FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

It takes all my charm, but I secure employment with the tailor. I’m not terribly charismatic, but I’m still rather nice to look at, nicer by far than the bull who owns the shop.

He’s a hulk of a man, but so, so gentle. In the bolt-room where he keeps his fabrics, there is a small painting on the wall where he, as a younger man (or perhaps merely flattered by the painter) chastely embraces a fragile-looking lady of the same race. He tells me her name was Alette, and he’d prefer not to talk about her.

There’s pained warmth in his voice, and I think it more likely that he’s a widower than that she left him. I consider broaching the topic again anyway, perhaps finding kinship as a man who, like him, has loved and lost, but think better of it. I won’t scratch at a fellow sufferer’s wounds.

My wages are a pittance, but I work well to earn it. I haven’t lost my way with needle and thread, and since I’m used to mending shoes and boots, my stitches are firmer and stronger than would be customary. He admonishes me at first for wasting thread, but when three customers on separate occasions praise quality of the needlework he instead asks me to teach him my art.

I take my first payment in leather. As a registered shopkeeper he can buy it from a wholesaler, cheaper by far than it would be for me, and he lets me work in his back room after closing, while he copies the day’s receipts into the ledger.

New boots are never comfortable and the leather isn’t of particularly high quality, but it’s been tanned well and should keep the damp at bay far better than my old ones. He takes professional interest in the results of my work, especially how firm and well-fitting I’ve made the heels. He inquires whether I aim to stay in the city, implying that he might have an interest in expanding his shop’s offerings, but only if I’ll commit to long-term employment. I tell him, honestly, that I don’t know.

I keep my eye on the herb shop, still closed, day after day. I ask the bull to inquire on my behalf whether anyone nearby might be looking to rent out a room for less than I’m paying at the tavern, and casually broach the topic of the abandoned shop. He knows little, sadly, so I’ll have to wait till he trusts me to leave me alone with customers and I can fish for gossip.

I find myself becoming comfortable in Élique. This was to be a diversion, an escape, and other than satisfying my curiosity about Allon, first, and the page-thief, later, I had no agenda other than to occupy my mind for as long as I could.

But as the third week passes I wake one morning, confused and unsure why, until I remember that for the first night in as long as I can remember, I didn’t dream of John.

I haven’t forgotten him. And my heart feels no healthier, the ache is still there any time his name crosses my thoughts, or his beautiful smile appears before my mind’s eye. But gradually, the pain is buried deeper in my chest, covered with a loose-leaf layer of new thoughts and concerns pertinent to my life here.

I see it in the tailor’s eyes, too. Infrequently he’ll pause by the painting, just for a moment, and I can hear the soft, pained sigh. But then he moves on. Her loss weighs heavily on him even now, but he has dresses to hem and breeches to cinch and sly cloth-sellers to haggle with.

I wonder if one day I’ll be like the bull. Content in my life, accustomed to the burden of pain. I can feel myself inching toward that. I still dream of John, but infrequently, and I think there was even a day when I never thought of him at all.

It’s so far away, now. It’s only been a few weeks, but since then I’ve crossed over into a new world, travelled to my childhood home and then to a grand city, uncovered mysteris that challenge me, and met men who have lost as I have lost.

Perhaps one day I’ll be like Erah, and my choices and their consequence will simply stop causing me pain.

Mmm, Erah.

When the tailor tells me a widowed acquaintance of his is looking for a tennant, and that the rent is most affordable, I think I might treat myself and celebrate in Erah’s bed.

The widow is a mouse, but she has a stern manner about her that demands obedience. She has a very low opinion of “young people” and their “craven habits” but says her son was as footloose as they come. She tries to sound scornful when she remarks she has no idea how that lout was ever accepted into the Schola, but I hear the pride in her screeching voice.

A narrow in an alley around the corner from the herbal shop leads up narrow, creaking stairs, to a short landing with three doors. One is obviously a coal closet, judging by the hip-high hatch and the stains of soot, the second is the entrance to the mouse widow’s home and the third appears to have been manually cut into the wall.

Her lout of a son, she says, craving independence, asked to have his own door. I hear in her voice the pain of a mother losing her son to the world, but I have no way to comfort her. My parents never lived to see me break out from their protection.

The room is simply furnished. There’s a bed struffed with fresh straw wrapped in good linnen, a closet with a lock, and even a pump that feeds from a basement reservoir. I’ve never seen such a thing before and the widow softens somewhat as I openly marvel at the ingenuity.

“My old man Farrow was a plumber, rest his soul, he was always inventin’ things,” she says, trying to sound dismissive. “Cost him a fortune to build this one and the one in my kitchen. Gonna become all the rage, he said, gonna make a fortune. Not much good if you get yourself run down by a drunk coachman, is it?”

I join her casual, easy, dismissive laughter, but I know how false it is. I heard from the tailor that her husband was killed in a robbery. When he was found, a trail of blood ran from the depths of the alley where he was set upon to just the edge of the thoroughfare. Weak and in agony he tried to drag himself to safety, but hadn’t the strength to call out for help when he got there. Poor sod.

I take the room and move out of the tavern that afternoon. I have coin enough for the advance of the rent, and the pump really is very useful. It’s a minute’s labour before any water comes out, but it’s cool and fresh and miraculous.

The second door in my room leads into the widow’s home, and I promise to leave it unlatched when I’m at home.

Home.

That’s what this feels like. It may be because I’m worn out from travel, and I don’t mean to say that I belong here, only that it belongs to me, and it feels good. I pack my clothes in the my closet – my closet! – and note how very little space they take up. In fact, most of the space in the closet is taken up by the box on the bottom shelf.

It doesn’t even occur to me that corboard and brown plastic tape don’t exist in this world. I’m so contented, or rather so relieved at being contented, I just don’t think.

I lift out the box, put it on my dresser and open it with my pocket-knife. I smile at what I see inside. A copy of my adoption certificate, laminated rather than framed, a Participant ribbon from my first disastrous science fair.

A framed photo, its colors still in excellent condition, of Mitchell and Doreen Kenna, both of them younger than I am now. Their prom photo – those clothes! I laugh openly, giggling at the sight of my dad, seventeen years old, in a powder blue tuxedo with big-ass lapels and flared pants.

