Joss is a fussy baby. Look: he’s fussing right now. Quietly so far, but don’t worry, he’ll escalate. This in spite of the fact that he’s already on his tummy in his favorite sleep spot. No, not the Pediatric-Superintelligence-approved smart crib with aquarium-themed mobile, carefully designed for optimal cognitive development. The doggy bed on the floor next to it.
Vida is an asweep toddler. Sprawled on her back on her floor mattress. Blanket crumpled at the foot of the bed. Her shirt tossed in the corner, where the shirts go. You can almost see the little z’s floating out of her open mouth. Her overnight diaper is swollen with pee, but there’s no damp spot on the sheets. Thank Mod for that.
My knees and ankles are sore. Makes sense, I did just walk twenty entire feet to get from my bed to the doorway of the kids’ room. The floor is cold under my bare feet. I used to keep slippers next to the bed. Those were nice. One day Vida decided they were “too spooky shoes,” and she cried until I threw them away.
The front door of the house slams shut. I manage not to jump. It’s the night au pair, leaving for the day, like she does at 6am every morning. 6am feels like it keeps getting earlier and earlier, somehow. It might help if I went to sleep before midnight.
Of course, the au pair’s the only reason I get any sleep at all with two kids under 3. We don’t have the friendliest working relationship though. I can still hear her talons, clawing at my door. Her shrill voice, croaking its accusations. “Stop cowering in bed, Vir Boransky. I know you’re awake. Come be a man and care for your warmblooded nestlings. I cannot be late to my yoga class again.”
A shiver runs down my whole body. At least she’s cheap.
Joss lets out a brief cry, somewhere between a squawk and a yawp. Vida shifts in her sleep, like a warning shot across the bow. It’d be nice if one of these mornings I could skip the part where I stand here in the half-lit doorway, watching one or both of my kids get gradually more unhappy, dreading how hard everything’s going to be. Maybe tomorrow.
I pad silently over to Joss. Blow a kiss to Vida. Bend over, pick him up, get one hand under his ribs, grab his pacifier.
“Good morning, Baby Baby.” Baby Baby doesn’t reply. Unless spitting out his pacifier counts.
I put the pacifier back in his mouth several times as we head away from the bedroom wing, leaving Vida still asleep. Eventually he spits it out with some force, and I bobble the catch. It lands on the hasn’t-exactly-been-cleaned-this-month kitchen floor. We have like twenty other pacifiers. It’s fine.
I hoist baby Joss onto my shoulder in the sack-of-potatoes carry. Open the freezer. Grab a bag of frozen bio-milk. Put the bag in a bowl. Turn on the hot water. Put the bowl under the stream of hot water. He’s totally safe being held like this, in case you were wondering. I’ve got one arm pinning his chubby little legs to my chest. Lets me take care of morning tasks with both hands, as long as I can get away with T-Rex-arming it.
Milk is going. I take Baby Baby to the living room, stepping over stuffed unicorns, snack food wrappers, and piles of toddler clothing that could neither be called truly dirty nor truly clean. I move a basket of unfolded laundry off the ottoman and set him down there. Which is totally safe, because he’s a tiny baby. He hasn’t even figured out how to roll over yet. That milestone’s not till four months. So as long as I don’t leave him here for, oh, eight weeks, we’re in the clear.
Joss tries to wriggle away, but he mostly manages to make grumpy faces. A sense of foreboding passes over me, one that I recognize from back in my P.I. days, when I’d have to open up the back of a serial killer’s van. Holding my breath and forcing myself not to look away, I take off the baby’s diaper. There’s no poop. No poop, ladies and gentlemen. We might just make it through the day after all.
I throw away the old diaper. Get out a new diaper. Grab him by the ankles with one hand. Lift his legs and his butt off the ottoman. Slide the new diaper under him with the other hand. Fasten it on both sides. Set him back down. Then I leave him to his ineffectual squirming and go to the bathroom myself.
Look, when you’re good at something, it feels simple. That’s just how it is. If you’re some kind of, I don’t know, Olympic athlete, you don’t just land your triple-axels — you make them look easy. When you’ve got the chops to back it up, you get to safely ignore the limitless, excruciating detail of reality.
Like when I’m investigating a case. The boring parts of reality politely get out of the way. I try to do something, like follow a lead, and I just do it. I don’t walk into the precinct and think “alright Vir, let’s go over the loose ends so far — oh wait, first things first, pull up the notes — no, actually I’ve gotta log into my terminal — well let’s just start with pressing one key at a time, okay?”
Because investigating a case is something I know how to do. Taking care of a baby? Jury’s still out on that one.
I sit on the toilet and do a little doomscrolling on my palm. Lot of new dooms today, so that’s nice. One thread has a prophecy betting market for some hyperwizard getting divorced by the end of the month. Said hyperwizard shows up in the comments and throws some flames around — metaphorically, people — and then drops ten thousand arcana bucks on prophecy resolves false. The kicker: Mrs. Hyperwizard posts a screenshot laying 175k arcana on prophecy resolves true.
I smirk and go to tap the lol button. But I hear a thump. Then a pause. Then absolute, ear-piercing DEFCON 1 screams.
“Shit.”
I rush through the absolute minimum hygiene steps to consider myself sanitary, then I round the corner into the living room at slightly less than a dead sprint. The ottoman is babyless. The basket of laundry on the floor, however, has a pair of chubby legs thrashing around in it sticking straight up.
I swoop Joss up into my arms and get his wrinkly red screamey-deemey face rightside up. “Shh, shh, poor bee, shh, I’m so sorry Baby Baby, I’m so sorry.” He keeps up his staccato “waugh! waugh! waugh!” screaming right into my face, which I think we can all agree I completely deserve.
With perfect, just-what-I-needed timing, in toddles the pitter-pattering little Vida. Seeing my frantic, red-handed rocking and shooshing of her fallen brother, she gives me a long slow blink. Then she tugs on her diaper and says “offff.”
With as much gentleness as I can muster while making myself heard over Joss’s clarion cries, I say, “I’m helping the baby right now Vida, so I’m going to have to ask you to wait.”
Possibly that was the wrong thing to say. Vida collapses forward onto her face and bangs her head against the hardwood floor once, twice, three times a lady. She holds a hand to her head and looks at me, her brow wroth with pain and betrayal.
“Mama?”
Oh boy. Not good. Now I’m fighting a war on two fronts. Joss has his crying turned up to eleven and is basically doing the baby equivalent of calling CPS on me. Vida has taken her own precious forehead hostage and is making demands that I can’t meet. I can see her face slowly crumpling from super mad to super sad.
I’ve only got one shot to salvage this situation. I go down on one knee, so I can get on Vida’s level. I blow a big puff of air in Joss’s face, triggering his completely real baby interrupt reflex. In the brief moment of startled baby silence, I look into Vida’s eyes and speak straight from my heart.
“Mama and I love you so much, Veeby Deeby. As soon as —”
Vida doesn’t even let me finish my sentence before she wails and breaks down into a full-on sobstorm.
Joss fires up his distress siren again with a “waugh! waugh! waugh!”
I completely lose it and let out a primal scream that echoes crazily off the walls and ceilings.
It’s not even 6:30.
Young kids aren’t easy, but they are simple.
We all fall into a cuddle puddle on the floor and have a good cry. I get Vida’s unicorn videos up on her display. I tuck Joss up against my chest in the carrier and feed him his milk. Vida asks for “crackey,” and I get her a bowl of crackers. Baby Baby falls asleep. Neither of them holds a grudge against me.
