The town is further away than expected, and I have to cross the big bridge to go to the place where the sun comes up. I swim under, meeting lots of hostile animals who are clinging on despite the current, and when I come out on the other side and shake myself off I am really alone. I grab a stick and begin making lines, so I can organize myself. I trace out the way the land felt last time we are here. We are going to make the journey backwards, but that's okay. We're at the one-road place. Everything branches off in either direction from the spine of the place of sands.

Mountains of gold stand against the blue skies, and the houses are all empty. A few people live here and there, but most of the smells are faint, and their happiness goes with them. We broke out during the death of the year, so things were more like this than anything else, but we were only here to begin with because we swam across the Sound.

The Sound is a place that is completely devoid of music, a long bay full of shallows and crabs. I used to catch them with my fingers, like all the others of our group who minded the pain less than the meat. It is too easy to remember the soft joys of sucking the fresh white out of the crabs or the jaded happinesses of the banks, where we slept amongst the sands, eleven of us curled around a human Red in the forms of dogs or seabirds.

As I walk barefoot down the scalding road, I remember a time when we all stayed as close to each other as possible, because we were worried about what we might not find when we woke up the next morning. I keep the ghosts of everyone clutched to me, like the light I stole from their bodies, as I wander down the path.

I remember their blank eyes, the way we emerged from nothing running. As all things do. There is a race between the creatures of this world, the game that never stops, and it is this: eat what you can. Run from when you cannot. Protect your own first, because they will take care of you, and when they bud into being, they will carry you on until the end of time.

We are cheating on every species. We are not part of them, but we eat, and we burn, and we might not have to. However much of us is illusion, I don't know. I am all ghost on these streets, fair white and shaking with cold, and even the cat form is not welcome here. It hears kin in the houses, sees familiar eyes around corner, but the cats here are not helpful, and they dream of multitudinous deaths. They understand they are not supposed to be there, but it is so easy to tear foreign games apart.

I let the hunger have its way, only stopping at the occasional dumpster so that I can tear it apart as a cat. The food is old, too, so that there are even few flies, because there is little anything. I have some cat food at one point, something set out, but as I am stroked by one of the last humans on this part of the islands, the bright, stilted house part, I see other cats leering in the shadows.

They are disturbed.

What I am looking for is far down the shores, where the houses give the land back to trees. The obelisk makes its home there, and though I have not seen him yet, I already imagine it extending far up into the sky, a beacon just for my purposes, so that I can come home again. I trot into the woods, purring, and then lapse back into a human form.

There is a large car out in the woods, thrusted through several trees so that it has come to an almost permanent rest. One of the glass screens is broken. Several glass screens, I realize, as I go around it, sniffing it, leering at it. It doesn't smell much like gas, either, but I know the other smell, which is the good people smell.

A man exits the side of the large car. He has a long stick... the gun... pointed at my head, but he drops it when he sees me. His face is bristley all over, his hair is a big dark bush full of thorns, and his eyes are filling up with water. "It's been months. I thought I'd lost contact."
"Years," I respond.

"Feds'll be here eventually. Thought it was... you were... well, dammit," he says, choking up. "Would you like to... come... inside?"

"Feds?" I tilt my head.
"Sometimes I forget that nothing makes sense to the lot of you. Don't you worry your head about feds. I'll handle everything," he groans softly, to himself, "Oh hell, I'm definitely coming down with a case of the Carolinas. Did I really just say 'don't you worry your head'? Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous."

I step inside. The car is warm, and the interior is filled with furniture, like a house. There's a beaten up couch, a few chairs, and a smell from a very small set of cooking things in the corner. A huge pot is on the counter, which teems with heat I can see from over here. I knead the sofa with my hands and settle down on it, kicking my legs out so I go all the way across.

"Comfy?" he asks.

I nod.

He sits down close to me and reaches out towards my hair. I watch him, eyes round, and when he puts his hand through my hair I feel glass being dragged down my spine. I bite him, and he falls back, not quite screaming but rather yelling in pain. I press myself against the sofa as hard as I can, and he stomps over to the right corner of the room and begins rolling a large white tape thing around his arm.