It’s only when I go to the wall to see if there’s a hook where I can hang the frame and hear a carriage rumble past outside, that I think about what I’m doing. There’s a brief spark of panic, and then, strangely, annoyance. This is a nuisance.

I was happy to find the photos, but they don’t belong here. I can’t keep them. I stuff everything back in the box, resisting the urge to rummage further through it. I slide it back in the closet, close the doors, and my eyes.

I was born in Carrick. I killed a man. I’m in Élique.

I open the doors again. The box is gone. Satisfied, I go back to work.

•

You’d think I would know better by now. That I’d have learned my lesson. That I’d at least have the decency to be worried whether my presence was damaging this reality, too, with parts of my other lives seeping through the cracks.

If I were wise I’d keep focusing more closely on the world around me, to ground myself and to watch for any further evidence of deterioration. The only intrusions so far have been some thoughts and the box, small things in the grand scheme of things, all very closely related to me. It’d be quite something else if a Concorde soared over Delphe and crash-landed in Visène.

If I were wise I’d consider my time to be a precious commodity. I’d resolve to risk a burglary of the herbal shop, now empty for so long, or at least an inquiry at the Arbiter’s Office regarding the property and its eligibility for sale. I ran a cobbler’s business there once before; I might reasonably be interested in doing so again.

You know me well enough by now to know that I don’t do any of these things, and that you probably wouldn’t either. Not really. We like to think that we’re alert and responsible and, true, we very often are. But even more often we let ourselves be seduced into complacency.

That’s what I am. Really, when I think about it. I’m not comfortable here, I’m not content.

It’s complacency that has me donning my new boots, now finally worn in a bit, and the new firm-shouldered jacket I bought with this week’s wages. My employer gave me free run of his tables so I could hem and trimthe garment to fit me perfectly.

My landlady is visibly flustered a moment when I step out of my room and show off my new attire, gaping like a fish before she remembers what sort of person she is and admonishes me for my wastefulness and decadence.

It’s complacency that puts a spring in my step as I cross the city at dusk, to find that little chandler’s shop and see if sweet Erah can light my candle.

And familiar as I am with the city now, confident as I am to take a back-alley shortcut at this time of day, it’s complacency that causes me to ignore the scent of cannonweed.

My assailant sets upon me from above. I hear the rustling of the cloak, feel the displacement of the air, and at least I’m not so complacent that I’ve lost all my instincts. I sidestep, whirling to put my back to the wall and crouch in the only combat pose I know, fumbling in my pocket for a dull knife that’s still better than noen.

The cloaked figure lands and springs forward immediately, black cloth swirling like ink dropped in water. I pull out my knife just in time to have it kicked from my paw, I swing out a fist and hit nothing but air, I sweep my leg to trip my attacker, but he’s already jumped up to kick me in my unprotected chest.

I crash against the brick wall behind me, knocking my head hard. Dazed, I finally see how small the cloaked figure is. No taller than my chin, slender as my landlady. My observation doesn’t last long, because a moment later the black whirl springs at me again, this time wrapping their arms and legs around my body as tightly as Erah at the height of our rut.

“Come with me,” a soft voice hisses, and my arms flail as I grow dizzy. The world seems to be rolling around me... No. It is rolling around me. The cobblestones beneath my new boots heave like the boat my father took me fishing on; the buildings around me warp and bend like the Ocrese contortionists that once came to Carrick.

“Don’t fight it, Game.”

•

I feel like I’m being pulled. I feel light. I lose my footing and my boots leave the ground, leave Élique and my plans with Erah.

I’m on my back. My lips are numb, my limbs tingle as if waking from sleep. Warmth seeps into my body, and bright light pierces my eyes when I open them. I smell salt. I hear the screeching of birds.

Allon is sitting next to me. She still has her hood up, she still smells of cannonweed, but I know it’s her. I knew it the second I landed in the sand.

“Don’t try to move just yet. You haven’t been through this before,” she says, untying the laces of her cloak. It’s warm, but the breeze is refreshing, and the soft lapping of the waves is so soothing. “I’m sorry I had to do that. I couldn’t take the risk that you’d leave.”

English isn’t her first language. Her accent is very subtle, but it’s there. Can’t place it, though. “Allon.”

“Yep.”

It’s nice here, on the beach. Even as the tingling leaves my limbs I don’t feel like getting up, I just want to lie on the warm sand in the warm sun. Even her laugh is warm.

“Feels good, huh? I don’t know what it is about this place, but it has that effect on me too.”

I bring up my paw to shield my eyes from the sun and turn to look at her. She’s shrugged off her cloak, and her golden born pelt gleams in the sun. She’s a lioness, of course she is. She was always a lioness. The only other feline in Carrick.

“Game, I’m just going to lay it out for you. You can leave if you want, you know how. You’ll have to leave your body behind here, though, so you won’t be able to go back to Élique until I teach you how. But if you want to leave, you can go anywhere else.”

I sit up and peel off my green jacket. It’s stained from knocking against the damp wall of the alley, but my landlady can wash that for me. It isn’t torn. “You’re like me, aren’t you?”

She nods. Somewhere I know that I should be feeling a rush of emotion and confusion; I can feel anger and panic and elation whispering at the fringes of my mind. But the salt air tastes so good, and the sun is so warm. The calm is overpowering.

“I thought I was the only one,” she says. “I could slip into other lives, other worlds. It was scary at first. Later it was exciting. Then painful. Was it like that for you too?”

My turn to nod. I hug my knees, just as she does, and together we look out over a blue-green ocean. Gull shit splashes on my shoulder, but it can’t ruin the overwhelming calm or distract me from the horizon. “One day I remembered you, Allon. I’d never remembered you before, but one day, I knew that we’d grown up together.”

“In that town, right? Carrick? I’d never been to that world before, but as soon as I arrived, I remembered you too. At first I thought it was just one of those little differences between my lives, but it felt... important, somehow.”

I crack a smile. “You stole my page from the Book, didn’t you?”

She leans in and bumps my shoulder with hers, just as she used to when we’d sit high up in a tree and look over our town. “I was in a hurry! I didn’t have time to copy it. But I took my page, too, so you’d know it was me.”

“I, uh, never made that connection,” I say, sheepishly and she laughs at me. It feels good, to have a friend.

You know how people say “I feel like I’ve known you my whole life?” That. Right there. I just met her, but I’ve known her my whole life. I don’t fight the memories or the familiarity, I see no reason to. Since our stories crossed a few weeks ago, we did grow up together in Carrick, we are friends.

