I was standing under a typically bloodless dawn, disguised half-nakedly. Not having eaten in two days, I was trying hard to ignore the self-cannibalizing groans and acid squirts of my stomach and focus on the task at hand. By a tent on the other side of camp, a man and a woman were having a hushed argument. They were talking in a language that I couldn’t understand, but based on the alternating glances of compassion and curdled annoyance they kept sending my way, I was pretty convinced that they were arguing about me. This should’ve been perturbing, possibly even dis-turbing or in other words un-nerving, but somehow it wasn’t really penetrating me quite as it should have. I was pretending not to notice. Instead focusing on trying to maintain my calm air of *belonging*, which I was steadily losing faith in given the argument and the fact that I had been loitering around the camp food stores for the past ten minutes, pondering on how I was going to extract the food from the crates without anyone noticing.

That man is scary, he looks *primal*... but that woman… look at those eyelashes, and is that a bit of moisture on her lips? They’re *glistening*, she’s inviting you in…

Please ignore that one, there’s something wrong with him.

My input is valuable.

No it is fucking not.

The three of them wouldn't shut up. It was driving me nuts, I would probably be foaming at the mouth if all the moisture and warmth in my body wasn’t being requisitioned into my bone marrow to keep me alive. A droplet of sweat squeezed its way out of my puckered pores to join the accumulation of frost under my armpit. I decided that it was probably the shoes. My pants were a bit conspicuous, but it was definitely the shoes that had riled them. Shoes were one of those things that the diseased and frenzyingly warm Hennings did without, just like shirts and fully-legged pants and personal freedom. Well, it was too late to take them off now, it would probably decrease my expected life-span by two minutes. Maybe more actually. It was hard to tell given that the entity I was inhabiting had decided to withhold the fact that I was freezing to death and would be dead in about ten minutes, and was instead providing me with a steady flow of prickling warmth as a coy little inside joke between it and my desiccated skin. Another consideration to make with the shoes was whether the water they were soaking in — snow doesn’t last long around Hennings — was freezing or warm. A difficult call without any feeling in my skin. The Hennings standing in it were exceedingly warm but everything else was freezing. Maybe it was somewhere between tepid and chilly.

Are you stupid? There’s more everything-else than there is Henning. The water is definitely freezing. You’re going to be footless soon. Footless and handless. How will you work in the square then? Squatting on your leg-nubs and pulling crates around by the teeth?

We’ll need a rope, a small one. Wait! No! Let’s get a harness and a bridle, the merchants can lead you around like a pack mule. 

The entity was churning; no useful suggestions were produced. I found myself drifting back towards the woman idea. The lips thing was definitely off the table, but I was still young enough that I could pretend to be a lost child of some description.

That’s right, really amazing. *Cough cough* excuse me miss, I accidentally wandered into the Henning’s camp on the frigid outskirts of the city, as far away from literally anything or anywhere else as a place can be, and I seem to have lost my shirt, so do you think you could be my new mama?

If lips are off the table there’s alway the bone-splatter contingency sequence. 

There’s no such thing. Anyway, we haven’t actually stolen anything yet, so what’s stopping us from just walking out?

For fuc— are you serious? Do you even live here? 

The foodless to food-having state conversion process must be completed *soon*.

Ok, fine. But for the record, I am opposed to the ‘lost child’ plan. Remember Ilya?

I remembered Ilya. A friend I had made when I was ten years old and still freshly ruined. Sometimes, if I stood really still in a quiet nook of the city, I was pretty sure that I could hear his voice calling out to me on the wind, but that wasn’t important right now. What was more important was that two things had just happened. Over by the tent with the couple arguing the arguing had stopped. The man had stepped inside the tent and I could see his feet moving around from under the little gap where the tent should have met the ground, but was instead raised slightly on wooden pegs. This implied that a *conclusion* had been reached, which in all likelihood was bad for me. I could only imagine that he was in there making sure his favorite club was greased up and ready to smash through my temple, collect all the nice little giblets and paste that I use for my cognition on the end of the club, and fling it out onto a nearby tent in a gumpy swathe of what used to be my head.

