FULL BLEED: THE GRANITE SLAP

So there's gonna be a little text from me before the main feature. Then the main feature. You can punch out then or you can stick around to hear the joke explained, since precious few have gotten it in the ten or so years that this story has been out in the wild.

This is "Chunked" which was a story that I wrote for in response to an anthology call that was put out by an indie publisher, I think in late 2014 or early 2015. I dunno. It's been a long time. I wrote it and was pretty sure that they'd pass just like every other anthology had passed on all my work previously. I was getting used to that feeling.

Instead of that happening, the publisher accepted the story. A few minor changes. And it went into the volume of future-set SF with a Lovecraftian/Cthulhu mythos grounding. I went on to work with them a couple more times and they put out the first printing of The Queen of No Tomorrows. Then we parted ways.

I will say that when they accepted the book that was to be The Queen of No Tomorrows, I kinda sold it on being related to this story. I, in short, mostly lied about that. I was much more interested in that story and this one was a one-off and a mean joke at that. I didn't see much value in it. Until I let my brain chew on it in the background for awhile. And now it actually does have a place in the Hazeland setting. Not gonna say how, because I'm not even sure things will get to that point. But there'd certainly be no Hazeland books if this story hadn't come out. So I guess it's important in that regard.

On with the show.

CHUNKED

by Matt Maxwell

Originally printed in Tomorrow's Cthulhu from Broken Eye Books. 2015, I believe.

This text is somewhat modified from that printing and includes a passage that was removed to fit their word counts. I'm not big on word counts.

I was on the ship before I knew its name.

The deckhand who led me on board was tall and bony and wrapped in a leather poncho. He walked stooped and black like a bat wrapping itself with its wings against the warm wet.

"Thought it wasn't supposed to rain in LA," he said as he half-turned to regard the sky with a glare that could draw blood at a distance.

Past the congeries of light on the shore, the open steel structures of the cranes lined up like skeleton hands. Then night swallowed everything.

"We're not in Los Angeles," I said as I pulled my own jacket tight. "This is Terminal Island, Long Beach."

"First name suits it better." His scowl turned to mocking, lips pulled back enough to show the greening pink of his gums atop yellowed teeth. "How far away is LA?"

"Too close." I strained to match the action of the boat as I stepped off the ladder. My hesitation cost me some dignity as I waited too long to drop to the dirty white launch deck.

Above me, the deckhand settled over the controls, digesting them. He hadn't heard my fall or didn't care, instead drawing a finger out of his mouth to pull out something that had stuck between his teeth.

His head swiveled back. "Why would anyone not working want to come on board a flenser, anyways?" Suspicion seethed out of the centers of his eyes. "Not like we run all-inclusives, y'know?"

"Survey for Essential Affairs," I said then fidgeted audibly with the bag. "Cleared with your captain or we wouldn't be here."

"Oh sure, he's satisfied. Just I was curious on my own." He made a smacking sound like the last of lunch going down. "Thought you guys were a myth."

"Too real, I assure you. I observe. I write." The words came out clumsy, slippery as my feet had been on the wet aluminum steps where the grip-tape had worn out.

He swept slitted eyes up and down me like I said I was from Internal Revenue. "Where's your computer?" Then he settled back on his heels and laughed while the rain dripped off his folded bat-cape. He was paid well enough to wear gaunt leathers. But then, he was close to the source.

"It all goes on the phone," I offered. The luminous surface went bright as I swiped it. "I just dictate then let the machine format it."

"More like you're a talker then." His blue eyes laughed above his long yellow teeth. "And what's that on your lock screen, man? It's all blurry and fuzzy."

My eye went to it. The picture was black and white and grainy, a lake surface disturbed by elliptical ripples. In the center of it was a thing that looked like a long curved neck with a tiny head atop it. It suggested motion, of something much larger and barely seen, only just below the surface.

"Oh, that. It's the Loch Ness Monster. The 'Surgeon's photograph'. Almost a hundred years old."

"Kinda odd choice. Me? I got a rotating selection of hot-tots." He ran his eyes up and down me. "You wouldn't make the cut." Then a chuckle. "Why that? History buff?"

Even under the rain, my neck flushed hot but I resisted the urge to fiddle with the collar. "I guess I wanted a reminder of when the essentials were just hoaxes." Like my position. Like my reason for being here, which even I couldn't fully articulate to myself.