“Once I knew your full name I went looking for you in other worlds. More advanced ones where I could search for you. I found you, once, in 2017, but...” She looks at me, a little sorrowful, and I reassure her with a squeeze of her shoulder.

“Suicide, in a mental hospital. I think it was for the best.” She nods. She’s the only person in the universe who could understand what I mean. “So you physically brought me here, huh? My clothes and all. I didn’t know that was possible.”

“It’s not easy, let me tell you,” Allon says, stretching her arms out, wincing at an ache. “Especially if you go to a world where there’s already a version of you running around.”

“I once visited 2017 after I died there. It was weird, I was just... floating.”

“That’s why you’ve got to bring a body, dolt,” she says and bumps me with her shoulder again. “I’ve never died before. What’s it like?”

“Oh, I wasn’t... I wasn’t myself when I died. I watched it happen.”

I can tell from her look that she doesn’t understand, but she drops the subject. She knows I can’t explain it to her in a way she’d understand. There’s so much we can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

“I never thought I was crazy,” I say, and she snorts an almost bitter laugh. “You did?”

“By the sinners, you bet I did. I thought I was losing my mind. Fortunately, heroine’s easy to find in the seventies if you’ve got nice boobs.” I squeeze her shoulder again. I never considered my life to be particularly blessed, but she’s making me realize I could have had it much worse. “That was a pretty bad time. Eventually I figured out other opiates worked just as well to keep me tethered. Weaned myself off the shots, shacked up with a med student who could hustle me a supply of pills.”

“You slept with him for drugs? Doesn’t sound like much of an improvement, Ally.” That’s what I used to call her, even though I know she hates it, and with a laugh she shoves me into the sand. I sprawl, and giggle, and enjoy the sun on my face. I shut my mouth, fearing further attacks from the wheeling seagulls overhead.

“It wasn’t like that, not even at first. We were dating, I told him I had a dependency, he helped me manage it.”

It doesn’t take a detective to notice a young woman growing wistful at the mention of a man while she rubs an empty ring finger. “You married him.”

“It was a teenaged wedding, and the old folks wished them well,” she sings. I don’t join in even though I know the words; it’s not that kind of situation. “Five years. He graduated, I became a doctor’s wife, and one day I came home to find him doing what doctors do with bimbo interns.”

I take her paw in mine and squeeze it. “Couldn’t get any more pills after you divorced him?”

“Didn’t try. I didn’t want to stick around. As soon as the drugs left my system I left. Hopped around, had some fun for a while. Stupid, self-destructive stuff, really. I started to feel bad about what I was doing, you know? I was being careless, messing up different lives of mine. And I thought, you know, they’re my lives, I can do what I want. But I couldn’t stop feeling crummy about it. Then one day I found myself in Élique, and remembered you.”

“Five weeks ago? Six?”

“Sounds about right. Listen, I’m a little thirsty, and there’s no drinkable water around for miles. You wanna go back to Élique and buy an old friend a beer?”

I grin and hop to my feet, snatching my jacket up and shaking the sand out of it. I hold out my paw, and she takes me back to the City.

•

The tavern’s ale isn’t particularly tasty, but at least it washes away the lingering taste of vomit. When we landed back in the alley I immediately slumped to the wall and heaved up my dinner, but at least I wasn’t paralysed like I was on the beach. Allon laughed at me and, weakly, I gave her the finger. She’s the only person in the world right now who understands what that gesture means.

I don’t tell her my story, not just yet, and she doesn’t press. That’s the advantage of having grown up with someone you just met; you understand each other. She knows I’ll tell her when I’m ready, but for now we simply revel in companionship, knowing we’re not alone.

We wonder why our stories crossed here and not elsewhere. She was once born in 1975, about the same time that that Mike and Doris found me in Cattewick, Wisconsin. I don’t remember her there, which makes sense since she was born in Lyons, France.

The only thing I tell her about John is that I had my own heartbreak five or six weeks ago, and I fled too, and we agree that maybe our emotional state built some sort of bond. But I was an old man in a lighthouse when it happend (I neglect to tell her I was hurtling to my death at the time) and she’d just arrived in this world for the first time. So we don’t know for sure.

But that’s fine. Both of us have grown used to that aspect of our condition: the impossibility of knowing.

Over our ale we still explore the possibilities. What if she had found a version of me, but one that was just living that life, without me in his head? Would that version of me also be able to shift between the stories of my life? Heady stuff to discuss, circumspectly and quietly, in a crowded tavern over some cheap ale.

She invites me back to her place. Of course she owns the herbal shop. She left it to go find me, remembering her youth in Carrick. “You never thought about breaking in?” she asks, unlocking the door and walking in with obvious relief. She’s been on the road for weeks, after all.

“Thought about it. Then I got a job and scored some pretty sweet tail in the night-trade quarter, and kind of forgot. Man, I love how this place smells.”

There’s a wooden bench with soft, blue-striped upholstry, and I throw myself back on it in utter relaxation. “Make yourself at home, will you?” she says with a sneer, lighting the ceiling-lamp and a few candles. “Night trade, huh? Is that where you were going when I found you in the alley? Sneaking off to the weavers?”

“Fuck off!” I toss a cushion at her. The lioness effortlessly snatches it out of the air and tosses it back to me. “I’m a chandler man, if you must know.”

“Always figured that about you, even when you were chasing girls back home... Carrick. In Carrick, I man. God damn, it’s still weird. It feels good not to have to worry about my language, though. That always trips me up.”

“I know, right?” I stand up when I see her stacking some firewood in the hearth, and head into her kitchen to see where she keeps her water pails. It smells fine as I fill the kettle, but she’s been gone for weeks. “Best boil it for a while,” I say as I hand her the kettle. She sticks out her tongue at me and hangs the kettle over the fire. “But you’re totally right. I’ll be talking to a sailor or a soldier or whatever, and we’ll just be having a conversation, and then I’ll blurt out something stupid about family stars or a Jeff Bridges quote.”

“The Dude abides?”

“The Dude abides.”

“Man, I miss weed. She pours us each a cup of tea and we sit on the bench for a while, just leaning against each other. “I like it here. I remember liking it, I mean. But yeah. I could really go for a nice fat one right now. What do you miss most?”

