-too aware how readers would judge her had she not been horrified to her very bones by slavery. And though she did her best to provide food, water, and comfortable sleeping arrangements using the argument that the only way they’d get the best work out of them was to make them as comfortable and happy as possible. She forced herself to use the word “happy,” feeling the absurdity of it even as she said it, but by now she understood the Magician well enough to know that sometimes he heard you only if you said the most outlandishly stupid things, like, “The slaves will be happy and they will like you more if you …” etc. etc. 

     The weeks passed and the infrastructure slowly came together one plank, one beam, one platform at a time. The Magician was pleased as he watched the progress with young Carolina at his side, like a conductor orchestrating the hundreds of pieces that worked together like a symphony - the builders, then the athletes who would compete in the arena, the performers - actors, fools, acrobats - who would entertain in the hall, the cooks, servants, and in the shadowy corners the prostitutes and thieves, though Walter, being somewhat conscious of his audience’s modern sensibilities, did his best to give at least a hint of dignity to the former. 

Littered in amongst all this planning and building and anticipation of the royal arrival, were the usual subplots: Carolina growing more beautiful and desirable by the day, her strength and independence of spirit causing so many around her to either love or loathe her, the teasing of potential long-lost family members arriving from faraway and unknown lands, her friendships with various slaves and the self-loathing that inevitably fosters, her longing for her parents and grandfather, and finally - and this will come as a surprise to no one - the arrival of the royal sycophants, the meeting between Charles the Handsome, the Magician, Carolina, and Margareet, who watches her betrothed, whom she loves only for his proximity to the throne, and how he looks at the orphan girl not as if she belongs to him, but oddly enough, as if he belongs to her.  

     Coming in at just over three hundred pages, book two in the Cottage series doesn’t have a great deal going for it in terms of plot and conflict. But it does push the larger plot along, and it provides in Margareet a foil for Carolina that will remain with her for the next several decades of her life. Both women are beautiful and attract men - for better or worse, usually worse - wherever they go. Both are strong and independent, fierce even. But where Carolina never defines her place in the world by societal confines and norms, Margareet is paralyzed by them. Carolina, no matter how dark her world may turn, will always find joy in the moment; Margareet, on the other hand, feels trapped, tortured, and hopeless. The world has given Margareet everything she could ever want, except for one thing: the capacity to appreciate it.

     When Margareet dies in book nine after being impaled by a harpoon, readers will mourn her. She has terrorized Carolina, nearly killed her many times over, but will, paradoxically, be a friend, an almost-sister. In fact, of the many relationships Carolina would have during her life - romantic or otherwise - her relationship with Margareet might just be the most important. 

 

The three men had been sharing Matthew’s pickup truck since Walter’s separation, but recently the two brothers decided it was time their father gave up his driving license. It wasn’t the old cliche that he was keen on driving into ditches, but that he drove in ditches, resulting in monthly visits to the Chinese-speaking mechanic twins they quickly started referring to as “alignment guy” and “axle guy.” Bruce just liked to drive at a forty-five degree angle, they’d tell the men, who didn’t mind the business, but slowly began to suspect some trick was being played, one they wouldn’t understand until immigration - even though they were full and legal citizens of the United States - came to take them away.

     Bruce was sitting in the truck, pathetically, and his sons, who were watching him, almost felt sorry for him. “It must be hard,” Matthew said. Spartacus was there too, and she let out a low growl, almost a moan, as if she too felt Bruce’s loss of independence. 

     “He’s crazy, you know,” said Walter.

     “No one’s arguing that point.”

     “Well,” said Walter, “he might.” He gestured toward their father with his coffee cup.

     As if his son’s gesture was what granted him permission, suddenly Bruce had started the truck and was peeling out of the driveway. It took the boys a moment to catch up to the reality of what was happening. They patted their pockets for keys that weren’t there, then looked at each other astonished, and ran after the truck that was already half a block ahead of them.  

    Walter turned around and ran back to the house, but Matthew kept running. He was five years younger than Walter, and in much better shape. Matthew took some pride in this, and was imagining himself telling the story and how Walter couldn’t hack it and had to go home, when Walter raced past him on his bicycle. The bike had probably been built during the American Civil War, with a steel frame that rivaled the girth of the Titanic, with one fixed gear that was comfortable only when you were riding at about forty miles per hour. 

     Walter sped on, keeping both wheels out of the ditch, following the trail of dust his father was creating with the truck. 

This is the end of part one; stay tuned for part two