"No hoaxes out here, son. Just wild Benthi-Treats waiting to be harvested. But if I see any real sea monsters, I'll be glad to point 'em out to you."

I hoped the Captain was friendlier.

Essential Affairs was a toothless department but there wasn't a single ship captain who'd been happy to see someone from the office step on board. At the same time, they couldn't afford to turn us away. Perception being nine-tenths and such. I was more often than not seen as an advocate for murderers and nightmares, hence the easy job openings. Big turnover in the department but a solid per diem and mostly boring work. Mostly.

Trick was that I no longer worked for them, though my credentials still seemed to carry weight with enough people to get me here. The captain didn't need to know that and with luck he'd never figure it out.

The ship loomed on top of the water, reflected in the greasy moonlight. Wet surface lurched slowly, twitching like an animal's lips during dream time. Yellow light spilled from the superstructure, catching steam and smoke from countless pipes and exhaust ducts. It made its own weather, leaving only glimpses of what might lay behind the mist. My eyes swept to the name on the hull, written in white block letters taller than a man. I slid down my glasses to read.

Something touched my shoulder and I jerked.

The deckhand laughed. "You're just a barrel of entertainment." He flinched and lifted his arms, wiggling his fingers "Ooooooo! I'm a scary monster!"

I sucked back a breath and willed my heart to stop rattling around in my chest.

"You okay?" His amusement cooled down to something harder. "Gotta be made of stronger stuff than that if you wanna step on board. The stuff we catch—"

"I'm well aware of that," I snapped. "And I'll be fine." The pulse rushing through my neck put a small lie to that.

Drizzle ran down the black of his hood and he nodded like he knew I was lying. "Okay, buddy. I mean, no shame in turning back. Hell, most folk wouldn't have even waited on the dock. I mean, they're happy to pop open a cup and eat it cold, but—"

"Knowing where it comes from is another thing."

"Sure enough," he said as he docked the craft at the retractable landing.

I looked up at the metal angles and watched the water sheeting off of the hull, like it had just been thrust up from the ocean floor, shedding the Pacific as it settled on the surface.

-

The captain was a big man, weight pressing at the seams of the uniform shirt that was taut beneath the big orange overcoat. It was stained with something, a color that hovered uneasily between moldy green and dirty brown.

"Welcome aboard meester Lou-ellyn," he said with an accent so heavy that it had its own gravitational pull. His lips twitched with the words he held back.

"Thanks," I said as I wiped my glasses dry and replaced them. "Not like Russia out there, right?" I pointed to the rain slicked windows, yellow drops hanging and glittering in the corners.

His frown could have curdled blood to scabs. "Ukranian. Not Russian." He spat something from between his big teeth. It hissed into the corner and skittered away into the dark. His lips were stained green from Lulu.

"I'm very sorry." The phrase flipped out of my mouth, covered in stupid.

"It is okay, Lew-ellyn," he replied. "Ukraine only here now." His fist thudded against the shirt, right above his heart. He swiped at his lip with the back of his hand, not noticing the smear that it left. Brittle chips of something like insect shell hung in the spit.

"I wanted to, to thank you for letting me on board on such short notice."

He turned away with a shrug of shoulders that was lost under the stained orange fabric. "Your paperwork cleared. And—"

"And?" I stifled a cough, guts kicking. He knew.

The captain's eyes narrowed in mirth. "Never seen EA man actually do the job. Kind of myth. Was curious to see what kind of man would wander onto flenser." His hand swept around the deck, tiny shards of moisture on the windows glinting in the yellow light. When finished, he turned and his eyes were lit with a sharpness.

"I've been to the accelerator gateway in Blackrock, Nevada. And to the aeries and tanneries of Bangkok." I lay it out to him like an offering.

"Got my leathers from there. Ain't nothing cuts through these babies." The deckhand slapped his leg and the sound was sharp.

"So you are a Collector? Preserver? I hear about people like that. Want see them all."

He was closer to right than wrong but didn't need to be told that. "Hard to get a census on ships," I said after a moment. "And I wanted to see the final frontier. I mean, you're after the big one, right?"

"You hear correct." The Captain pointed at the helmsman and snapped his fingers. "We finish out Devil's Reef, every last one of those bastards. Even the big one down around the Horn. Day-something. Took a week to process. Quality product, too. Then we come up here."