“From where? Twentieth century?”

“Let’s go with that.”

I don’t need to think long. “Toilet paper.”

We have our tea and chat a little longer, but the night is pushing on and we both have to work in the morning. I know, it sounds ridiculous: at last I have a companion, a fellow master of reality and we’re turning in early because we have jobs in a world that we can just abandon at any time. Hell, for Allon this place didn’t even exist until a few weeks ago.

Did you ever read books as a kid about people being magically whisked away to far-off lands for amazing advantures? They’d usually return home, wiser and stronger. But you never read about what they do the next day. How they have to take a shower, brush their teeth, fill out their taxes.

It’s just like I said before. There’s something so comforting about knowing what you’re supposed to do.

•

I know better than to invite Allon up to my room; my landlady would freak out. I also know better than to decline her offer to cook dinner, even though she fusses about how we “young people” are always bustling about and haven’t any time for the ordinary things in life.

The kitchen pump fails that evening, and I bravely head to the basement to take a look. Fortunately the problem is simple. I notice the leak immediately when I call up for the widow to work the pump; a leather gasket has burst, probably due to rats.

I leave my inner door unlatched so she can use my pump and take the gasket with me. I’l can take it to work tomorrow and make another with the scraps left over from my boots. I’m a pretty good tennant, all considered.

After dinner I stop by Allon’s. The advantage of a herb shop is that most of her wares are dry goods. All her stock was in good condition so she could open the shutters in the morning and get back to business, getting some kids to run messages for her to wholesales for a little coin.

Her larder is empty so she took her meal at the tavern, and as we sit on her bench we talk about how oddly nice it is to have something ordinary to do, and a friend nearby to talk to. We’d be content to stay here, the absence of weed and toilet paper notwithstanding.

She slaps her knees. “All right, traveler. Time to show you a new trick.”

“Oh god, not that full-body shifting thing. My landlady worked hard on that meal! I don’t want to spill it on the beach...”

The lioness is stern, looking just as fierce in her floral dress as she did in her traveling trousers and cloak. “No ifs or buts, buddy. One of these days you’re going to do it by accident, and then you can never come back here. You know how to move your mind, now we’re gonna practice moving your body.”

Allon takes my paws and pulls me to my feet. I groan and resist, rising only reluctantly. She leaves me standing uselessly while she closes the shutters and curtains. “First rule: observation. Just like peeing, you can’t do it with people watching.”

“Bitch, I got no problem with that. Get a bucket, I’ll show you!”

“Hush up, assclown. I’m serious: you cannot do it if you’re observed, goes for both departure and arrival. Animals don’t count, and apparently you and I don’t count either, but cameras do. I’ve never been able to do it any later than about the fifties.”

I interrupt her with a paw on her arm. “How long have you been doing this?”

She shrugs. “Couple of years, before I started shooting up. I take it you’re a late bloomer?”

I nod. “I started noticing it... Christ, it’s only been a few months. Two months. That’s all.”

Her grin is eager, excited. “Daddy-o, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The rabbit-hole goes pretty deep. You ready?”

I shake my body loose, and take a deep breath. She holds out her paws, and I take them. “Teach me, sensei.”

“As you wish, grasshopper! You have to keep two things in your mind at the same time. Your destination – it can be anything, any place, especially if you’ve never been there before.”

“Like the pyramids?” I ask excitedly, but she rolls her eyes and squeezes my paws.

“Observation, doofus. Do you think there’s ever been a time where someone wasn’t looking at those things, even for a moment?”

I think I do a decent job of hiding my disappointment. “So what’s the other thing I’ve got to keep in my mind?”

“Yourself. Your physical self. It helps to look at your feet or your paws. Think about what clothes you’re wearing. Doesn’t have to be too detailed, like what’s in your pocket. That’ll take care of itself. And this time you’ll have to think about a third thing: me. You’re leading this dance, and you’re gonna take me with you.”

I feel giddy with nerves. I feel like I’m taking my first swimming lesson, looking over the edge of the pool, clutching my mom’s paw. “What if I lose you? What if I don’t make it back?”

She shrugs, and squeezes. “Look, you can’t learn to fly without jumping off a cliff. If you lose me, try to come back here. You’ll have done it once already, so you should be able to manage it. And if you don’t... do you have a life in the nineties?”

I think a moment. “I remember leaving Wisconsin in ’91. June. I was on a Greyhound bus.”

“Perfect, that’s it then. In ’91 I was living in little town called Jonquière in Canada, the only A. Ley in a really thin phonebook, so you can find me in the directory. If you can’t make your way back here I’ll wait for you to call me in July ’91, deal?”

I shake my head. “No good, I was sixteen then, It must be ’96 there by now, ’97 maybe.”

She’s getting impatient, and rolls her eyes. “Dipshit, that doesn’t matter. You can slip into that life at any point after your last visit. If your last solid memory is of a Greyhound, think Greyhound. Then wait until July 1 and make a collect call to Quebec. I’ll be waiting for you.”

I cant my head. “I can do that?”

Exasperated, she squeezes my paws painfully hard. “Enough, dude! Fucking vamenos. Picture someplace, think about yourself, think about me and let’s go.”

I close my eyes and concentrte, until she clears her throat pointedly and I look into her eyes, bringing our joined paws up between us so I can see them.

I feel myself growing lighter, less meaningful, but I resist floating away completely. It’s hard to describe... It’s like carrying luggage. One of those roller cases you drag along behind you, you know? That’s how my body feels, and Allon too. Heavy, hard to carry while I’m lifting off, but I hold on to them regardless.

I’m doing well. The world changes around us. Not in any noticeable way, it’s not as if bits of Allon’s shop vanish or pieces of the destination appear. I’m not conscious of it, even when candle-light changes to sunlight. It all just stops being one thing and starts being another, and I don’t notice until I’m there.

Holding paws with Allon, on a lonely lighthouse, with a pink sunrise across the endless sea.

“I did it,” I whisper, but Allon pulls away and stumbles to the ground. I catch her arm before she can fall down the spiral staircase, and hold her while she pukes up her dinner.

“Wow,” she says as I help her to her feet. “I guess it’s rougher when you’re a passenger. Sorry I called you a pussy.” She wipes her lips with the back of her paw. “Where are we? You know this place?”

I walk to the rail and lean my elbows on it, flicking my tail behind me. “This is where I was when I first thought about you, Ally. I... Well, see for yourself.”