The other thing that happened was that a gust of wind had just wandered out the forest by the camp. What it provoked in me was not burning or pain but more concerningly a sort of flattening tiredness that made me want to crawl under a sheet of ice and hibernate my corpse for future generations. It also dawned on me that I was doing a rather poor job of pretending not to be freezing to death. All in all, the situation was no longer in equilibrium but *out of hand*, or rapidly approaching. I needed to do something, but nothing came to mind. 

Your brain is freezing. It’s becoming more *rectangular*. It’s turning into a block of ice.

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The more I thought about the matter, the more the following scene played out in my head: I walk right into the food stores. I pull an entire crate of supplies from the shelf. I walk back out of the food stores carrying my crate with a plundering swagger, and somehow leave the camp without anyone stopping me. Clearly these were the frost-addled fantasies of a dying boy. The only other thing that I could think of, however, was that the speccy popping noises I kept hearing were really annoying. And that I could probably think better if they didn’t have a borderline military presence in my eardrum. 

I took a deep breath. In, and out, exhaling the last vestiges of heat from my lungs. It turned into a white mist which hung momentarily in the air. Around me: a despondent archipelago of four-hundred canvas tents and twice as many living souls. A single cloud drifted over the formation, an indifferent creature, headed out west to a place far away. It was trapping the air underneath its white bulk, forcing it to descend and wander between the isles, carrying the achingly gentle scent of burnt sugar and wood chips. From a nearby atoll a tiny cough was ringing out, a woman sat alone in the melting snow, thinking about peach orchards.  

At the same time as the man was exiting the tent, something clicked into place. The noises were my teeth, shifting slightly in their gums as I clenched them in what I sincerely hoped was an *anti-clattering* maneuver. He was now striding towards me with palpable intention, though seemingly clubless. Right…

Unbolt the reserves, scream like a banshee, use lethal force, just snatch that shit!

He’ll be here in twenty seconds. 

Errr… If you crack open a crate now, we might be able to eat something before the beating. Or if he kills us, at least we’ll die on a full stomach. 

It was set in motion. I turned around and lurched into the food stores. It was a wide shack at the tip of the camp, log-paneled, scribe-fitted, column-shelved, unguarded — because who would steal from the Hennings? — and single-entranced, which meant that I was going to have to make a seventeen-point-five second round trip with the crate. As soon as I entered my eyes started straining against the sickly panes of shadow. A second passed before I spotted a crate about as large as my chest, hiding at the edge of the first shelf on my right. It was nailed shut. Though my fingers were feeling more like stone spindles than flesh right now, I was pretty sure that prying the lid free would be impossible. I picked it up, and it was heavy.

I walked back out of the store and aimed for the exit to the camp, hobbling with as much gusto as I could manage. Behind me, to my dismay, the man had gained enough ground that I could see him in detail. He was much taller and much wider than I was. Slightly tanned, long brown hair. It was damp. The snow was falling on it, melting in the heated strands and running down to the ends to form beads that wobbled as he came after me. 

This thing with the crate wasn’t going to work, I realized. It was weighing me down, preventing my escape. I tossed it to the side. I didn’t toss it to the side. It slipped out of my numb fingers as I shifted my weight, nailed my shin on the way down to my foot, and then tripped me as I startled. 

It was enough to break through the ice. Pain. Scraping the nerves as it shot up into my skull with an acidic burst. My toes curled against the inside of my boots, displacing an unneeded shard of shattered nail back under the ball of my foot. A hefty chunk of meat-plated skin was dangling from a snag on the crate, which was now sitting squat in the snow like it always belonged there.  