Lit from below, the helmsman looked like a drowning man, downturned lips and protruding mouth painted in the emerald light of his console. "Locked in, Captain. Day at half power."

"A day?" I asked. "I thought it would be longer." The idea of it having been so close all this time ate at me suddenly. A hundred days would have been too close, once I'd known it was there.

"Is that fear?" The Captain laughed. "And you have been to Blackrock? Surely that was more frightening with the colors and the—"

"Geometries?"

"Yes. Ge-om-et-ries." He repeated the word, playing with each of the syllables like it was a piece of fatty tuna on his tongue. "The abstractions." His finger thrust out from his fist and he rotated it around his ear and whistled.

"It was safer than you'd think. There was a distance between us and the Essential at the gateway." I coughed and shifted on my feet. "A day?"

"Hah!" He fished out a translucent plastic bag from inside his jacket. The instrument lights shone through it, showing turquoise-colored gelatin. Suspended in that were strings of something like fungus, dotted with the metallic chitin I'd seen earlier.

Pure Lulu.

He took three fingers and shaped up a wad of it, then stuffed it into his cheek. Of course I knew what Lulu did. I also knew it wasn't for me. It made the walls reverberate and let you see around corners and in-between words. It was essential for Flensers, letting them find prey more easily. Letting them look at the things with the distance necessary to do the job and not go insane. Or only go insane in a way that let them keep being productive.

The captain offered the pouch to the helmsman, who took a generous helping and stuffed it underneath his cheek, getting back to the first knuckle of his hand as he did. His fingers came out wet and he stared ahead, uncaring.

Fingers reached past me as the deckhand leaned for a pinch as well. The bag stopped in front of me and the captain shook it. Contents jiggling, they caught the console lights like a stars in a splashed puddle.

I held up my hand, palm out.

"That stuff gets in the way of my reports."

"Your talking, you mean," said the deckhand. His words went flabby around the Lulu in his cheek.

"So, you want tour of the ship?" The captain clapped his hand on my shoulder and it felt like a dead cat there. "Quiet time. Won't last. Almost done processing. Caught one in Gulf of Mexico. So many legs." His eyes were black and dead as the Lulu took hold.

"A big one, I hope?"

"Only big ones left. Little ones easy to snap up. Use trawl-field. Big ones we need to fight. Old school." He struck a pose like drunken wrestler and more drool than growl escaped his lips.

"Trawl is a big drain on the power plant," the deckhand interrupted. Then he sucked his fingers, getting the last bits of it off. "So we have to use a grounding line instead. You time it right and there's no escaping. Come on. I'll show you." He shrugged his shoulder and rolled the gesture all the way out to his pointing finger, which wavered now.

"Go on. Nothing happen to you here, Lew-ellyn. You get home in one piece. I don't want mess. You don't want mess. We same." His hand landed on me hard. "Just don't sample the merchandise before processing. Have to work up to that." He winked and his lips pursed then smacked.

The captain's hand slid away and I could only feel relief.

-

There was no sense of motion any more, as if the world itself was moving around the ship now. I followed the deckhand down the metal stairs to the cargo hold, each step making a skeletal clang. The smell of the pushers was unbearable down here, even though fans worked to pump fresh air in, blowing hard enough to make me wish I'd worn a hat. Fetid and moist air swam up inside me but I held back the gag.

"You ever get used to it?" I asked my guide. "The smell?"

"What smell?"

"Why did I ask."

Maybe there wasn't any fresh air to be had, not with the clinging weather following the ship around.

I watched as a pusher sidled up to a pallet double-loaded with yellow barrels, each easily reaching up to my shoulder. They were held in place with sheets of shrinkwrap that had a hazy sheen of color and ghost-writing when seen at an angle. The pusher itself was a rough blackish cube, perhaps eight feet to an edge. It was tough to tell, as the shape only stayed mostly fixed. Two prongs extruded from its front face as it approached, like icicles melting in reverse. They slid under the pallet and the pusher surged, bunching up in the back and rippling the power forward as it lifted.

It moved along like a snail, but more quickly, at jogging speed even pushing tons. Individual motions disappeared into a fluid whole and it shoved the load along the empty floor, soundless but for a hushed scuffing. I expected a sheen of slime, was disappointed when it wasn't there. The overhead lights made the pusher's shadow monolithic as it surged.

I stared at the skin of the thing, which looked like stone, evidence of texture and striation that changed with every flexing.