She joins me at the rail and follows my gaze down, clutching her paws to her muzzle when she sees the red-stained rocks below. “Oh my god! Game, did you–“

“I jumped. Heartbreak, guilt.” I turn my head to look at her, seeing her soft features, her large brown eyes, her gleaming pelt tinted pink by the sunrise. “You saved my life, girl. I was on the way down and suddenly there you were, bright as day, tucked away in my memories. I had to come and find you.”

We look at each other. She studies my face, I look at her eyes. She’s beautiful, really. Short and feisty, powerful and elegant. I don’t know if I’ve ever knwon a more beautiful woman.

Only an inch separates our noses. I can see her nostrils winking, feel her breath on my dry, parted lips. Below, the waves patiently wash the blood off the rocks.

But it doesn’t happen. Of course it doesn’t. That’s not what we are to each other. Both of us have emptiness inside us, but a kiss wouldn’t fill it.

So neither of us moves closer, and our lips don’t meet. And I can see in her eyes that she’s as glad about that as I am.

She takes my paw, and together, we go home.

•

“Wait, wait. You’re Allison?” I ask her, almost spraying the burger I’m chewing all over the table.

Moons – months have passed since Allon found me in the alley, and they’ve been as exciting as our mischievous childhood. We spend our evenings together and travel for brief intervals to new and private places. We have picnics on mountains and in valleys, dangle our legs over tall cliffs.

On the Rest Days, while all the upstanding believers of Élique go to Dictus for their chosen Sayer’s sermons, we sneak off to have other adventures. We make a sport of comparing the different versions of our lives, finding those where we were both alive at the same time and lived less than a day’s travel from one another.

We’re in a McDonald’s in New Delhi in 1987. I’m a highschooler, backpacking my way through the subcontinent; she’s in her forties, a German businesswoman overseeing the construction of a new shopping mall. It takes us some hours to find one another and indulge in some Muslim- and Hindu-friendly junk food for lunch.

The chicken burgers are actually damn tasty. I’m on my third one, listening intently while she tells a story of one of her escapades. The juiciest stories are always the ones from her travels after her husband, the doctor, cheated on her. She still harbors some guilt over being so careless and frivolous, but they do make for sensational stories.

I feel positively provincial by comparison. She’s experienced so many lives already, especially compared to my meager explorations, but what astonishes me the most is how very different they all are.

My lives have always followed similar patterns. I am always born in blood, abandoned, and named Game Kenna. I grow up in peace and relative solitude, and the only really different lives are the ones where I don’t meet John.

We ponder whether my inexperience keeps me gravitating to lives that are similar to what I know. We consider that I could maybe be bolder and find different and stranger selves, or that I could peek into the futures of some of the lives I’ve had.

I admit to some trepidation at that prospect, and she agrees it’s wise to be cautious. Besides, we have our little adventures to occupy us, and her scandalous stories.

Which brings us to the one she’s telling me over halal fast food in New Delhi. How she found herself in the early 21st century, in a relationship with a sensitive young man. Still reeling from her husband’s betrayal, she admits with some remorse that she immediately committed adultery.

When she mentions that the young man was a dog and a sculptor and that she had sex with his weasel roommate Kevin, I choke on my chickenburger.

“His name was John, wasn’t it? 2006?” I ask, too astonished to feel any other emotions. “He knew you as Allison. Wait, you slept with Kevin? How was it?”

Night falls quickly so close to the equator, but we don’t notice. Our conversation is a furious exchange of curiosity and wonder, wonder at the knowledge that these other versions of our lives were entwined as well.

In 2006 she was indeed the Allison, having changed her name when she turned eighteen. If she hadn’t gone angrily a-roving, with all the fury that hell hath not, the Allison that John knew wouldn’t have cheated on him, and he wouldn’t have been on the rebound when he saw me gaping in the street.

Hell, he probably wouldn’t have been on that street that day, and I’d just have gone home to unwrap the new iPod that Mrs Appleby had bought for me.

But as the conversation proceeds, I find myself feeling less and less of the curiosity and excitement I see in Allison – Allon’s beautiful eyes. I’ve been dreaming of John less and less, and between my job at the tailor, evenings with Allon I’ve had plenty to distract me. But I’m so, so far from over him.

Just as my employer cherishes and hates the painting of his wife for reminding him of the love he had and lost, I can’t rid myself of the memory of him eating an apple on the street, or of his shadow as he leaves me in his studio.

“Allon, I’ve... not here. Do you mind if we go?”

We’re thoughtful enough to each go back to where we’re staying in Delhi, so that our other selves don’t find themselves at a table together. We’re pretty sure that our stories in this world would work themselves out, that they’d remember some plausible reason to have met and taken lunch together, but neither of us are inclined to toy too much with innocent lives.

Even our own.

She’s already gone by the time I return to my body in her herbal shop. I take off my jacket and leave it on the bench, but when I arrive at our beach I actually wish I’d taken it with me. The sun is setting, more slowly than in Delhi, and the cold is coming in.

“You wanted to tell me something?” she asks, taking off her cloak and putting it around my shoulders; she’s wearing plenty of layers of clothing over her dress to ward her against the chill of dusk. “It sounded like it was a big deal.”

“It was. I loved John a lot, the first time I ever loved anyone like that. I know it sounds stupid, but it was a big deal,” I say, pulling her cloak tighter around me and smoothing my sleeves down again. “And I screwed it up. I was a dumb-ass playboy, then I met John and, I swear, I turned my life around then and there, but that shit caught up with me, and it ruined him.”

I tell her everything. I never told her about my dalliances before I met John; as a victim of adultery I was sure she didn’t want to hear how many marriages I’d risked or ruined. And I was right, too. She looks at me differently than before while I tell my story, about the men and women I bedded, about the miracle of finding John’s phone number amid lines of outbound calls on a forwarded telephone bill... About the horror I felt when I saw Mrs – no, by that time it was Ms – Appleby in my lover’s studio.

“I ain’t gonna judge you, bud. I do, but that’s just me being selfish, and I’ll get over it,” she says, as we once again sit on the beach, this time watching the moon. Just the one moon, which is comforting even though the moons of Delphe have started to grow on me. I don’t remember seeing the single moon quite so large in the sky, though. “I was a junkie, for fuck’s sake. Glass houses, and all that.”