The day’s hopes and ambitions are borne by the whiteboard on the wall above Vida’s toddler desk:
Groceries. Trash. V bath, J bath, shower. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Go outside. Call appliance repair, call electrician, call handybird, call grocery/trash-bot re: mystery bill. Figure out V activities… forest fairy school? montessori something something? sports ball? WORK ON COLD CASE.
Wow. The sheer audacity of our dreams takes my breath away.
I skip breakfast. Whatever. I get the groceries, trash, and both baths done. Which is about what I expected to manage on the day, so I feel like not a complete and total failure.
I almost get to eat lunch. Really, I get this close. I give my chicken carbonara order to the Rambo voice assistant, he calls up a food drone, I get a verification code pop up on my palm. But right before I can seal the deal, Joss spits up an entire stomach’s worth of milk onto my pants / the floor / Vida’s prized build-a-unicorn blocks. Somehow, I never quite get back around to the chicken carbonara.
Vida gradually slumps over for her nap, lulled to sleep by unicorn high schooler toy commercials. I slip a pair of undies on her and lay her to bed in the kids room. Joss stares at the ceiling fan going around and around. I gently rock his bouncer with a toe. I can feel it. Now’s my chance. The cold case may be at the bottom of the priority list, but it is in all caps.
I pull the case file off the top of my dresser, out from under a stack of board books with torn-up covers. Vida enjoys ripping. I enjoy picking my battles. It works out. I sit on the couch and lay out the papers in my lap. Joss squdges up his face and blinks off to sleep in the bouncer.
This case was last checked out of the archive two months ago, by one “Vr Brnskuy” if you’re going by the signature. Before that, it was some eighteen years since the case last saw the light of day. The signature for that checkout belongs to Frank Crippleton. Helluva guy. A real hothead, but loyal and dedicated as anybody.
Frank worked this case from every angle when it was fresh. I was on the private side of public service back then, nosing my way in to the investigation to see if I could make a name for myself or make a buck. I watched as the trail went cold, and Frank got more and more desperate, until he was hauling in vacuum robots for obstruction of justice and waving lead pipes at mimes to make them talk. That’s about when they pulled him off the case.
No one else in the precinct has ever wanted to touch the thing. Too many unanswered questions, no ticking clock. There’s always plenty of work that’s more urgent, and less likely to get people calling you “Crazy Crippleton” behind your back.
The day before I went on leave, Frank slipped the file onto my desk with a note. “Some light reading, in case fatherhood is too boring for ya.”
I flip through the old notes. It was a headline-grabbing case. A book of short stories popped up in stores around the city, hot off the vanity presses. Dirty Dozen it was called, by Icarus K. Death. Twelve stories, each featuring a different quote-unquote unnatural citizen of Fusion City meeting a gruesome end at the hands of the sadistic antihero narrator. Featuring such lovely titles as “Half the Elf He Used to Be,” “Arachnocide,” and “Slime to Kill.”
A real amateur-hour noir-horror collection, with sales numbers to match. Probably a few stoners picked it up by mistake. I think an indie ragazine published a 2-star review. Then – as you might have guessed –
A raucous fart escapes from Joss’s butt. He scrunches his face and wriggles like a pinned worm, and another wet, elephantine squirt sounds out. “Potty check! Time for a potty check!” I sweep the case notes into a pile and hoist Joss up by the armpits. By the time I get him on the ottoman and undo his diaper, his baby downstairs area is swimming in orange-yellow liquid. It brings me right back to all those serial killer vans I opened up back in the day. Sheer carnage.
I wipe him up. Throw the diaper and wipes in the trash. Wipe up the further spurt of nigh-aerosolized baby poop that he shoots onto the ottoman. Hold him over the mini-potty, mostly so I can say I tried. But he refuses to go for it. Joss’s powder is spent.
Having thus shat himself awake, Baby Baby realizes that he could use some more milk, and burping, and walking around, and a pacifier, and a swaddle. He runs out the clock for big sis, who wakes up, crying, in unpleasantly damp undies. Through her preferred communication medium of head-banging, she requests new undies, and cuddles, and storytime, and unicorn videos.
The killings in the short stories started coming true. Is the thing I was going to say.
Dinner for me ends up being a bottle of soylentil and a multi-course selection of toddler leftovers: stale corn chips, several half-melted pieces of chocolate, most of a bowl of crackey, and an apple with a single bite taken out of it.
Vida puts big flower stickers on the wall and scribbles on them with her markers. Joss does some hard time on his tummy, pushing up his head and collapsing back to the blanket. The household enters the evening lull.
A better man than I would take this opportunity to take another crack at the cold case. I consider it, at least. Mull it over in the back of my mind. Meanwhile, the front of my mind watches a video feed of squirrels misjudging their jump and slapping face first into the wall. Classic.
“Icarus K. Death,” whoever the bastard is, put twelve victims on ice. They deserve justice. The half-elf from “Half the Elf He Used to Be” was a semi-famous jazz organist. The spider alien from “Arachnocide” had like a hundred and fifty grandkids. The sentient slime mold from “Slime to Kill” had a softcore porn operation that got put on permanent hiatus. They weren’t human, but who gives a shit. They were still people.
Are still people, actually. I said they got put on ice, and that’s exactly where they are: on ice, at minus 196 degrees, in the Implausibly Massive Mausoleum for the Temporarily Deceased. Between Fusion City’s googolbyte-scale server farms, mature neuro-nano-biotech, and always-on, totally-non-Orwellian soul-scanning magic, it’s pretty much impossible for someone here to die for good. You could get blown to pieces at an illegal fireworks-and-ball-bearings factory at noon, and be back home eating potato dumplings and kung pow chicken by dinnertime.
But they do have a murder loophole on the books. If you get killed intentionally, they store away your body and mind pattern in the Implausoleum, like a collector’s edition bobblehead. You don’t get out until your killer is apprehended by the proper authorities and proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Or at least till everybody’s like “oh yeah, that guy totally did it, what else is on.”
Why? Some people decided it’s a slippery slope from letting you respawn after you get stabbed to turning the whole city into a never-ending sci-fi/fantasy first-person shooter. The police unions and the organized criminals banded together to make the #KeepMurderBad hashtag happen. At that point it was a done deal.
Every other detective is treating this case like it’s radioactive. Except for Frank, who’d go well past lovable-loose-cannon into fireable-insubordination-offense if he got caught working it again. So it’s on me. If I solve the case, the big claw machine in the sky plucks twelve dead people out of the ice and plops them back into their lives. They get to play the organ again. See their grandkids. Dust off their softcore porn business.
But I’ve been dealing with two kids under three all day and I’m friggin’ exhausted. So I watch squirrels jumping into walls. And get Vida a sippy cup of “wawa.” And change Joss’s diaper. And get out Vida’s backup tablet when her display runs out of battery. And look over to make sure Joss is still breathing. And clean up the spill when Vida pries the lid off her sippy cup. And find Joss a new pacifier. And comfort both of them when Vida runs over to give me a hug but trips, steps on Joss’s arm, and bonks her skull into my nose.
I love my kids. I feel like that comes through, e.g. in that I’m willing to listen to children’s songs on a permanent loop, or that I spend all my waking hours keeping them alive, or that I’m willing to live with them at all, frankly.
I also love when 10pm rolls around and the au pair shows back up to take them away. She peers down her spectacles at Vida and Joss still playing in the living room, and ruffles her neck feathers. “Loaded up the fruit of your loins with sugary snacks and blue light again, Vir Boransky? Didn’t bother dressing either one for bed, I see. What would their mother think to see the squalor you keep them in?”