"Ever had a problem with your pushers?" I asked.

"Naw. Them things are easy to control once you get them configured right. The looser the shape, the more likely they are to buck. Gotta keep 'em enclosed physically so they stay enclosed mentally, y'know? Come on."

He walked forward, taking us right to the pusher, without thought or hesitation. Maybe he didn't know about the incident in Sunnyvale or maybe he thought that couldn't happen here.

Something cold and oily coiled up in me but I knew that if I refused, I'd be tormented without end. It was just a simple machine, after all. No moving parts, even.

The deckhand in gaunt leathers stopped, impossibly skinny and black next to the thing. He then put his hand out and smacked it flat on the pusher. It didn't have skin, or it was all its skin. I missed that lecture.

"Come on. It's as close to touching an elephant as anyone like you is going to get these days."

"Land or sea?"

"Land elephants? You funnin' me?"

My steps echoed as the palm-slap died down in my ears. I took a breath and tried to rein in my raging pulse. Controlled, just like the pusher. My hand made contact and I jumped only a little when I felt the surface twitch under my touch, like an irritated horse shaking off a bluebottle. The whole thing moved under my palm, neither cold nor warm, roughness only perceived fleetingly.

"See? Perfectly safe."

"How are you…?" There was something intoxicating about the sensation of this much power underneath my fingertips. Maybe this was what Lulu was like.

"Coherence induck prods." He grinned dumbly at the thing, teeth showing green. That must have been the light. "Yeah, these babies are tamer than kittens. Configurations made for obedience. And if you think this is a trip, take a look at the ones in the engine room. Yeah, we don't even allow those to take a shape past a cylinder. Safety first."

My stomach turned at the thought. How titanic must the things have been to keep a ship this big moving?

"I'd have thought that this ship used nuclear or something."

"Sure as hell ain't diesel. Dinosaurs all been burned up. And these things are better pushers than fuel, y'know?"

The cube shuddered under my touch, different this time and my hand jumped back like it had been resting on a hot stove.

"Have a little faith!" He laughed but pulled his hand away too.

"Where is this one from?" I asked. "Down south?"

"Waaay down south. That's the only place to get good source now."

"I heard there was a lab in Boston that's growing these. Hand-tamed. Use them for vehicles, even pets."

"Pet rocks? Whatever sells, man."

The pusher continued along its path, neither stone nor jelly but somewhere upsettingly in-between. The feeling of it still rested in my palm like muscle memory of a roller-coaster or one of those tingler strength testers you’d find at an old carnival.

"You have any other essentials down here?" I asked. I'd only seen human crew members aside from the pusher. "No leather cukes or lobsters?"

"Maybe in the hold. This here's a flenser. All we do is catch and strip and early reduction. Nothing fancy. If we see a lobster out here, it better not interfere is all I'm saying. We can flense them too."

He strode on ahead but I stopped in place. "Hey!" I called.

The cloak drooped around him as he came to a halt. "What?"

"This is all just hitting me now. You think we can finish the tour tomorrow?" My pulse roared through my temples. I'd been able to hold things off this long, but no longer. "I'd like to go to my cabin now. Need to start filing the preliminary."

"What? Oh, sure." He slid past me like grease. "You're lucky, guest quarters are above the waterline on our ship. You don't want to bunking in down there."

"Why not?"

"If you think this place smells, you wouldn't make it long."

-

The room was no bigger than a rich man's hearse. I slept but not well.

It wasn't seasickness but something else. I couldn't feel any sensation of movement, even though we were under power to our destination, south and west of here. That much I could gather from the helmsman's screen. I drank from my supply of water that I'd brought on board and tore open the foil on an Icthyo bar. I hadn't sourced it personally, but the dealer was reputable. Who knew what kind of food they'd be serving here? Probably cut straight from whatever they'd caught. That was a little too close to the start of the supply chain for me.

The protein stick was too salty by half, so I cut it with some crackers. Dry, but plain enough to work. My fingers lingered over the pear in the bag, but I'd save that for a real emergency. Or for trade, if anyone on this ship would have anything I thought worth giving up fresh fruit for.

Checked messages and found only the automated garbage. More promises of jobs with "real outlets" after building a portfolio of apprentice work with an agent. Funny how none of the stuff I'd done before could carry over. Proprietary work was full of teeth like that.