I shake my head. “Ally, that’s not... There’s more.” I take a deep breath. I remember a few days ago, when I was hanging up my green jacket and thought, for a moment, that I saw the box in the corner of my closet again. And the night before, when I woke up and could swear I’d heard an ambulance siren outside my door.

“Things started... I don’t know, seeping through. I’m not talking about the usual stuff. Thoughts and visions and accidental slips into other worlds. I mean things that shouldn’t exist started existing, sometimes for a little while, but some of them stayed.”

Allon shakes her head. “Honey, that’s normal. Happens all the time. It’s subconscious; you bring in things from other places by accident. Thoughts, words, skills, objects–“

“You don’t understand, I didn’t bring them. They weren’t mind, they had nothing to do with me. A galleon – a clipper – crashed in the middle of Tennessee. And that day, when John walked out on me... Ally, I didn’t just run away because I couldn’t stand what I’d done with him. The world was falling apart.”

She lays her arm around my shoulder, so gentle, but there’s no stopping me. “A burning blimp came down over the city, and there were bats and a beehive – I did that, Ally, I broke that world to fucking pieces!”

She pulls me to her, and even though she isn’t a teenager any more I can understand why she had no trouble scoring heroine. Her breasts are nice. And her arms are comforting, and she smells like her shop. “Easy, now. Is that what you’ve been running from all this time? You think you have the power to actually destroy a whole world?”

Only when my breathing slows do I realize I’ve been panting, gasping. She strokes my ears, soothing me. She’s never done that before, not even in our half-real childhood. “Think about it, Game. You heard a believe-it-or-not story on the news and you saw some weird shit in a big city one day. Which turned out to be the worst day of your life. Can you think of a better recipe for blowing things out of proportion?”

I’m still trembling. Her cloak’s pretty thin. “It felt like an escalation. Like things got worse over time. The more I travelled, the more weird shit happened... I was punching holes in reality for kicks, polluting it.”

She kisses my ear. It’s a sweet kiss, like a big sister. I don’t know how old she is, not really. In this world she was born later than I was, but she was a lot older than I in Delhi... another time. I’ll think about that and talk with her about it another time. “When I first became aware of what I could do, I was in ’73. And I thought that was reality, that all the other places were dreams or parallel universes or other planes of consciousness or what have you – I was into sci-fi and LSD,” she says, snorting a chuckle. “I later learned that it was no more or less real than any other version, but my point is, it took a year for me to realize that. And I spent that year hopping in and out of there, into other lives and back. And my world didn’t come apart. It’s still there, I even visited it before I remembered you.”

She makes sense. She always had that knack. And she knew how to spoon-feed me her reason, one argument at a time. “It was a really bad day,” I admit, forcing a smile and she hugs me tightly to her really, really nice tits.

“So are you gonna try to go back?”

I shake my head, and she sighs. “No, Ally, you’re right, you’re – well, you’re probably right. But I can’t go back there. If there’s even the slightest chance I could make things worse...” It’s my turn to sigh. “There’s nothing there for me, anyhow.”

I expect her to start in on me again, to tell me I’m being stupid and I should go and talk to John. She has a way of making things sound simple. And as childish as it is, I start preparing a more detailed timeline of the events that led John to walk out on me, and reasons why there’s no fixing the damage I did to him... But she stays quiet. She just rocks me on her lap.

“Tell you what. You need a pick-me-up. And it’s all well and good, us having these little adventures, but you’re a growing boy with manly, manly needs, right?”

The bitch actually tickles me, and god damn, she’s good at it. I squal like a kitten and curl up but she’s stronger than she looks and I can’t defend my flanks well enough no matter how hard I try. “Stop, stop, I surrender!”

She laughs and kisses my ears again. “Give me my cloak back. Go back to Élique, pocket some of your hard-earned cash and see if that chandler raccoon you’ve been talking about has an opening for you. You need to lighten up, dude!”

“That... Ally, that’s a great fucking idea.”

“Obviously. I’m serious about my cloak, it’s getting cold. I’m gonna chill out here for a while, and I’ll see you at the usual time tomorrow. Sound good?”

I leave without handing her back her cloak. I let it slip away as I fade back into her shop. I wonder what it looked like, to her, having me vanish from her lap and leaving the cloak behind, but I bet it was pretty cool.

I know how to make an exit.

•

I walk right past Erah’s place at first; the candles are unlit, and the narrow little building is hard to notice without their light. I backtrack, my heart sinking a little at the thought that he’s already occupied.

Hell, Game, that’s childish. You think he’d just lounge around, turning away customers until you felt like dropping by?

My spirits lift when the glow of a candle grows beyond the shop’s windows as I approach. Erah shows a blushing bay colt to the door, giving him a kiss on the cheek before he notices me, quickly pulls his hood up and hurries away.

Erah’s laughing as I approach, and point over my shoulder. “First-timer?”

The raccoon, once again dressed only in that red-sashed kilt, tilts his head at my expression, but he soon understands. “Definitely his first time with a male, possibly his first time at all. Hello, Vale, it’s lovely to see you again!” he says, and greets me with a paw on the shoulder and a kiss on the cheek. “I haven’t had a chance to wash, though. Perhaps you’d like to take a stroll, and come back after? I promise I won’t light the candles until you return, you won’t find a closed door waiting for you.”

I cup his chin and tilt his snout up, leaning in to lick his lips. “I’m not in a clean sort of mood, Erah.” I press myself against him to let him feel the firmness of my resolve, and he steps aside to let me into his shop.

The chandler portion of his enterprise is far better furnished than it was in my first visit. The shelves are stacked with candles of all sorts, many of them tinted with interesting marbled patterns. “Are these your work?”

“At the hosue in Visène I’d often help out in the shop to make a little extra coin, once I’d decided to aim for a business of my own.”

I lean in to a cluster of sturdy, thick columns, and sniff the faint scent of roses. I think Allon would like these, and make a note to buy some from the raccoon after we’re done. “This is quality stuff, dude. You could make a pretty decent living just selling these, if you opened up shop in the daytime.”

He presses behind me, sliding his paws under my jacket, along my chest, then down to the front of my breeches. “I find an indecent living to be much more rewarding.” Out of habit, I push back against him, but stop when I feel the pronounced absence of his arousal. I feel a little silly, having forgotten that, but he squeezes me reassuringly.

