There were things that didn’t fit, but a lot of things did. And as I say, it passed the time.
There was one question to which I couldn’t supposition an answer: what could be done about it?
6
I got to know my fellow prisoners a bit, but because we stayed locked in our cells, it wasn’t possible to cultivate what you’d call meaningful relationships. Fremmy and Stooks were the comedy duo, although they were more amused by their wit （or what passed for it） than anyone else, including me. Dommy was big, but he had that graveyard cough, which got worse when he was lying down. The other black guy, Tom, was much smaller. He had a fantastic singing voice, but only Eris could sweet-talk him into using it. One of his ballads told a story I knew. It was about a little girl who went to visit her grandmother only to find a wolf wearing Nana’s nightgown. The “Little Red Riding Hood” I remembered had a happy ending, but Tom’s version ended with a bleak rhyme: She ran but was caught, all her struggles went for naught.
In Deep Maleen, happy endings seemed to be in short supply.
By the third day I was beginning to understand the true meaning of stir crazy. My dungeon colleagues might have been whole ones, but they weren’t exactly MENSA candidates. Jaya seemed bright enough, and there was a fellow named Jackah who knew a seemingly inexhaustible supply of riddles, but otherwise their talk was desultory prattle.
I did pushups to keep the blood flowing, and squat thrusts, and ran in place.
“Look at the little prince, showing off,” Eye said once. Iota was a shithead, but I’d developed a liking for him nevertheless. In some ways he reminded me of my long-gone pal Bertie Bird. Like the Bird Man, Iota was right out front with his shithead-edness, and besides, I’ve always had admiration for good trash-talkers. Iota wasn’t the best I’d ever known, but he wasn’t bad, and although I was still your basic short-timer, I enjoyed winding him up.
“Look at this, Eye,” I said, and raised my palms-down hands to my chest. My knees smacked them. “Let’s see you do that.”
“And strain something? Pull a muscle? Give myself a rupture? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Then you could run away from me when the Fair One comes.”
“Not going to be one,” I said. “Thirty-one’s all there’s going to be. Flight Killer’s all out of whole people. Let’s see you do this!” I raised my hands almost to chin level and kept slapping them with my knees. My endorphins, although weary, rose to the challenge. A little, anyway.
“You keep doing that, you’ll tear your ass in two,” Bernd said. He was the oldest of us, mostly bald. What little hair he had left was gray.
That made me laugh and I had to stop. Hamey was lying on his pallet and chuckling.
“There’ll be thirty-two,” Eye said. “If we don’t get another one soon, they’ll stick in Red Molly. She’ll make thirty-two. Bitch’ll come back from Cratchy soon enough, and Flight Killer won’t want to wait much longer for his entertainment.”
“Not her!” Fremmy said.
“Don’t ever say her!” Stooks cried. They wore identical looks of alarm.
“I do say it.” Eye jumped up on the bars of his cell again and began shaking them. It was his preferred mode of exercise. “Whole, ain’t she? Although that great galoopin’ mother of hers fell out of the ugly tree and scraped her fuckin face all the way down.”
“Wait,” I said. A horrible idea had come to me. “You’re not going to tell me her mother is…”
“Hana,” Hamey said. “Her who guards the sundial and the treasury. Although if you got to the sundial, she must be slacking off on the job. Flight Killer won’t like that.”
I hardly paid attention. That Hana had a daughter was amazing to me, mostly because I couldn’t begin to imagine who had lain with her to produce offspring.
“Is Red Molly a… you know, a giant?”
“Not like her mother,” Ammit said from down the corridor. “But she big. She go Cratchy to see her kin. Land of the giants, you know. She come back and snap you like a piece of kindling if she get a hold on you. Not me. I fast. She slow. Here’s one Jackah don’t know: I’m tall when I’m young, short when I’m old. What am I?”
“A candle,” Jackah said. “Everyone knows that one, dummy.”
I spoke without thinking. “Here comes a candle to light you to bed. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.”
Silence. Then Eye said, “High gods, where did you ever hear that?”