The door knock rang through the small room and I pulled my glasses on. "Yes, what is it?" My voice sounded unsure and tentative, even to me.

"Hey there. Captain thought you might want to know that the timetable's moved up. We're expecting contact in a few hours."

My heart strangled in my throat, double wrapped by arteries come loose. "Hours? But it was supposed to be tonight?"

"And even that was a little close, yeah?" The deckhand laughed on the other side. "Target's moving and what's more, moving right towards us. Probably was the whole time."

I slid out of the cot and took the two steps to reach the door, sliding it to one side. "Towards us?" I prayed that I'd heard it wrong.

"Doesn't take too much to get you out of bed, does it?"

"Towards us?"

"Yeah, this one's full of piss and vinegar. Big one, too. Point eight seven hull lengths." He grinned and his long face distorted without mirth. "Ya ain't scared, are ya?"

"If you aren't, then I'm not."

His empty blue eyes flicked up and down. "Gawd but you are a terrible liar. Get yourself dressed and on the deck if you want to catch the show."

"Is that safe? I mean, to look at it directly?"

"Well, you might need rubber pants, but it's safe enough. Lulu would help but you've already made your stand on that, right?"

The idea of partaking twitched in my stomach like a live crab. "How about the glasses?"

"Lenses, you mean?" His lip rose into a sneer but he didn't let it come to full. "You won't find a pair on the ship. Those things mess with your head."

"Good enough for the crews at Blackrock and near any other containment facility."

"Gutless cowards, all of you. Yeah, put your lenses on if it'll make you feel better." He turned without saying another word, oozing contempt as he pulled out a clear pouch that shone blue and grabbed a wad.

-

The rain had broken but the sea still did a slow roil like molten lead. Churning from beneath formed hundreds of chaotic whorls on the surface. The sky itself was dull and metallic, dark above but greenish at the horizon, reversing the image of the water. It didn't feel like we were anywhere now, sea and sky looking the same in either direction. The wind that blew smelled like fish, like meat left out at low tide.

Something ahead of us surged off the port side bow. It broke through the water but wasn't visible through the spray and wake. Coy, unlike the subject of the Surgeon Photograph. It wasn't teasing or there to elicit wonder, no such pretense.

The smell intensified and I pulled out a mask, holding it to my mouth and sucking in on the bleach and alcohol. As much as they stung upon the inhale, they beat the alternative.

On the level below, black-clad workers shifted and made the line ready. Spools of metal shone silver as they peeled the yellow sheathing off, leaving it like aside jellied snake skins. Another clutch of them fussed over the harpoon cannon, with a bore large enough to drive a car down. One of the overhead gantries brought the piercing rod into place, holding the missile low enough so the crew could attach the grounding cable.

I'd never understood how it worked, but then the metaphysics involved went over just about everyone's heads, including most of EA, who simply signed off on what they couldn't comprehend so long as the results kept coming. But what I did understand was that the essentials needed to be grounded in order to be flensed. They existed in some kind of half-life until their state could be fixed and then they could be worked. Before that, they were real enough to split the ship's hull in half, just not to be consumed.

"You all know the drill," the voice boomed out of the loudspeaker. "And that's cash money out there flopping around in the surf. We don't leave any of that on the table."

The men in their still-slick black clothing all nodded as the thing in the water broke again. Something like an arm broke the surface and made a clawing forward stroke into the sea. Distortion hovered around it, like it was a video only half-loaded, giant chunks of it being interpolated or only guessed at. The low sun didn't help at all, just giving it enough light to show a sheath of greenish slime like liquid emerald.

But I knew it wasn't a just a sheath. It looked like that all the way through. Underwater green, always wet.

I wished for it to be a hoax, a simple trick. Sunlight scattered and my brain imagining anything else, a giant squid half-chewed and spit out by a whale bigger than anyone had on record. I wanted it to be not real, which it somehow was, only to be made realer in a few moments.

The piercer was shunted into the barrel, thousands of meters of the grounding cable coiled on giant spools now uncovered. Sunlight gleamed off it, shining like a mirror hammered out into wire thicker around than a man's arm.

Water around the thing boiled. The sea wasn't attached to the thing's motion, but it was as if even coming into contact with the thing made the water explode, matter and anti-matter combining into swirling chaos. Like this thing fundamentally didn't belong here, disintegrating any reality it touched.