I stand up without responding, and walk directly to my bedroom, undeterred by the sound of Vida violently attempting to break out of the au pair’s grasp and come after me. “Love you Baby Baby, love you Veeby Deeby.” I lock the door behind me, and let the au pair earn her keep. The old coot.
I lay in the empty king size bed, earplugs in, white noise machine going. I try to ignore the phantom newborn cries that I hear anyway. I stare at the ceiling, my pattern-seeking ape brain making constellations in the popcorn treatment. Saber-toothed tiger. Frowny face. Dead body.
My guts churn out a tense, twisted feeling that I eventually peg as inadequacy. I obsess about Joss and Vida until I feel guilty about the cold case. Then I obsess about the cold case until I feel guilty about Joss and Vida. My mind spins, and slips gears, and tries to visually map out the connections between the cold case victims on the popcorn ceiling, and ends up singing “Baby Quark” instead.
What kind of guy exclusively goes after things he’s not cut out for?
It’s 12:55 by the clock before I fall asleep.
It’s Sunday. The one day every week when we leave the house. Ideally, we would get out every day. Go out on a lovely walk to the park, maybe. Get some fresh air, pick some flowers, guess whether some weird animal we see is magical or made by mad science.
But before we set foot outside our front door, we have to get ready. Which means packing up the diaper bag. And pulling together an outfit for Joss. And convincing Vida to abandon her toys and videos for an unknown length of time. And getting the kids buckled into the mega-stroller.
All of which pales in comparison to getting undies on Vida. And pants, and a shirt, and socks, and shoes. And a hat, if it’s cold. The difficulty of each of these steps ranges, depending on her mood, from “hold still, almost got it, gah!” to “I will defy your human ‘clothing’ with every fiber of my being until the sun burns down to ashes, Father.”
So it’s mostly just Sundays when we get out. There’s a weekly dads group down at the carpet warehouse that went out of business after the owner had a profound spiritual experience and realized that nobody really likes carpet.
An ancient gray microfiber sectional wraps around three walls of the meeting room. Five dads and six kiddos are either sitting on it or crawling around in the center, as per their inclination. I give a little sorry-we’re-late wave. Everybody just smiles. They know how it is.
Vida lets go of my hand and runs to the knee-high table in the corner with the pile of runestones on it. Her nose starts running immediately from the runestones’ EasyStack aura — she has magic allergies, the poor kid.
Joss transfers quite happily to his bouncer, and ogles the overhead light silently. This passtime of his never made sense to me, until I stared at the light with him one day. It clicked when I realized that the light fixture is kind of shaped like a boob.
I look over, and sitting across from me on the other side of the sectional is none other than Detective Frank Crippleton. Wearing a white undershirt with baggy gray sweatpants and bouncing a purple baby octopus in an eight-holed diaper on one knee. I’m only like 80% taken by surprise. He’d said they were thinking about adopting, and I’d even mentioned this dads group to him before I went on leave. I make a mental note to corner him after the meetup and pry out whatever secrets he’s been keeping from me. Like Octobaby’s name, for instance.
“Anyway like I was saying, the missus is completely entitled to her hobbies. Completely entitled. But she can’t just dash off to the edge of the rim on no notice — no notice! — because her racing centaur broke a leg or whatever. She knows I have a real job to go to, and yet she leaves me completely alone, holding the bag on this thing.”
Frank raises up the baby octopus away from him like its a small, strange ritual sacrifice. One of its tentacles whips around and gets a sucker onto his cheek. He peels it away with a pop and a look of absolute martyrdom.
The group’s facilitator, Trix the Rabbit, holds up a fuzzy white finger. “Careful with the I-it framing… Frank, right? There’s a lot of pain in store for your relationship if you keep going down that road.”
Frank stares off into the middle distance. “Maybe. It’s hard though. Real hard.” A brief grunt of agreement from the assembled dads. “Especially when it’s 4am, you know? And it’s your night with the octopus, and it’s not taking a bottle but it’s not going back to sleep either, it’s just screeching and screeching right in your ear, and at some point your brain starts pointing out all the sharp corners on the dressers and the brick fireplace, and thinking ‘gee, if this thing doesn’t stop screaming, I might just make it stop’ — you know, by smashing its brains out.”
The grown-ups share an awkward, horrified silence. The kids all keep cooing and babbling and knocking runestones together. It’s not like I’ve never gotten intrusive thoughts before, but as a parent you’re supposed to say “oh those darn intrusive thoughts,” not go into graphic, gory detail about it.
I shake my head. “Dreezus Friggin’ Greist, Frank.”
“What? What?” Frank looks around, defensive and confused. “Did I forget to mention it was 4am?”
Trix steps in and redirects things a bit, reminding us that this group is a safe space for dads to talk through all kinds of experiences. He shares about a time when he was rough with his little boy rabbit. He doesn’t go into the details, but in my mind he grabbed the kid by his floppy ears and spun him in the air like a cartoon lasso.
Trix regretted it instantly, of course, made amends, yatta yatta, and the whole thing made him a better father in the end. We all make that ‘mm’ noise that you’re supposed to make.
“It seems like just yesterday Peter was our ‘surprise bun in the oven.’ And now he’s 18 years old, graduated, and moving out into his own burrow.” The rabbit strokes his whiskers. “Treasure these moments, gentlemen.”
Immediately there’s a crash from the corner. Vida comes running to me saying “oh no, oh no,” with what’s by this point a thin sheen of snot covering her face.
I take her hand and we go over to the site of the runestone collapse. I do some labeling for her. Kids love labeling. “They fell!”
Vida nods. “dey fell.” Then she looks at the remaining runestones on the table for a beat, and sweeps them all to the floor too. “oh no, oh no!”
“You didn’t want that to happen,” I label some more. Can’t go wrong with labeling. I lean over and open up my arms for her. “Big hug?”
“big hug. smol hug.”
“Big hug, small hug.” She snuggles into my chest for a squeeze, then she backs up and I pat her on both shoulders. Vida calms down with some deep pressure and breathing. I get a big smear of mucus on the front of my shirt.
I give her one last squeeze and let her go. She picks up two of the runestones and stacks them into the start of a new tower. “Love you Veeby Deeby.” She’ll say it back one of these days.
Trix steeples his rabbity fingers as I sit back down. “You haven’t said much today, Vir. How are things going? For you.”
I stare down at Joss’s squdgy widdle cheeks. He looks less like a tiny old man alien than he did right after birth. He still has the jowls, though, and his eyes are, by any objective standard, sunken and baggy. He’s pretty ugly for how goddamn cute he is.
“You know what Trix? Things are going just fine. Do I miss getting to pound the pavement and put bad guys behind bars and brush my teeth more than once a year? Sure. But these two tiny squooglers? They’re the most important thing in the world to me. And even though I screw it up sometimes, I feel like I’m doing right by them.”
Trix smoothes his ears back over his head and crosses his legs. “Well that’s great, Vir. That’s great. But are you sure that’s why you’re choosing to be a stay-at-home dad? Or the whole reason why? Are you sure part of you isn’t… running away from something?”
I look around a little uneasily. “What, do you know something I don’t?”
Frank leans in and shoots me a fierce bulldog look, like I’ll handle this joker for ya. “How come you’re so serious all the time, Mister White Rabbit? Are you, or are you not, the same wacky prankster that got everyone thinking they’d brought back the Mona Lisa, but then at the big reveal it was a phony that had ‘Haha, tricked you!’ tattooed on her face?”
Trix pastes on a slight smile. “That was all a long time ago, Frank. With children running around, there’s a lot in life worth being serious about.”