“I must thank you for pointing out that my condition is unexpected, here. I made a point to make that clear to the customers before taking them upstairs; I’d have been mortified if I’d had to inform someone I wouldn’t be able to render the service they desired after I’d given them my tea. In fact,” he says, taking me by the paw and leading me up the stairs, “I’ve found it on occasion to be an asset. It’s particularly popular among canines. There’s this thing they like to do, where–“

“Thanks!” I blurt hoarsely, and cup my muzzle as I clear my throat. “No sweat, bud. I think I’ll manage just peachy without hearing that shit.”

Why am I talking like this? I can see the raccoon’s confusion, though he’s too polite and professional to remark on it. I take a deep breath, and focus on his snug little upstairs den. The pile of furs where he showed me the full measure of his attention, the cushions and the tea set, the colorful, wispy drapes pinned to the walls and the sloping ceailing.

The only new addition is a small table with an hourglass in the corner, a little less than half its sand still pooled in the upper half, drizzling away. Errah follows my gaze. “As you say, sir, he was a first-timer. If you like, I can add the measure of his unspet time to your hour? A courtesy to a valued customer.”

It’s sweet of him, but something isn’t working. I don’t... I’m not feeling it tonight. I’m horny as all get-out – my apetites are as enflamed as – fuck it. This isn’t working.

Even the scent of eager sex that lingers in the air, still fresh and honest on his half-naked body, can’t pull me into the moment. It’s not a turn-off, to smell the evidence of other people’s lust, it’s quite the opposite. But I feel disconnected, somehow, like maybe I left the stove on at home.

His paws are on my shoulders, and I’m about to apologize to him for weirding out on him, trying to find the proper way to say it in a Carrick-born boy’s parlance, but he silences me with a kiss. “Be at ease, sir. You’re troubled, and you needn’t apologize. You can call on me another night.”

I lean my forehead against his, putting my paws on his hips. “Your insight is a balm, thank you. It’s not you, it’s me – oh, fuck... Errah, please know that my craving for you is undimmed. My heart is in greater turmoil than I thought.”

His smile is so gentle, his attention to me unwavering. He’d have made someone a fine husband if he hadn’t made that sacrifice for his trade. He puts his paws on my chest, feeling the beating within it for a moment before he looks up at me again. “The heart is a fickle thing, sir, faithful to no man’s command. You should find your rest and let it reveal its concerns to you.”

I sigh, frustrated, but grateful for his understanding. “Thank you, Errah. Thank you.”

“But sir? If you’ll pardon my forwardness, I think you’d find it easier if other pressures were lifted from you,” he says, without being coy, as he lowers his paw to my groin. “There is sand left on the first-timer’s coin, sir; you needn’t disrobe or draw your purse. Will you tarry a few moments more and let me tend to this for you, before you go?”

I’m hard as a pipe, despite the vague, confusing emotions. I know it’s a vulgar thing, but he’s right. I would feel better if I didn’t have that distraction. He senses my assent before I even speak it, and takes me by the waist to sit me down on one of those cushions. He splays himself between my legs, pushing my thighs apart to make himself comfortable, looking so very modest with his legs curled beneath him and his kilt wrapped so chastely about his shapely waist...

He unfastens my breeches and quietly practices his art upon me, skillfully, effortlessly. It doesn’t take him long at all, and though I’m no less confused when he sees me out, licking his lips, I do feel much, much better.

•

The sense of unease is still with me when I awake. I work the pump in my room and wash myself for the day, I take breakfast with my landlady and make perfunctory conversation with her.

At work, while hemming moth-damaged winter dresses, the tailor broaches the topic of expanding into the cordwainery business and elevating my wages if I think I can handle the extra work of shoe-making. I thank him for the offer and say I’ll consider it, returning to my work. I shouldn’t have been so curt with him; despite the brutish figure the bull cuts he’s a creature of great sensitivity and delicacy.

Why couldn’t thoughts and words like this have come last night, with Errah?

I’ll make amends with him tomorrow. Today, it’s best if I speak as little as possible to anyone until I can talk to Allon. Day’s end can’t come soon enough.

As soon as the last customer departs I rise and make apologies, asking whether he minds if I take my leave a little early. Like Errah, he’s noticed my odd humour and bids me a good night, stopping me at the door to tell me in a soft voice that when he’s troubled, he finds solace in conversation with a Sayer of his acquaintance.

He tells me the name of this Sayer and where I can find him if his chapel is closed, and I thank him, and forget immediately.

I feel an unease. I have no other word for it. It defies definition or explanation. All I know about it, is that it’s mounting, and rapidly. It takes all my self-control to take the time to knock on the widow’s door and tell her I can’t join her for dinner tonight. She masks her disappointment well, and I mark yet one more thing I’ll need to make apology for in the morning, when I’ve sorted my feelings out.

I try not to run to the herbal shop, but it’s a hard impulse to resist. There she is. She lifts the last of the fragrant bundles of tea-leaves that she displays outside her shop during the day, about to take it inside when she hears my footfalls amid the thinning crowd.

She turns and smiles at me. I’m relieved, but the unease only grows, like a rustworm in my belly. “Allon,” I say, “I couldn’t wait to see you.”

“Evidently, good sir. You risk quite the scandal by coming to my door without the cloak of night. Shall we lave the gossips’ parched tongues and take our supper together?”

I shake my head at her. “Ally, I need to talk to you, I’m all kinds of fucked up. Can we go to the beach?” I ask, stepping through her door.

“Game Kenna, catch yourself on!” she says sternly, following me into the shop and setting her bundle aside to fume at me. “Rest her soul, Doria surely didn’t raise a foul-mouthed lout, did she? And stepping through a lady’s door without an invitation. Shame!”

I’m confused, but only until I look at the lioness. Really look.

She’s not there.

Her body is there, and the mind of the Carrick-born girl who came to the City and worked as a herbalist, but the feisty chick whose life was marked by heroine and heartbreak is nowhere to be seen in her eyes.

She’s not there. I know it, but I try anyway. Stepping to the side, out of view of the windows and anyone passing, I try to leave, but the lightness won’t come. She’s looking at me – with rising anger, I might add – and you can’t leave when someone’s looking at you.

I make a quick and meaningless apology that does nothing to stop her fuming, and run around the corner and up the stairs, bolting both doors to my room, slumping against the door to catch my breath.