Of course. It was only partly real now. It wasn't grounded.

"Good to see you out here, even if it is with crutch." The captain's voice boomed behind me, but I didn't jump this time.

"Crutch?"

He pointed to the lenses and made a face to indicate the mask. "You know why you need those, yes?"

"The smell is revolting," I said.

He laughed. "Your attachment to aesthetic is touching, but is wrong." He folded the bag as he stuffed his fingers deep into his cheek. They came back slick as that thing in the water.

"Without the glasses I'd go crazy. Unless I started crazy that is."

"Ha! None of us is crazy here."

Crazy for Lulu maybe.

"So why do I need these things?" I thought about taking the mask off, but a whiff of what lay on the water sneaked past a corner and I had to choke back a gag.

"Sentiment, my friend." He put an arm around me and leaned in close enough so I could smell the Lulu on his breath, like jellyfish-flavored mints. "You think this represents something more than it is." The crinkles on his face deepened as he smiled, knowing I wouldn't get it.

"And what is it?"

"Lots of goop to process. Jobs for a thousand flensers. Heart of thriving industry. Frozen dinners waiting to happen."

He squeezed me like a gorilla squeezing an orange, flush with pride.

"Nothing to be afraid of at all?"

"It only smell bad. It is not bad."

The thing on the port side lurched forward like an island cut free and rolling on a storm surge, part liquid, part solid, hideously in-between states. It raised an arm that looked more like a melting skyscraper wrapped in green glass. The sunlight passed through it murkily and beneath the skin something swam, sluggish. I sucked in the mask and tried to see it like the Captain did. Countless individual servings of Benthi-Chow in those bright green and yellow tubs on store shelves.

I couldn't do it. Something boiled up at the back of my throat and I retched over the rail, nearly hitting a black-clad lineman. He didn't notice, running a gloved hand over the grounding line one last time. My mask hung by one ear in the breeze.

"See, I tell you. You no need stupid mask." The Captain's laugh barked out like a seal. "Face it as it will be, my friend."

His hand smacked again between my shoulder blades and I lost the last of my sparse breakfast and mask as that fluttered away and over the side.

"If it make you feel better, that big boy won't be a bother in about five minutes."

I was dimly aware of the shadow cast by the launcher's barrel as it turned towards the thing. The creature seethed in the water, reaching for the ship, neither urgent nor afraid, like it was reaching for one of several snacks just within reach.

"Smile, you son of blubber." The captain's whisper was hoarse and ragged now. He was all up in the Lulu. Maybe the words for was whatever he saw in his head now and not the thing bearing down on us.

Through the mist was a green hellscape, gelatinous and shifting. There were two black spaces in the center of it, almost like eyes, but nothing could have eyes like this. The urge to rip off my lenses bit at me, but I kept my hands on the rail instead.

"Fire!" the captain yelled. "Fire to bring supper home!"

No other sound existed after that. Just a horrible woosh that ramped up for the space of a heartbeat and then cut out. Several tons of decompressing propellant hissed around the barrel of the spear gun, more weather, quickly lost in the smokestack miasma that trailed behind us.

The grounding line shot out in silence, only my brain imagining a KERRANG! of metal against metal. Cable shone hard as it unspooled behind, men laying flat on the deck to avoid being decapitated by flying steel.

I looked up to see the line go tight for a second then slack as the cable's momentum caught up to the spear sticking out of the thing. It jutted out, embedded some distance below the eyes. Lulu addicts or not, the crew knew their business.

The thing stopped now, lowering its arm into the water slowly and curiously, distracted by sensation.

"Throw the current!" The captain yelled now. "Ground that piece of meat!" The words were muffled like they were through a hundred feet of cotton batting, though he was right next to me.

I felt a galvanic snap and my hair stood up and my jaw clenched. At Blackrock they kept the field and the essentials isolated far enough away that you only noticed a slight buzzing in the back of your skull. This was a somatic shock through the whole body. Were I not holding onto the railing, I'd have dropped to the deck or thrown myself over in spasm. But I didn't need the rubber pants after all.

The thing shook once, ripped from a state of shifting in-between to that of leaden certainty, of reality so solid that it could now be cut by knives and carved into bite-sized chunks. It could be reckoned entirely. And now known, the creature stopped moving, only so much gelid meat awaiting the butchers.