The rabbit gets a twinkle in his eye. “Of course, I’d also like to think that I contain multitudes. I’ve played many roles over the years,” he says, ticking off his fingers. “Trickster, father, advertising expert, volunteer discussion group facilitator… and now with Peter gone, empty nester. Who knows what stories my next chapter might hold?”
“And another thing…” Frank moves his wriggling octopus baby from one arm to the other to get a better hold of it. But before he can say his piece, Octobaby seizes up, convulses, and shoots a black liquid jet, of what I pray for his sake is ink, directly into Frank’s open mouth. Joss and Vida are both undisturbed by Frank’s violent retching.
“Knock knock knock!”
I open the front door, hunched over with Joss buckled to my chest and Vida hanging onto my shoulders, wearing nothing but a pink cowboy hat. She’s in the pink cowboy hat. Not me. I’m in a puke-stained basic t-shirt and my ninth-best pair of gym shorts.
“Yesh?” I say, talking around the pipe-cleaner reins Vida’s got in my mouth.
It’s Frank Crippleton. Wearing a navy blue suit and tie with pinstripe pants, holding a brown paper package in one hand, no octopus baby in sight. “Mornin’, Black Beauty! Got a delivery for you. The pony express dropped it off on your desk at the precinct, thought I’d save you the trip in.”
Frank holds out the package for me. I leave him hanging, seeing as my hands are busy keeping my toddler from falling off my back. He just stands there, holding the package out expectantly, totally oblivious to my withering stare and the implication that he should set the package on the ground and get out of here. Vida breaks the battle of wills with a whinny. “buh-lack nyoo-tie”.
I sigh. “Come on in.” I beat a retreat to the kitchen that’s as dignified as I can make it while singing the William Tell Overture. I unload Vida onto the counter, knocking over three plastic bowls of blueberries in the process. Joss blinks, then buries his head in my chest.
Frank dawdles his way over, managing an impressive number of faux pax in the twelve seconds it takes him to get to the kitchen. He forgets to close the front door. He leaves his shoes on and tracks in a bunch of dirt. He even remarks on the cluttered disaster that our house had become, rather than keeping up the polite fiction that everything is fine, why do you ask, totally fine. The bastard.
Frank sets the package down on the counter. “So where’s your dear sweet Octobaby?”
Unfortunately, Frank’s face contorts into a portrait of utter smugness. “A magical friggin’ aquarium, if you can believe it. My wife — you know my wife, with the centaur racing?”
I spot Vida scooting along the counter toward the package, and I move it out of her reach and set it on the kitchen table. “Yes I know your wife, Frank.”
“Well her centaur knows a merwoman, and the merwoman turned her on to this deluxe enchanted nurture… box. It’s approved by the Pediatric Superintelligence and everything. Not like a smart crib with an aquarium-themed mobile, I mean this thing is deluxe. And they delivered same day. Now little Octavius hangs out in there for hours, safe and sound and quiet. What a Modsend, right?”
I must have a dirty look on my face that says fuck you and the horse you rode in on, because Frank stops short. “Hey, here’s a thought: why don’t you get one for your thing? Or two! They probably have toddler aquariums out there, right?”
Joss spits out his pacifier onto the floor. I plug his facehole with my pinky finger. He goes to town on it. “You know, I probably would, and just roll the dice on whether their mother finds out and guts me with a sword.”
I look over my shoulder, to where Vida has gone after the blueberries and is practicing squishing them into her ears. “But princess prancy-pants here has an allergy to magic.” Which is not a very convenient allergy to have when half the people in Fusion City are wizards or elves or singing swords or whatever. It’s a big part of why we’re stuck with the harridan harpy for childcare. Compassionate competence, hypoallergenic, and cheap: pick two.
A big stupid grin of relief plasters itself on Frank’s face. “Oh, a magic allergy! I’ve heard of that, that’s nothin’. I saw this ad while I was doomscrolling the other day, they say they’ve got a weekly shot that can fix that right up.”
Vida whimpers and crawls over to snuggle up to my shoulders. “no pwease, no pwease.” I shake my head and give Frank a look that’s halfway between look what you did you monster and one more wrong move and I’ll throw you out the kitchen window.
Frank tosses up his hands with an “okay, okay, dreez,” and drops the topic. Then he nods over at the table. “So anyway, how about this package, huh? I’ve been dying to know what’s in there.”
I kiss Vida on the forehead, and murmur, “Daddy won’t let anyone hurt you, Veeby Deeby.” She relaxes some and goes back to squishing blueberries.
I walk over to the kitchen table and pick up the package. It’s like every crappy birthday present I ever got from my grandma, just a book or a box of stationery wrapped in brown butcher paper. There’s no return address, or even the address for the precinct on there. Just “Vir Boransky — URGENT.” Written with those cut-out magazine letters that psychopaths on TV use for ransom notes.
“You said the pony express dropped this off?”
“Oh that part was a joke, actually,” Frank says. “I didn’t see ‘em drop it off.”
Ominous.
I unwrap the package. It’s a book, thanks Grandma. Or almost a book. It’s a pretend book. A proto-book. The cover is a flat matte green, no title, nothing on the spine. I flip through it: there’s a table of contents, and then that’s it. A table of contents and two hundred blank pages.
Frank peers over my shoulder to get a better look. “Did you order yourself a gag gift off the home shopping feed while you were on sleeping pills or something?”
I ignore him. I’m busy focusing on how my gut is twisting itself into a knot. This can’t be what I think it is. And obviously I can tell that I’m in denial right now, but this seriously can’t be what I think it is. The titles in the table of contents aren’t helping me sustain my disbelief though. “Which Wolf? Witch Wolf.” “An Officer and a Lizardman.” “Sphinx in the Drink.” “Snakes One to Know One.” And, oh yeah, there’s twelve of them.
The shoe drops for Frank. “Holy dragon balls, this is some kinda Dirty Dozen Part Two! The crazy bastard’s back!”
“cwazy bas-tahd,” Vida says from the counter.
On the left-hand page, opposite the table of contents, there’s a faint typewritten note I missed before.
Heard on the wind you’ve been opening up the past, Vir.
Thought to myself: “Now that’s an idea I can get behind.”
So this one’s dedicated to you.
There’s an arrow drawn on in pen, pointing to the final title in the table of contents. “What’s the Sound of a Family Man with no Family?”
I am not, under most circumstances, a meticulous man. I am not focused. I am not thorough.
I probably could have “worked” on the Dirty Dozen / Icarus K. Death case until Joss started kindergarten. Or high school. Or law school, frankly. And I still wouldn’t have found the killer. Because it never would have been urgent. There would always be a mysterious leak funking up the hall bathroom, or an Alicorns on Ice show to reserve tickets for at 4am.
Honestly, I only ever made it as a P.I. back in the day because underneath their cool narcissistic exteriors, criminals are frightened, ornery animals with bad instincts. And I always found a way to prod them into making mistakes.
But “Icarus” made his first – and final – mistake without me having to do anything besides logging out the case file from the precinct. He threatened my kids. The stupid motherfucker.
“Frank,” I say, with a calm steel in my voice. “I need you to go back to the precinct. I need you to find whoever put this package got on my desk. And I need you to keep your mouth shut about what was in there. Do you understand?”
He quirks his head at me. “I mean, no? Don’t you think we should —”
I pull my finger out of Joss’s mouth and stab it in the air at Frank. “Do you understand that you’re either gonna follow my lead or I’m gonna kick your ass off a building?”
“Oh yeah, that I understand. I’m behind you 110% of the way, Vir.” Frank zips his mouth shut and jogs off to the front door.