Where the fuck are you, Ally?

I’ve been living here so long, and with so many distractions, I’ve forgotten that it’s just one more story, one more version of the story of my life. It has its own plot, its characters navigate their own way through it. And even when Allon and I, the real Allon and the real me, make strange choices while we’re wearing these bodies, the story sorts itself out after we leave.

This other Allon remembers me visiting her every evening, surely, showing me the hospitality of her home. She remembers closing the curtains every time, and no doubt remembers some perfectly chaste reason for doing so.

In her mind, we’re childhood friends who encountered one another in this city after many years apart, and have enjoyed one another’s company in the evenings since. Given how hurt she was by my discourtesy, I think maybe there’s an aspect of budding romance to our relationship.

Could this version of her remember encouraging me to seek out Errah, too? Maybe that’s why she was so prickly.

And hell, what does that say about me! This Game was on his own path. His vengeance was satisfied, he was on the road to... somewhere. See, I can’t even remember what he was going to do next if I hadn’t slipped into his head and taken over.

What right do I have to play with these lives? Allon made it seem so simple, like it was just some fun, and I needed some fun so badly I just rolled right on along.

Sure, we made an effort not to interfere too much with the lives we took, but was it enough? We stole days from those folks, occasionally making excuses to people around them for shirking whatever obligations they had that day, but just as often we wouldn’t bother. After we left, the story would work itself out. But was it enough? Who knows what opportunities they missed, or what bridges they burned, just because Ally and I were enjoying an afternoon adventure.

I remember Missile as clearly as Mistle, I remember Mitchell and Doreen as clearly as Mike and Doris, Mickell and Doria. All of them are real, all the time, dozens or hundreds or trillions of versions my story, all ticking along merrily, except I had to go and notice.

I noticed. I? There’s a philosophical conundrum, isn’t it? What the hell am I? Am I that heartbroken fuckup from 2006? Hell, that body is still in that world, with a mind not much different from mine except he’s still playing his part on that stage.

He’s living his life just fine without me. They all are. I’m nothing but an interloper, an imposition, thief of their time and will.

I killed that poor old fart in the lighthouse. He didn’t choose to jump off the cliff; hell, I remember how badly he didn’t want to go up those stairs again. He might have had another few years ahead of him, enjoying his peace and quiet, conversing only when the town sent him a new supply of food, water, tea and lamp-oil. One day, maybe, a stranger would knock on his door, and would announce herself to be his granddaughter and his withered old heart would grow right back.

Now it’s smeared over the rocks. I sent him plunging down the cliff because I was blue, and on the way down I got distracted and just wandered off, leaving him to his own devices.

What were those last seconds like, for him? Did he remember feeling the urge to end his life? Did those feel like his thoughts, or did he sense that they were forced on him because his story was compensating for my actions?

Can I do anything without fucking up someone’s life?

I wonder how many versions of my life took a turn for a worse after I visited them. And how many of the other players in those stories came out poorer for knowing me. Even if it’s only John, that’s enough.

And the stories of my lives are sensitive to each other. I’ve seen that. While the differences may be vast in circumstance, most of the time these stories try very hard to play out along similar lines. Christ, I hadn’t thought of that. If I hurt my John so badly in the life I left, how many other Johns did the other Games wound just as deeply?

God, listen to me. This must be why Allon left. I’ve been using her all this time, probing her for stories and new ideas for adventures and contributing nothing but half-told anecdotes, withheld facts, and endless musings on my own insecurities and inadequacies.

And then I had to show off, and vanish from her lap, leaving her cloak behind. Oh god, what if that hurt her? Killed her? We’ve only ever touched to travel together, we always stood apart to travel separately.

She was holding me when I punched through the fabric of reality. I’ve never seen what it even looks like when she disappears. Is there a flash? An explosion? Was there a sudden rush of radiation when I left that set her cloak on fire and vaporized her body? Oh god, oh god...

•

No.

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait. This is wrong.

That’s not me. I’m not insecure and I’m not inadequate. These feelings are coming from somewhere else, I can feel that. Another version of me is feeling them so strongly they radiate across realities and into my brain.

I push it gently back, and this fog of uncertainty starts to thin, and I can’t explain it, but I get a clearer picture of what I am. These foreign thoughts and worries are an extension of the unease that came over me yesterday and grew until I saw Allon’s empty eyes. But as I push them aside, I notice that there are other emotions, too, that aren’t directly mine.

It’s like a jar of different-colored candy. Is it a jar of blue candy with other colors mixed in, or yellow candy with other colors mixed in? You don’t know until you start pulling out the ones that don’t feel like they belong.

And as I sift through my own thoughts, picking away the stew of bleed-through emotions, from this version of me, from others I’ve visited and from others still I haven’t yet experienced, I find some immovable rocks amid them. If there is a true me, these are his thoughts.

First: I’m not crazy.

Second: I am the master of my goddamn universe.

Whoever this whiny bitch is whose depression seeped into my brain, he’s wrong. Not about me fucking up people’s lives – I mean, who doesn’t do that at some point in their life? He’s wrong about the idea that I’m helpless, or that I’m only a force of destruction. I can make things happen, and if I’m careful, they can be good things.

Would my English counterpart have had the stones to sneak through the estate and find John’s bed? And if John had come to find him, would he have been able to overcome his nerves long enough to get it up? I don’t think so, and if you harbor any doubts about that, I politely remind you that I am him. So I’d know.

These other versions aren’t toys. They’re tools, they’re lessons. Across the vast expanse of time, among the brilliant, gleaming facets of my fragmented realities, these stories thrummed together in such harmony that I became, in a small but monumental way, aware.

I understood something fundamental about my universe, something that only one other person I know, in all of existence, understood too.

She didn’t leave me, she never would. I don’t know where she is, or what she’s doing, but I’ll find her. And all that other shit I was whining about? I’m going to fix that too.

I may not be able to go back and undo any actions in any stories... but hell, if I could do that, what would be the point of living those stories in the first place?

Life would be meaningless if your decisions carried no weight.

So I’ll do what everyone has always done. I’ll try to understand what I did wrong and try to imagine what I can do to make things better. That’s it. That’s all anyone can do, whether they’re a regular Joe or a reality-hopping demigod.

You fuck up, you learn, you f?i?x — do better.

That’s the game of life.