-

Seagulls wheeled above it but did not land. Instead they dodged in and out of the bright white arc lights that played over the massive carcass alongside the ship. Their screams were insane, chattering.

"Is it always like this?" I asked one of the black-slickered men.

He looked up and his features were once-strong but now molded into something paler and duller. His lips stained green as he parted them to answer. "No. This is different. Gulls usually won't eat this until it's been processed."

Which was smarter than the handful of workers I'd seen down on the muscle shoals floating alongside, kneeling and grabbing up handfuls of slime, licking their fingers clean. They did it mechanically, without joy or shame. Perhaps the captain had been down their earlier, beefing up his stash. More likely was that the choicest goop was being turned into Lulu for his consumption and these poor souls were skimming some for themselves.

The carcass was being maneuvered by a series of hovering skimmers, each of them with grounding hooks attached. They worked with the currents and wind, reading each and calculating the best vectoring paths. Their blades whirred with an eerie pulsing rhythm. The gulls pecked at them, seeing these things as nothing more than larger, blacker birds invading their territory, taking pieces of their kill.

Ever so slowly, the drones pushed the titan corpse into the receiving bay at the back of the ship. A single deck extended from the starboard side, busy with activity, wranglers driving the skimmers driving the giant mass of now-flesh.

I tried not to think about where the power for all this came from, to watch it dispassionately as the captain had urged me to with his drunken manner and breath that betrayed appetites that I couldn't dare contemplate. The body floated, sheared from gravity as teams of men in yellow hoods flashed electric chainsaw blades that bit through the meat and great strips of it were flensed away from the mass.

They couldn't even wait for it to be lashed down to the work docks.

"Beautiful sight, ain't it?" The deckhand settled next to me on the rail, loose and flush with what must have been very fresh Lulu.

"I suppose." The green of the thing was bilious now, more yellow than emerald. Maybe it was already starting to rot, locked in our world.

"Enthusiasm, Lou-ellyn," he said in a dire imitation of the captain's accent.

"Sorry. Just that when essentials are harvested over at Blackrock, it's more like watching a light-show or fireworks. This is different."

"Captain's right. You're a preservationist." He whistled and as he did, the light rimmed his face and he looked like a crescent moon-man with the face on the wrong side. "But a man's gotta eat. Woman, for that matter."

"I don't care for seafood." Not that I could think about eating. Even the pear waiting back in my bag in the room was rotten in my mind, mealy and slimy.

"Maybe you just need a taste of the right stuff instead. You'll stop fretting." His smile had no reassurance.

The swarms of men, what seemed like every hand on the ship, were down there now, flensing the fiction off the bone and slipping it into giant polyethylene sleeves or siphon tubes that ate giant chunks of flesh as fast as they could be fed. Above them, the seagulls continued their chattering, an odd sing-song quality behind it now, with a rhythm that was clear to me, though nobody else seemed to hear it.

"No," I lied. "I just need to file my report and then get back on dry land."

"What report? That stuff you babble into your phone?" His smile turned wicked now. "Oh yeah, we all figured it out."

I went back to gripping the rail, pressing my flesh to the cold metal to have something to hold onto, otherwise my brain would scatter off into a thousand directions. I checked my breath and held it down.

"Figured what?" My lie, for once, convinced even me.

"Why you like hoaxes so much. You know." Lips pulled tight against teeth, just a line of green between them.

I shook my head. "Enlighten me."

"You'd rather have that thing be not real, you know? Half-real. Strong enough to hurt you but invincible. We'd rather have it so we can take ourselves a bite. Solid. Known." He pointed and even with the weight of the gloves, his finger seemed impossibly skinny. "You're sad because you've seen it and now it's real and just meat, not like that sea monster on the phone."

I let him think he was right. I listened to the sounds of the seagulls and let them make more sense to me than him.

"Nothing to say, mister EA report talker? Gonna let your tears stain the pages?"

The sigh escaped me without thought. A little heavy.

"So there's the dream, man. Squid meat in vacuum packed bags. Chunked. Dig it." He waited for a response which I wasn't going to give then shrugged and swept away.

-

I was hollow in the room, staring at the metal ceiling, scratched and marked with graffiti from a hundred others. The sound of the seagulls continued somewhere in the back of my mind.

The room lurched, as if we'd hit something or suddenly picked up speed. I rolled out of the cot and took to the floor before another something shook the whole ship. A red LED dome started flashing along with a chirp that dug into my skull, letting me hear nothing else while it blared. My jacket was on and I was out the door before it pulsed again.