It’s not that I wouldn’t appreciate some help from the precinct in nailing this psycho. It’s that there wouldn’t be any help. Without any new killings or solid leads, no one’s going to jump on a decades-old case. Or actually give a damn if they get stuck with it. And meanwhile, with my kids in the crosshairs, I’d get tossed into the “too close for objectivity” bucket and get benched, hard. Not acceptable.
The minute Frank’s gone, I pull Vida close and squeeze her and Joss together in a big tight hug. “I’ve got you kids. I’ve got you.”
Vida thrashes her way out of the hug pretty quickly and runs off to pee on a corner of the rug. But I take that as her way of saying something like, “Thanks Daddy, I know you’ll do whatever it takes to keep us safe and nail this scumbag.”
I’ve been dilly-dallying with this case for months now. Always telling myself that I could find the time. That I could figure it out. That I could somehow be a good enough father and a good enough detective to juggle the kids and the work, and do everything thing right.
If I were good enough, maybe I could do this on my own. But at this point, I don’t give a damn about being “good enough.” I just need to get the job done.
“Hey Rambo,” I call out. “I need a little help.”
“Yeah boss, whaddya got?”
I’m pacing around the living room. Vida is on her display. Joss somehow managed to fall asleep in the carrier after all that. I scooch him a bit lower so his head stops lolling back like a broken crash test dummy.
“Three things. One: draft a note to Kali saying something came up, and I’m dropping the whole stay-at-home dad thing a few months early. Make it sound like I’m doing something important… but not more important than her exoplanet thing. You know?”
The disembodied voice of Sylvester Stalone replies. “You got it boss. In your email for approval now.”
“Two: find me the best nanny in town. No more of this bargain basement, overnight-only owl-lady B.S. In fact, call up the au pair agency and fire her first, and then get me the best nanny in town.”
Rambo’s little thinking light on the ceiling spins for a second. “Uh, you sure about that boss? All the real good nannies have magic oozing out their ringlets, and uh…”
“And Vida’s allergic?” I look at her there, sitting on the ottoman watching videos with her feet dangling off. Sorry Veeby Deeby. “That’s three: get somebody out here to do the S-H-O-T. Today.”
The ceiling light goes red. “Sorry boss, afraid I can’t do that. Got a hard lock on that course of action from admin user ‘Kali_The_Destroyer.’”
At this point, I don’t even care. “Sudo demote ‘Kali_The_Destroyer’ to general user. Override the hard lock. And get it done.”
A low whistle from Rambo. “You got balls o’ steel boss, balls o’ steel. You wanna confirm I should go ahead with Operation Hostile Takeover?”
I ruffle Joss’s short, fine baby hair. “Confirmed. Some men are born with balls of steel, Rambo… some have balls of steel thrust upon them.”
“No comment. Good luck boss.”
Around mid-afternoon, a formal knock at the front door reveals a proud elven doctor in a long white lab coat. Joss is asleep in the kids room, his breathing faintly visible on the monitoring display. Vida and her stuffed dragon-unicorns are making headway on the big bag of candy I got for her.
Pointy Ears M.D. unfolds his leather case on the kitchen table, the little vials and syringes gently clinking against each other. “I hope that you appreciate, insofar as you can, that I have disturbed my schedule greatly in order to effect this house call.”
I furrow my brow and intone back at him with a great deal of concern. “Oh, indeed, that one such as you would undertake for one such as me an ordeal of such —” Then I drop the act. “Listen, Dr. Third-Place in the Legolas Look-alike Contest: are you getting paid or are you not getting paid?”
“As I’ve agreed to provide this service pro bono, I would have to say the latter.” The elven doctor draws forth a crystal vial of purplish-green liquid from his case. “Evedriel was a friend.”
Evedriel… right, right, right. The organist. Well great, now I feel like an ass. “Thanks. I’ll do my best for him.”
The doctor nods.
“And as far as the shot goes, Doctor…”
“Nestariel.”
“Dr. Nestariel, you’re sure there’s no way to… make it easier, on her? We can’t just have her chug a sippy cup of Nyquil or something?”
The elf spreads his slender fingers in an expansive gesture. “The workings of magic can never be truly fathomed; those of metamagic, even less so. Out of infinities of interactions, only a chosen few are certain enough in safety for me to administer to a child.”
I sigh. “You can just say yes or no, pal.”
“Then no,” Dr. Nestariel says, with the hint of sneer, “she cannot chug Nyquil. At future weekly appointments, when her allergies have already been suppressed, the soothpetal extract can be applied topically prior to injection for analgesia and sedation. For today, it can only be included in combination: meaning, the effect onset will be delayed.”
The doctor pierces the vial of purplish-green liquid with the needle-sharp point of the syringe, and pulls back the plunger. This guy has good reviews on the fusionnet. It only looks like he’s prepping a torture device.
“So it’ll… get easier, after today, right?”
Dr. Nestariel looks me in the eyes. “It will, Mr. Boransky. It will.”
Vida sits in my lap, chomping little chunks of red candy off her tootsie pop. I speak to her as gently as I can, working very hard to make sure my voice doesn’t crack. “I know Daddy told you that I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you. You remember that?”
“mm hmm.”
“Well this is Doctor Nesty. He’s very nice, but he is going to do something that will hurt you.”
Vida flutter kicks and presses her head back against my chest. “no pwease, no pwease.”
“He’s going to give you a shot that will keep you from getting sick around magic. So Daddy can keep you safe. I’m –” I squeeze her tight and kiss her on the cheek. “I’m really sorry Veeby Deeby.”
Vida escalates to screaming. I pin her arms to her sides and give a curt, what the hell are you waiting for nod to the doc. He deftly wields the glass syringe and jabs the point into Vida’s shoulder. She thrashes, and cries out in pain, and I clench my jaw so hard my teeth hurt.
The doctor presses the plunger down and finishes the injection in just a few seconds. It only feels like it takes seven hundred years.
I carry her, gasping from crying so hard, over to the stained, amorphous beanbag chair in the corner of the living room and lie back with her in my arms. Joss sleeps on in the other room without stirring.
Vida screams and hits my chest with her fists until the soothpetal kicks in and she falls asleep. I just hold her. Her face is snot-crusted and red. I feel like the most horrible father in history.
But she’s going to be safe. And she gets to be at peace. So that’s something.
It’s the next morning. The doorbell rings. Vida looks up from her mad scientist unicorn girls video with a worried look. Joss also looks at me, largely because I set him on his tummy facing me and he’s still working out how to move his head.
“Vida, who’s at the door?” I sing-song at her, the way I do when it’s good news that someone’s here. Instead of rushing to the door, she runs over and stands behind my legs. Which, you know, fair.
I open the door on a woman dressed in a sensible black traveling outfit, complete with overcoat and umbrella. If you look closely, you can just make out a faint aura of sparkliness in the air around her. She also has wings, and a horn, and is a pretty pretty anthropomorphic pony.
“Oh look, it’s Alicorn Mary Poppins!”
Vida squeals with glee and jumps around me in a circle. “pony! pony! pony!”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Princess Vida!” Alicorn Mary Poppins says. She reaches a hand into her frumpy traveling bag and pulls out a bouquet of bright yellow dandelions, which she proceeds to levitate over to my daughter. Vida squeals again.
(Don’t ask me where gendered interests come from, okay? We’ve bought about eight plastic tubs of trucks, dinosaurs, blocks, and tools over the last couple of years. Vida has consistently ignored all of them, preferring to play with her fiftieth different unicorn or a used Lisa Frank trapper keeper or whatever. I’m just working with what I’ve got.)
Alicorn Mary Poppins leans toward me and, out of the side of her mouth, asks, “Got your credit and account approval, Mr. Boransky?” I tilt my palm toward her, showing the digital auth mark from Magical Nanny Ventures.