"Figured. Somehow, I figured," he says, "Still invited you all into my house. I know it's not just you, six."

"Mimsy," I tell him. "I'm Mimsy."
"Right. Where's the kid with the phone?" asks the obelisk.
"The phone is underwater. The kid is with the others. I didn't tell them I was coming. I just had to go to you," I tell him. "Where's Ms. Grace?"

He looks down at his arm. The bandages are beginning to go pink, like a sunrise. "Figured that's what you'd come here for."

"Where is she?" I insist. "I love her, and I miss her, and I came here for her."

"I have somewhere I want to take you," he says, getting to his feet. "Not much of a walk, so we'll be in and out before you know it."

I stand, too. He turns the knobs on the counter with the hot bucket on it and leaves, the air violently whipping around our faces. He walks through a patch of woods and out to a cut near the waters, where a big stone lies surrounded by grass. It grows out in a sick way, and I feel myself revulse a little at the sight of the dark greens.

"It's just some of her ashes, but she'd have wanted you to see it," he tells me.

"It's a rock," I say.

He breathes outwardly in an agitating manner, like hot air around the neck. I wish to brush him off. I turn around, face twitching.

"She is not... a rock. She is a human. She lives. She breathes. She can not be a rock." I put my hands to the rock and run them down, trying to savor the sensation of it. It is not like flesh. I want to grind my fingers onto meal on it.

"Even when you were back in the labs, you weren't too naive as to not understand how death works, Mimsy," he says, and I realize that I should not have given him my name.

I rise to my feet. Hot water forming blazing canals from the sand of my cheeks, I ask, "Why are you out here?" His ragged clothing blows in the wind. "What are you doing out here in the woods with this rock, and in the big car, and you called us, why did you call us? It's been so long since we talked to you, and do your people want us back? Why do you want us back? Are we bad? I think we might be bad but I don't know, and they think I have answers I'm not telling them, and I do, but not the answers they want, and I don't want to tell anyone anything, and she told me not to say anything, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"

The man smells like saltwater and decaying trees. I bury myself in his shirt, breathing in until my breath steadies, and I shake desperately, like a young sapling facing the first hurricane of the season. This is the land at the end of the end of everything, where the sand and dunes and all the plants stand bravely against the full might of the ocean, but I can't take the ocean. Cats can't swim.

"Easy, girl," the man says. His hands are coarse, like the trees. "World's going to be alright in the end. So are you. Settle."

I sniff, drawing myself back. It feels like breaking the shore and coming out to rest on land.

"How do you feel about crabs?"

We eat a crab together. He lets me suck the meat out of the legs, which even I have to admit is better cooked, and he talks about where people go when the world ends for them. I sit and listen, mostly to things I don't understand, but I don't take my eyes off him, and he keeps speaking, even as his breath begins to smell like whatever comes out of the bottle he sips from every few moments... seawater. Man drowning himself.

"I take odd jobs on the off-season, which doesn't make you much money, but locals talk. It's not like my upkeep here is all that high. Probably look crazy from this angle. Probably am," he says.

"I'm talking to a person," I say, head in my fingers.

"You'll bring 'em back, right?" he asks me, finally, when it's so late that the moon is dripping amber out the window. "The others?"
I don't reply. My hair rises imagining them all in this room. Sitting side-by-side.

"She'd like that."

"She would?" I ask.

He nods, but he can barely keep his own head up. It's not long after that when he falls asleep. "Sh'd like that a lot."

Ms. Grace is the rock in the back. She would have liked that. As for what she'd like now? For what my group might like? I don't know, and I can not make that decision.

I go back out to the big rock before I leave. I can sense her here, now, and I put my face against it. It is cold, and not very much like her at all, but it vibrates with all of the heat in her body. It is full of her light.

"Hi, mom."

For the first time in my life, I feel almost human.