It turned out that Rust not only had a tin bath, but she had a whole bathroom to go with it.

"I wasn't that backwards," she muttered, as she adjusted something or other on the stove. "I didn't grow up in the middle ages."

The cottage had some sort of system in place to heat and pump hot water, which neither Shim nor Quilt even pretended to understand, but supposedly it would be up and running later, if Rust had anything to do with it. For now, they had made do with lukewarm water, heated on the parlour stove.

Shim stood shirtless in front of the kitchen stove, rubbing his hair with a towel. He had scrubbed his skin with cool water and laundry soap until he shone like a fresh tomato. It was so good to be clean! He hadn't realised quite how bad it had gotten, why had it taken them all so long?

Quilt was sitting at the table attempting to weave together some twigs into a basket shape, more to keep her hands busy than anything else, and Rust was still fiddling with the stove.

"So how do you explain the chickens?" he asked, and Quilt looked up, the twigs in her hands springing apart.

"Shit," she grumbled, looking down at the mess, and then up at Shim, "what do you mean explain? They're chickens."

He nodded, jumping and attempting to hang the towel on the airer, almost causing the whole thing to come crashing down over him.

"Sure, they're chickens, but why are they here. Did they do good deeds in life?"

"They were very good girls," Rust's voice was muffled. She was down on the floor now, half-inside the stove, "they laid me a lot of eggs. All chickens should get to go to chicken heaven."

Shim shrugged, lowering the airer and hanging his towel properly over the rail, checking the dryness of his shirt. It had suffered over the previous weeks, getting stained with grease and sweat and muck, but it wasn't until this morning that he'd actually thought about it, that any of them had thought about it.

It didn't look much better now, for all the scrubbing he'd done, but it would do until he found a replacement.

"Ok sure, all chickens go to heaven." He started to winch the rack back up, the shirt still not dry, "and I suppose they do have a very nice life here. You to feed them every day, oats, bugs, all the birds of the world as their friends. But is that… Are you telling me chickens have souls, souls which go to the afterlife?"

He thought about it for a moment, tying off the rope. "Cause I ate a lotta chicken nuggets as a kid." He waved towards the door, "sorry old girls, you probably don't wanna hear this, but, and I'll put this bluntly: people eat a lot of chicken. I couldn' give you numbers or anything, but surely they'd need their own heaven? Do other birds also go to heaven? Songbirds, kiwis, parrots? Where's the cutoff? Are we stuck in bird heaven?"

Stolen story; please report.

"Does heaven have layers?" Quilt asked in return, leaning now on one arm. The evening sun lit up her still-damp hair, which was now tightly corralled back, rather than the cloud it had been before. "And if we escape this one, we end up where, cat heaven? Dog? What's the next layer down?"

She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment, and then sighed, shrugging and leaning back, pulling her knees up against the edge of the table.

Rust crawled out of the oven and Shim backed away. She had gotten a flea in her bonnet the moment they came back and declared the stove "needed cleaning, now!" and by the looks of her, she had done so by transferring all the grime and soot to herself.

"I'm gonna go burn my clothing." She stated, reaching out for Shim to help her up, before shaking her head and getting up on her own. "If you could give the floor a mop, that would be good, I hope you left me some warm water."

She grumbled her way off towards the bathroom, already undoing her shirt, and the other two watched her go.

"I dunno," Shim sighed, sitting down and starting to mess with the pile of twigs. "I don't this is like, the outside of heaven or whatever you're thinking. I agree it's a cute idea, but we can see that the machine is changing. Just look around us."

He gestured towards the hanging washing and the buckets of filthy water, waiting to be discarded in the woods. "We can see that stuff is changing more every day. More animals wake up, we remember more of ourselves. Who's to say that this isn't just… I dunno, some higher being finding an old jigsaw in a cupboard and slowly putting it back together. Except it's a metaphor, and the jigsaw is our fucked up, broken world."

Shim stared down at the twigs, before scooping them all up into a neat pile. "There." He declared. "That's us."

Quilt leant her chair back further, the bottoms of her feet against the edge of the table, and had to catch herself as it started to tip too far. Instead, she slammed it down onto the stones, and pushing herself up from the table, headed towards the sweet cupboard.

Shim watched as she walked over to the side, hesitated, and then returned for the chair.

"I swear we'll find that stepladder one of these days," she said, trying to open the door without knocking herself off the chair in the process. "But okay, so if we're not souls who've fallen out of paradise, then, what are we? I guess we have no way of checkin' the perfect day theory without finding other people or whatever, but we could do the 'talk to the manager' thing?"

Shim nodded at her to continue, and she did.

"I dunno how, you tell me. But we could go up to the top of my building and shout at God? Do the thing you wanted to do with paint, spread it everywhere, see if anyone notices?"

She tucked a jar of some sort of strawberry caramels under her arm, and slowly clambered down off the chair, knocking the door shut as she went. "If the ants make enough mess of the farm, somebody's gotta notice they're starving eventually.

"I'm hoping there's other people out there, and we just ain't found 'em yet. It can't be just us, surely. It's- it was a big world, billions of people, more if we're like, all fucked up in time."

"Mm." Shim made a noncommittal noise, taking the jar from her and twisting the lid open as she sat back down.

He offered her the open jar, taking two for himself.

"We never did find the paint, did we. But we can look again tomorrow. Maybe write some books while we're at it."

Quilt reached out and took a handful of sweets, sorting them out into a line on the table in front of her. A death row for strawberry swirls.

"I ain't much of a writer, like I said, shit at art and all that crafty stuff," she gestured at the twigs for emphasis, "but I reckon even I can splash some paint about."

Shim smiled, and the conversation moved on.

They sat together munching on sweets and talking about nothing. The weather, what they would do once they found the paint, little snippets of memories, moments in time. All in all, it was nice.