A.M.P. cheers out, “Who wants to learn about friendship?!” She scoops baby Joss out of my arms and gallivants to the kids room, a gleeful Vida and her coterie of magically floating unicorns in tow.
“I’m surprised you still had the place available.”
In the dimly lit hall, with its flickering lights and water stains, and occasional rats-in-the-walls sounds, the hunched old rhino guy next to me waves around vaguely. “Not most attractive location.”
We’re standing on either side of a musty wooden door, a little warped with age and disuse. Old Man Ködel is jingling his way through his keyring, trying out one key after another. There’s a frosted glass window in the center of the door, the kind that lets you see the silhouettes of curvy dames who are nothing but trouble, and hulking brutes who got a message for ya from da boss. And underneath that, an empty slot where a name placard would go. Something like “Vir Boransky, P.I.”
Click. Ködel gives a little smile. “Key not lost after all.”
I take an appraising look around the hall. “So why haven’t they terraformed this slum basement into a strip mall or a butterfly garden by now?” Or, you know, cleansed its stain from the earth with holy fire.
“I would not let them.” The hunched old rhino shrugs, completely devoid of irony. “Too many good memories.”
Old Man Ködel gives me the key and reads me off the terms of the lease. Said terms include “No maintenance requests — it’s only you that breaks things,” “Noise is grounds for eviction, no make noise,” and “No walk on carpet with shoes, always take off shoes.”
I swear by a stack of rhino bibles that I’ll follow the lease to the letter. Ködel is satisfied, and wishes me luck with whatever business I’m into now. “And not just any luck — good luck.”
“Thanks, Old Man Ködel.”
I ease open the door. It still has that aggravating squeak — the one that makes me wanna kick the stupid door in its stupid face. Then again, that squeak kept me from getting mowed down by a kangaroo with a tommy gun back in the day. So I guess we’re even.
For the first time in years and years, I lay eyes on my old office. It’s… not in great shape. But honestly, I can relate. The dust on every visible surface and the cobwebs in the corners could easily be turned into a strained metaphor for my being wildly out of practice. The furnishings, such as they are — two cheap dining chairs and a scratched-up desk — groan just like my joints do after a bad night’s sleep. I think some part of me got left here when I joined up with the boys in blue. I think some part of me knew I’d be back.
I sweep a cloud of dust off the desk and lay out everything I need to get down to business. The case file. My working notebook. Dirty Dozen II, pre-print edition. A reusable tote bag filled with colored string, thumbtacks, and holo stickers to make one of those great conspiracy boards on the wall. And a pack of arm patches loaded with my favorite stimulants, which are excellent for doing focused work and terrible for taking care of the kids.
I’m still an anxious dad, even in my sequestered office across town, with Vida and Joss left in the best possible hands… hooves… whatevers. I check my palm notifications, oh, maybe fifty times to see if the kids need anything. It’s like, I know there was nothing wrong five minutes ago, but five minutes is how long it takes for a baby with his airways blocked to get permanent brain damage. So yeah, that’s what my brain is like right now.
I call the magical pony nanny, just to check in and see if anyone’s dying, or if I should jaunt home for a quick check-in. She humors me, very patiently, and lets me know me that Vida is having an enchanted tea party and Joss is chewing on a non-toxic rubber pigeon. Assuaged, I let her get back to the children. Lovely lady. Really knows how to make the medicine go down.
I put my palm in stop-enabling-me mode. The stim patch kicks in. I sweep the floors, color code the files, and call the appliance repair, the electrician, the handybird, and the grocery/trash-bot re: mystery bill. Then I successfully order and eat a lunch of chicken carbonara.
But that’s not really what I’m here for, and I know it. The clock warns me that 5pm is coming up sooner than I’d like. The time when I’ll go home, take over on the kids, and have to answer to myself for how I spent the day. The image of my own face staring back at me from the mirror comes over me so vividly, it’s like I’m there already, splashing water on my face, shaking my head, avoiding my own gaze.
It’s like I’m looking directly into my soul: there’s my guilt at pouring my time into wasted motion while the killer goes free; there’s my fear that no matter what I do, I’m going to royally screw everything up. And there in the mirror is my better self, saying, Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’m right there with you. But you don’t need to be cut out for a fight to win it. You just gotta stay in the ring and keep throwing punches.
That’s when I notice something off about the mostly-blank green book that the killer sent me.
I have the book laid open to the table of contents, with my miniature trophy for Most Improved Detective, Spring 3038 pinning the front cover to the desk. Something about the titles for the short stories just… isn’t right. I stare at it for a minute, clearing my mind, listening for the dickishly elusive whisper of intuition.
H. There. In “Which Wolf? Witch Wolf.” There’s a printing error on the last letter of ‘Witch.’
A. Same with the last ‘a’ in “An Officer and a Lizardman.”
H. In “Sphinx.” Exactly one letter in each title, there’s a faint blurring of the ink. Not something you’d see in a digital printing.
A. An “error” that could only be made by deliberately typing that letter twice.
I grab for a pen and rapidly go down the line, circling the double-stroked letter in each title. I sit back to take it in. The secret message is pretty clear.
HAHA TRICKED U.
I swear a blue streak that would make an unabridged dictionary cover its ears. If it had ears. And was like, specifically marketed to sex workers, aggressive hip-hop artists, and sailors. Real nasty stuff.
I pick up the truly ancient office phone and call Frank at the precinct. “Frank, I need —”
“Wow incredible timing Vir, so I ran back the security footage and it looks like the package just dropped onto your desk out of thin air, but then I called in a favor with one of those wizard cops from the other department to have ‘em do some of their mumbo jumbo, and they turned up a single unaccounted-for footprint, which looks by all appearances like it belongs to, wait for it…”
“A rabbit?” I ask.
“Uh, yeah, a rabbit.” Frank sounds a little deflated. “You know, if you knew you were already gonna know that, you coulda told me ahead of time and gotten me out of doing a lot of backbreaking investigative labor.”
“Frank.” When he gets like this, I find it helpful to just ignore him and start over. “I need you to do something for me. It might get you suspended. It might get you fired. Hell, it might get you flattened by a comically large steamroller.”
Frank scoffs. “Steamrollers? I’ve been flattened by worse. No way am I letting you deal with this creep alone. What do ya need, Vir?”
There’s a thump in the hallway. Actually, more of a thumpety-thump-thump: repeated, erratic, and getting louder. It’s joined by heavy footsteps, the carpet-burn sound of something furry being dragged across the floor, and a high-pitched whine that eventually resolves into words.
“…I demand you unhand me, I will absolutely be calling my lawyer about this, if you think for one second that you can —”
Through the frosted glass window, I see an outline that could easily be a musclebound goon holding up a cabbage topped with two prominent leaves. The warped old door squeaks its way open. Frank Crippleton steps into my office, one hand gripped tight around the long floppy ears of Trix the Rabbit.
“Got a delivery for ya, Vir.” Frank shoves the rabbit forward none too gently. Trix almost gets his feet under him, but trips over a loose pair of shoes — mustn’t damage the carpet, you know — and crashes in a heap. “One dirty, rotten, no-good jackass, just like you asked for.”
I’ve got my legs crossed. I have one arm slung over the back of my chair. I drum my fingers on the desk. I’m missing the fluffy white lapcat, and the kind of office chair where you can spin around to deliver a nice “I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Rabbit,” but I do alright.
“Good work Frank. I owe you one.” I nod from him to the door.