Clamor bubbled around me and below. Feet and hands hitting the deck and slamming bulkhead doors back with empty clangs. Everyone was moving.

And then they weren't. The deck shook and jarred and over the chaos, I heard the screaming of seagulls. They were laughing as the ship yawed and I was thrown to the wall become floor, before it snapped back sickeningly. Something roared like all the seas being dumped out in mile-high waves and crashing down. It must have been the ocean itself.

Tears welled up in my eyes. I thought it from the sharp pain in my elbow which felt broken, having taken most of my weight and useless now. But it wasn't that.

Crewmen screamed and cried in reply, gasps and shock welling up in a torrent of realized fear. I could have jarred and preserved it, so thick was it around me.

The ship settled back, but something was wrong. We were pitched backwards, as if a mighty weight at the tail end was pulling us down. I felt the engines go to full in response, a shudder braking through my feet as I stood uneasily.

The captain started babbling something over the loudspeaker between those incessant chirps. It must have been Russian or Ukranian, whatever was the language of his heart. But it didn't sound human at all. As he spoke, the seagulls hushed and the roar subsided, replaced by another sound.

Creaking. A groan ten miles long snaked past me and I felt the engines go dead beneath me with a loud CHUNK. The ship lolled in the water and I could feel the angle of descent steepen. Outside the door, men were splashing overboard and screaming at one another or the sea or the sky, helplessly and flailing.

Something moved far below me, down under the skewed decks beneath. There was sensation of power, like the engines starting up, but it wasn't that. There was no regularity in it, but there was unleashed strength. It hammered in every direction at once. The ship shook again, but this time it was from within. Violence pulsed as bulkheads below me shattered and tore.

I thought of the pushers on the cargo deck and how they were small by comparison to the engine room menagerie. I thought about the shapes they'd take once the induction fields were off, the horrible unchained freedom.

The life vest felt already wet beneath my fingers, but I took it anyways. The thought of going back for the pear flashed through my mind, but there wouldn't be time. The ship would only last moments if even that.

Tears flooded down my face, hot and stinging, even where they welled behind my glasses. The night wind whipped over my face as I slipped out the door and onto the deck. I didn't look at the bodies, imagining them glistening with a sheen of fresh emerald slime instead. That was enough.

The water below was black and choppy with the thrashing of hundreds of limbs and another, larger set of waves driving away from the ship. Something had dove under the surface and was still leashed to the ship, bringing it down as well. The whole works heaved. The grounding line had gone tight.

I stood canted at a sickening angle, high up, but I could make it. There was a moment of dreamy weightlessness and rushing before the granite slap of impact on the water.

-

The dull fire of my arm roused me, though I didn't let go of the life jacket, which I was holding onto more than wearing by now. It was still night and the gulls still laughed above my head, but now it was a chaotic and disorderly sound. There was nothing underneath it as before.

My head lolled up to the night sky, still black and huge. I turned, groaning as I did. Rimmed by the remnants of its own strange weather, the prow of the ship jutted out of the calming sea like a misplaced monolith, suggesting so much of what was happening beneath the surface. The sea lurched and the bow itself shook like a toy in a palsied hand.

It slid beneath the surface without me knowing its full name, only the letters PROVIDENCE written in man-high writing, never to be read again.

--

Stop reading here if you don't want the artist's statement changing what you might think of the story. Yeah, I could go on about that whole relationship for some time. I won't here.

So this was me declaring war on, I dunno, mythos revisionism I suppose. Or simply getting these dead ideas to dance around. The Lovecraft Industrial Complex, perhaps. I literalized it. I expected folks to take umbrage, after all there's a lot of people out there doing HPL revisions or working out from a piece of marginalia or hooking onto what is ultimately a franchise that's free for them the use. Now, I did no different. You got me there. Satire is a vampiric or parasitic process. There has to be a host body to latch onto. But I'm doing it to bite the hand. Not to fix HPL's work or repurpose it. Perhaps I'm a preservationist. Perhaps I understand that the damage has been done and he's in the DNA of contemporary horror, at least a strain or five of it, and isn't going away. It was shots fired. Only instead of being seen as that, it was just a fun little mythos story. Certainly not what I intended and led in directions I couldn't have guessed.

More than you probably wanted to know.