The man was standing above me. Looking down, figuring out whether he wanted to beat me, or have a nice hand-on-hip chuckle and then beat me. A white liquid was weeping out of my almost-revealed shin, gently spilling out of the gash and onto the snow. That was all really fine with me. Fucking great. Actually, it was what I had been planning from the beginning. This was all a *high concept* performance that I had been working on as an *experimental* foray into being a worthless piece of shit. It was a real gaff, all this failure stuff, this dying stuff, this starving and freezing stuff; the artists paint, and my brush was absolutely *gushing*. This next part was my favorite, I called it ‘dead end’. 

“Fuck you,” I told him. He was wearing nothing but a loosely fitted pair of shorts which looked like they were once full-blown pants, but had since had their legs torn off at the knee. His bare skin smelled clean, like rainwater. 

He gave me a disgusted look as he kicked me in the ribs. “You stupid bastard.” The other Hennings were assembling to watch; everybody loves a good kicking. Glances and hushed remarks were being shot back and forth, opinionated exchange, they were loving the performance. The applause was trembling on the tips of their fingers, ready to be unleashed with the cheers in cacophony at the end of the scene. 

“Whatever,” he said, kicking me again. “I like it better this way”. I tried to spit at him from the ground. There was no moisture, just sound. 

Look at his hip. Something’s hanging there.

The thing swung forth as he loaded up another kick. A gray pouch, thin fabric, a few small bulges jostled around inside as he let another one loose. The sight of them brought me back. Back into the game, this is what I had come for. Hold on and pack away that sad shit for a second, this was all part of the plan! The guy had Henning boluses strapped to his waist like it was his post-beating snack, and they would be well within reach if I could get off of the floor. 

I rolled over as he kicked me, clamoring over the box as I got to my feet. While he was still thinking of how best to work this new angle, I stumbled onto him with a tackle, wrapping my arms around his waist and pushing my head into his belly-button like I was trying to force it inside. 

Banshee, banshee, uncork that esophagus and let it rip. 

The fastening chord of the pouch was just below my elbow. Somehow I needed to get it loose, remove it from his waist, and conceal it without him or the crowd noticing. That last part was going to be the hardest, given that I was only wearing pants and shoes, and was thus mostly exposed. I decided to just stuff it down my pants, setting aside for now the problem of how I was going to stop it from rolling out. 

I started writhing as I began to unleash a blood-curdling child-roar to distract the crowd — pride was for the grave, I needed the boluses. I managed to unfasten the pouch. I straightened up on him as he sent a swing down onto my back, accidentally slipping the blow. That was good, a bit of luck goes a long way. I wrapped my feet around his left ankle, hoping that we would fall over and that I could slip the pouch under my waistband before we hit the ground. Instead of falling over, though, he stumbled back for a second, before pushing off the ground with his right leg and hurtling his knee up between my legs. The abject terror squeezing a yelp out of me, I instinctually pulled my leg up to block it. His kneecap powered into my tender shin and I could practically feel each spidering fracture sing in crunchy delight as they grew. I pushed through the pain, cracking into the untapped reservoir of heroism and bravery that I had been keeping mixed with the fluid in my joints. I held onto the pouch, pulling it close to my chest. Falling to the ground, I curled up, knees to chest and the pouch pinched in my waist. My armor was hard, spinal. It withstood a battering of slowly decreasing force. The yelping was minimized and the dignity maximally preserved, no tears fell to the melting snow. A glut of unsacrificed pride welled in my throat, glad to still be above the ground. 

The beating eventually stopped, but the long awaited cheers never came. There was no clapping. For a moment, only the sound of swaying trees and falling snow was heard. I reached upward with my eyes to see averted heads and tightly gripped wrists. The arguing woman was there, looking skywards as a mournful wren flew overhead. 

The man sighed and turned to leave. There was no mention of the pouch. Was it luck?

The gathering dispersed, the people flowing back to their islands. After a while I stood up. There was a warm imprint on my flank where his leg had been striking, and the cold moved back in to reclaim it. A gust of air wrapped around me, tousling my hair. Up and up, it was headed towards the city, gathering the leaves and the falling snow, pushing everything closer to the center. 

I let out a sigh. It was time for me to return too.