Frank brushes the dirt off his shoulder and walks out of the office. Before he closes the door behind him, he jabs a finger at Trix (yes, he flinches, and yes, it’s incredibly satisfying). “You better hope my pal here likes what you have to say. ‘Cuz he’s the only thing standing between me and breaking every last bone in your body. Twice.”
Frank’s heavy footsteps fade down the hall. Trix uses the desk to pull himself up to standing. With a pained grimace, he works the kinks out of his ears and crunches his neck. “And they say I’m melodramatic!”
“Take a seat,” I tell him, with a lazy gesture at the chair next to him. Trix huffs, and indicates that he’d prefer to stand.
“So be it. I’d like to apologize for my friend. I told him to take it easy on you…” Obviously, I did no such thing. “But you know Frank — he’s a real loose cannon.”
“Ohhh. Going for the old ‘good cop/bad cop,’ huh?” Trix strokes his whiskers thoughtfully. “No, that can’t be it — see, because then you’d have to be a good cop, and we both know that’s not true.”
“I’ll cut to the chase then, Trix.” I take the green hardcover book out of the desk drawer and drop it with a thwack on the desk between us. “Care to explain what the hell this is about?”
The rabbit picks the book up curiously. He makes a show of goggling at it, holding it closer and farther away, you know, trying to get it in focus. He paws open to the table of contents, goes down the page pointing at the circled letters with a furrowed brow of confusion, mouths out “haha tricked you.” Mimes a lightbulb going on. Has himself a chuckle.
Trix snaps the book shut. “Looks like a harmless hoax to me. Pretty nice work by whoever put it together too, if you don’t mind my saying so.” Trix slides the book back across the desk to me. “Hope you didn’t take a little thing like this too seriously, Vir.”
I slap my hand down on the book cover, hard enough that it stings my palm. “You threatened my kids.”
Trix holds up a wagging finger. “Ah ah ah: I made it look like I was threatening your kids.”
He paces in front of my desk, hands knotted behind his back, like he’s got a rehearsed opening statement to deliver. “I’m certain that a jury of my peers would determine that this alleged ‘threat’ was just another in a long line of pranks, of the very kind for which I, Trix the Rabbit, am so widely known. A prank intended, I imagine they would imagine, to teach you, Vir Boransky, a very special lesson, from one father to another. Something, perhaps, about the fleeting nature of time, the importance of using your talents, carpe diem, vini vidi vici, yolo, et cetera, et cetera.”
Slowly, menacingly, I get to my feet, while making sure I don’t accidentally lose my balance and fall backward onto my ass. Drawing up to my full height and staring Trix in the eye, I realize for the first time that he’s got six inches on me, ears not included. On the other hand, he’s a scrawny friggin’ anthropomorphic rabbit. If push came to shove, I’d put my money on the ex-P.I. with the lower center of gravity taking it in the third round.
I give him my best grim, gravelly growl. “You know what I think, Trix?”
Trix plants his paws on my desk and leans in toward me. “I’m all ears.”
“I think…” I throw my hands up in the air. “You might just be right! Let’s seize the day. Let bygones be bygones, eh? Get out of this dump and, I don’t know, go somewhere nice to watch the sunset…” I trail off, sounding totally natural by the way. I snap my fingers. “And hey! I know a spot not too far from here: the view is absolutely to die for.”
Give him some credit: Trix isn’t exactly fooled. He has a look on his face that’s one part toddler skeptical you’ll give those scissors “right back” after you take a “quick look” at them, and one part baby accidentally eating a lemon.
But he laughs and waves it off. “Oh what the hay. I wanna see what scheme you’ve concocted that you’re so evidently pleased with yourself about. Let’s go ‘watch the sunset,’ you sneaky devil.”
Trix gives me a big cheeky wink. It takes every ounce of my willpower to not leap across the desk and throttle the arrogant asshat right then and there.
The Green Helix is an unremarkable glass-and-steel skyscraper, other than these two giant moss-carpeted, open-air moving greenways it’s got winding up the outside of the building. Those are kind of remarkable. All the glamor of a thousand-foot-elevation-gain nature hike combined with all the cardiovascular demand of standing in a glass elevator for ten minutes.
We go through the turnstile onto the “up” greenway. I tell Trix that we should get to the rooftop lounge right as the sun sets through the Fusion City skyline. “How’s that for carpe diem?”
Trix smirks. “Oh yeah, you’ve really turned over a new leaf. I guess my little prank showed you the error of your ways, hmm?”
I force a laugh, and clench a fist by my side where the rabbit can’t see. Calm down, Vir. Keep it casual. Lure him in.
“You know Trix, that’s something I didn’t really appreciate about you. At least until I read up on your glory days.”
Trix perks up, and sounds coy as he tells me to go on.
“Sure, you like playing pranks. Wacky setup, thrilling reveal, unexpected lesson. But you’re not in it for the attention, or to drive people crazy: you want to show people where they’re already crazy.
“Politics is crazy. Money is crazy. Art is crazy. So maybe you get a room full of candidates together for a fake debate and pie them in the face. Or you bankrupt a bunch of investment firms using a convoluted tulip bulb trading card ponzi scheme. Or you come up with a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, but at the big reveal it turns out she’s got the old ‘haha tricked you’ written on her forehead. And then maybe, maybe people will finally snap out of it. Right?”
“A rabbit can dream,” Trix says.
I lean over the mahogany railing to look down at the streets, now a few hundred feet under us. They’re swarming with little people. Getting off of work. Going home to their families. Living their lives.
“It’s not like anyone’s really getting hurt here,” I say. “Right? Even that stagehand… you know, the one at the Mona Lisa showing who fell to her death off the scaffolding? That kid came back the next day!”
Trix taps his cheek with a finger and stares off at the buildings of downtown Fusion City, slowly traversing around us. “I wonder. Do you see it, Vir? Or is this just you having some fun?”
I keep my mouth shut. Go ahead and wonder, buckteeth.
The rabbit sighs. “Maybe it would have been worth all that hand-wringing and holier-than-thou finger pointing, if we were back in the dark ages. Maybe. But now? Death is just… a timeout. A brief intermission. A friendly word from our sponsors.”
“Just one more thing people can’t see they’re crazy about.”
The light of the evening sun lances through the clouds. All the skyscrapers and forest parks are cast in that golden hour glow. The reflected sunlight flickers off the sheets of glass and stretches of water. Like uncontrolled flames threatening to consume the city. Like that time a fire demon tried to hide out in a combination gas station / liquor store.
“So maybe you decided to show them,” I say into the silence. “Set a serial killer loose in Fusion City. Let people lose their minds. And then laugh your furry tail off when the cops haul you in, when all you did was put waste some people’s time. Like getting the trial of the century for playing ding dong ditch.”
“Maybe you even told yourself you’d come clean. Show up at the precinct with a filing cabinet full of evidence, blow the cops a raspberry, take a bow. But then along came a little bun in the oven named Peter. All of sudden doing a five-year comedy tour in Fusion Prison didn’t sound like such a laugh.”
I look over at the rabbit, who’s backlit, eclipsing my view of the sun. He’s staring dead ahead. Jaw clenched. Face ashen.
“But the cops didn’t catch you. And you didn’t turn yourself in. So the consequences got more serious. #KeepMurderBad and all that. It turned out to be less like a ‘prank’ and more like ‘holding people hostage for twenty years.’”
Trix’s cheek twitches. Twitches again. His mouth twists into a slow, sly grin. The sound that he makes might be a grunt, or a cough, until he makes it again, and again. Trix, with the gathering energy of a slow clap at a frat party, xa0gradually breaks into a giggle, then a chuckle, then a knee-slapping guffaw. He falls over himself, collapses against the railing, points at me and shakes his head, laughing, just wildly laughing, through a wide rictus smile.
What did I tell you. Underneath all the swagger and ego, criminals are just animals. Some more literally than others.
With the moss-green path beneath him and the cityscape scrolling by behind him, Trix sits up, crosses his legs, takes a deep breath, slicks back his ears. “So sorry. I was just remembering this comedy sketch. It had this woodchuck with a crippling addiction to chucking wood. Classic.” He wipes the tears from his eyes. “Where were we?”
“You were about to confess to twelve counts of murder, and give twelve innocent victims their lives back.”
“Me? Confess?” Trix strokes his whiskers and looks out onto the city. “No, I don’t think so. Not a good punchline. If you want to bring in Icarus K. Death — whoever that clever devil is — and bring back those twelve nobodies he killed, be my guest. You just have to do what that thug friend of yours was supposed to do twenty years ago: your job.”
The moving greenway plays a jaunty jingle and lets us off onto the rooftop lounge. The place has all the makings of a swanky outdoor club: the multi-dimensional bar, the configurable seating, the holographic firepits. But other than me and the big bad rabbit, the place is deserted.
Which might be because of that call Frank made to the owner of the lounge… something about a few dozen safety violations going away if they cleared out the rooftop tonight for a private event. Could be a connection there, who knows.
There’s no separation between the roof and the open air. The same tiles under my feet go right up to the edge, with no railing. Up here, we’re not looking at the skyline — we’re in the skyline. Towers of steel and stone and stucco and stained glass light up from behind like statues in a spotlight. The sun brushes against the horizon suggestively.
I make my way toward the edge of the roof. “You like teaching people a lesson. It’s your thing. Makes sense. But I think I’ve got a lesson to teach you.”
Trix follows behind me, but keeps some distance between us. “‘Crime doesn’t pay?’ ‘Cheaters never prosper?’ ‘When it comes to having kids or Long Island Iced Teas, always stop at one?’”
I stop walking maybe ten feet before the end of the roof. “Look, people are crazy. About all sorts of things. But there’s always a reason people do the things they do, even if you can’t see it. And if you get fixated on somebody’s emotional, irrational, lizard-brain nonsense, you stop seeing them for who they are. And you might misjudge what they’re willing to do. For example:”
I turn around with a lunge and grab two fistfuls of Trix’s fur, right under his collarbone. I twist with my shoulders to yank him off balance, and I drag him sideways to where the roof meets the sky. He gets one of his feet back under him and nearly turns the tables on me, but I manage to put a knee in his gut and knock the wind right out of him.
I make sure I’ve got a real good grip on Trix. Then I swing him off the roof.
Eyes wide, stunned and gasping, the rabbit dangles from my clenched fists. His feet scrabble at thin air, with nothing underneath him except a sheer drop onto the criss-crossing greenways and city streets below.
“If I catch the barest hint of your rabbity ass coming anywhere close to my kids, I’m going to snap your neck, cram you into an airtight box, and bury you so deep not even the worms will find you.” I shake him for emphasis, and I can’t be completely sure, but at least in my headcanon he pees himself a little.
“Then I’ll finish the investigation and get you convicted. We can be cellmates at Fusion Prison until I get out for good behavior.”
I do a head fake and drop him half an inch, to which Trix responds with a very unmanly scream. When he realizes I’ve still got him, he stops his thrashing and goes limp.
I pull Trix back up onto the roof, during which process I tweak my shoulder, my back, and a muscle in my side that I forgot I had. When all’s said and done, we’re both out of breath, sitting a healthy distance apart, plenty far away from the edge.
As he’s catching his breath, Trix forces out, “‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ Got it.”
I stare daggers at him. “Don’t threaten my kids.”
Joss is a whimpering baby, but not yet a crying one. Vida’s doing great, her head burrowed into the crumpled-up blanket, z’s floating away. I spend two minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, brushing my teeth, splashing water on my face, psyching myself up for the day ahead.
I grab Joss and take him to the living room, get the milk going, get his diaper changed. Joss tries to roll off the ottoman while I’m throwing away his wet diaper. But what he doesn’t realize is that the tip of my index finger never lost contact with his chubby thigh. It’s an easy catch.
“Dear Mod!” I say, gently lowering him to the floor against his flaily wishes. “The edge, my boy! Sweet Dreezus you’ve gone over the edge! Oh, the humanity!”
Joss lodges a complaint against being placed facedown on the rug, which I duly note. I let him stew in the natural consequences of his choices for like, fifteen seconds, and then airlift him into his bouncer.
Vida waddles out to the living room twenty minutes later to the smell of eggs, bacon, and pancakes frying away on our retro 20th century four-burner stove. One side of her hair is sticking out, punk-rock style, and the other side is sweat-pasted to her scalp. She clearly made good use of that extra beauty sleep.
I help her out of her relatively light diaper and head back to flip the first pancake. There’s a distinctive psss noise, and I turn around to see Vida crouching next to Joss’s bouncer, loosing a stream of lemonade-colored weewee directly onto his baby blanket. Judging by his face, he’s somewhere between gobsmacked and awestruck.
I sop up the collateral droplets with the soggy blanket, and try to coax Vida into bringing it with me to the washing machine. What this looks like is me claiming we’re going on a “chores adventure,” pointing between the blanket and the laundry room repeatedly, and praising her whenever she almost takes the blanket from me.
We actually make it out of the living room and into the hallway before Rambo starts shouting at the top of his metaphorical lungs. “Fire! Fire! Smoke detected! Smoke friggin’ detected! We’re not gonna make it!” Vida cries and clings to my leg. I rapidly stump over to the kitchen with her, take the smoldering pancake off the heat, and bat at the fire alarm with the nearest textile at hand, which to my inevitable dismay is the piss-soaked baby blanket I’m still carrying.
Between burning on the stove and getting showered with pee, the casualty rate for the pancakes is 100%. I eat the bacon and eggs. Vida sticks to fig bars. Joss stares down at a bite of egg I gave him like it’s an alien specimen, origin and purpose unknown.
The doorbell rings at the stroke of 9am. Vida runs over to the door, still nakey as a jaybird, calling “who zit! who zit!” She twists open the doorknob — which is not something I knew she could do, please pray for me — for none other than Alicorn Mary Poppins, who sweeps her up into a big tight hug.
“Why it’s Vida, my favorite little girl on the block!”
“mist you!”
A.M.P. tosses her sparkly mane and nods solemnly. “Well of course you’ve missed me, dear: it’s been two whole days. Let’s go comb your Rapunzel doll’s hair — I bet if we try our best, we can grow it all the way from the bedroom to the backyard!”
Vida runs in a circle around A.M.P., giggling her head off. Joss turns his head back and forth as the nanny’s levitation aura straps him into his bouncer and carries him swaying down the hall behind her. He gives up on the looking around thing and goes back to making big sleepy blinks.
I go over to the coathooks and grab my keys, my shoes, and my stim patch. I unzip my messenger bag and confirm that it’s got the manila folder of notes labeled “TRIX.”
Vida looks away from her magical pony nanny and back at her dad. Her face crinkles in dismay. She stomps over and pulls my hand away from my shoe. “daddy stay. right here!” She points at the ground intently.
I come down to one knee. “Sorry, Veeby Deeby. Daddy has to go and do work today. There are people out there who’ve been waiting a long time for someone to come and make things better. So I need to go and help them.”
Vida has tears in her eyes. She tries to explain it to me again: “right here.”
“Can I have a big hug?” I ask her. She acquiesces.
I squeeze her tight. “big hug. smol hug.”
I put my hands on her shoulders. “Small hug.”