Hitherby Dragons #1: Jack-o'Lantern Girl

By Jenna Katerin Moran

A modern fantasy novella proposing solutions to such pressing problems as labyrinths, excess firewood, and suffering, as well as a brief explanation of the principles of resurrection, the construction of angels, and the structure of the monster's wings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jenna Katerin Moran
• Release date: Nov 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301003754

Jenna Katerin Moran

Having finally defeated the kung fu ghost of Rene Magritte, I'd like to settle down and live in a house made of macaroni for a while.

Book preview

The firewood world is falling, right out of the sky. Bob is dead. The wogly is dead. Jenna/Jane is dead, but in her case, that’s nothing new. What’s new is just that she’s acting all corpse about it, pretty much.

Martin’s got an answer for that, though.

He leans down.

He picks up her head. It’s still attached to her body so her neck and torso come up with it.

He whispers the secret words that wake the dead and her body twitches and her eyes snap open and there is fire surging through and around and in her form.

Hey, he says.

They’re on a miniature world sloppily assembled out of firewood. It used to hang between the earth and the moon but it isn’t hanging there now. Instead it is plunging down towards southern California in a fashion one could only consider ominous.

Hey, she says.

She looks like she’s trying to figure out who he is, which is, more or less, true.

It’s the first morning of your life, he says. So you get a wish.

She straightens up a little. She pulls out of his arms. She looks around. She looks at dead Bob and the dead wogly and the various firewood automata that are running around and screaming bloody murder.

Her mouth opens.

"Not that one, he says, scandalized. It has to be something hard."

She squints at him.

Then she grins. It’s sudden. It’s brilliant. It’s as crazy beautiful a grin as ever a six-year-old girl has worn.

Suffering, she says.

Sweet, he says. He slips a pair of goggles out of his pocket. He puts them on. He looks at the horizon, which is currently bubbling with the Santa Barbara area like the top of an overcooked pie. He lifts a hand.

She pokes him. She interrupts him.

His face falls.

"Ending it," she clarifies. You dork.

He looks bleakly down at all the people and freeways and cities and cars and homes that he probably shouldn’t crash into with a world made principally out of firewood, if he’s supposed to be putting an end to suffering. He gives a long-suffering sigh, and thinks as he does so that there are probably only a finite number of those left in the world. One day sighs like that might even be a collector’s item —

You sure? he says, quite seriously, to Jane.

She nods.

So he reaches into her and he catches the fire of her life and he pulls it out, and he touches it to the world around them, and at that touch it burns: burns fiercely, burns horrifically, catches up the firewood grocers and the firewood alligators and the firewood houses and the firewood firemen in fire, and as they fall the fire closes around the heartwood of their world and it dissolves to ash, and Jane and Martin are plunging to the ground amidst dissolving lines of black.

He grabs her hand. He tugs on the cord of his firewood parachute. He realizes, just a moment or two too late, that he has committed three distinct and terrible errors — to wit:

Firewood parachutes do not work;

The firewood has turned to ash;

He has forgotten to put his firewood parachute on.

These errors, he thinks, will probably cancel out.

They do not cancel out.

You would think that an absence of a nonfunctional parachute would be logically equivalent to a functional one, he tries again. It is cajolery towards the universe.

The universe is a cold, hard, uncaring place, characterized by a pervasive experience of suffering.

You remember how to come back from the dead, right? he asks her.

Duh, she says.

He grins.

Later, they found the Gibbelins’ Tower Theater Company!

Hitherby

Dragons

Table of Contents

The firewood world is falling . . .

One day in 1973, Jenna’s grandfather becomes a god . . .

*The Shelf, and What Happened There*

. . . a fire burning inside every living thing . . .

. . . the monster educes a hero . . .

*The Sickness*

. . . the monster is clumsy . . .

. . . the hero — well, Jenna’s hero, anyway . . .

*Isn’ts*

*Scanning Things*

_The monster laughs at God_

. . . Jenna hears about the monster . . .

The Monster is Coming

. . . the treasures of the Pandora Squad are . . .

. . . The cedar house they leave behind. . . .

*Ways of Avoiding Migraines*

Ben trains Sebastien to fight. . . .

*Two Great Tastes*

. . . and in that dark there is the angel . . .

The Ogre Express

. . . It makes him cool and suave and he speaks in the tongue of stars. . . .

. . . Jenna hides in the tunnels. . . .

*The World’s Not Fair to Dead People*

. . . she finds the wogly. . . .

It is difficult to keep a fire burning in your chest when you are not actually alive. . . .

*See Jane*

. . . the manner of Daniel’s birth. . . .

After Daniel, Frederick. After Frederick, Manuel. . . .

*Ponies and Wolves*

The girl forgets that she is not a corpse. . . .

*Necessary Things*

. . . and with the shadow they there dwell. . . .

In Which Jane, Amidst Circumstances Wholly Inexplicable Within the Context of this Volume, Meets Four Angels For the First Time

. . . the deepest, bluest skin . . .

Martin educes himself from nothing! . . .

*Avoiding the Use of Exclamation Points*

Martin educes himself from nothing. . . .

*Dragons*

And when the medicine . . .

. . . Martin, who does not descend . . .

*Rolled. Into. One.*

The angels are visiting . . .

. . . The monster receives a certified letter. . . .

*A Poorly Timed Deus ex Machina*

. . . as if she’s thought of a counter . . .

The hero receives a certified letter. . . .

. . . He brushes a nonexistent bee from. . .

. . . and all of them have been sad. . . .

*A World of One*

So, anyway . . .

. . . a corpse.

The Cedar House

April 19, 1973

One day in 1973, Jenna’s grandfather becomes a god. Or he would have done, anyway, if gods were real. Since they are not he catches on fire from inside instead.

His chest becomes a furnace.

The shadows of his ribs play on the wall.

His face catches and locks on a snarl of great joy. It is plain to anybody looking that while he might want to be the kind of person who turns down apotheosis, he is not. He isn’t fighting it. Even though it is going totally awry, even though he is not actually apotheosizing, he isn’t fighting it. He is maybe trying to want to sort of kind of fight it, maybe, at the most.

The locks of his white hair burn black against the fire.

He turns and he looks at Jenna and her brother Sebastien. It is the kind of look he gives them when he is making a memory from them. It is the kind of look he gives them when he’s going to tell them a story. It’s a look of somebody who’ll always be a part of them, and the other way around, even unto and after death.

He opens his mouth.

He doesn’t have a tongue any more. When he opens his mouth there is nothing that comes out of it but light. He is trying to say something but it is not clear what it is he is trying to say.

I love you, maybe. Or don’t play with monsters. Maybe even snowflakes ignite strange candy when they fall.

Or it’s OK. It’s OK. It’s not OK.

Jenna is not very good at reading lips, even when they are on fire.

It would be very helpful if she could read lips. It is practically for moments like this, where one’s grandfather is exploding and he does not have a tongue with which to articulate his thoughts, but at the same time he is glowing so brightly from within that every movement of his lips is distinct and limned and casting great shadows against the woods, that lip-reading was invented. Jenna looks very carefully at his lips and expects a lip-reading power to spontaneously appear.

Stubbornly, it does not.

So she doesn’t know what his last words might have been.

The stars are made of toast and fire, perhaps, or my God, I love you all.

He turns into a great pillar of fire, and then ash, and then nothingness, and the angel of death does not find him, nor any place thereafter bear accounting for his soul.

The Shelf, and What Happened There

a performance of the Gibbelins’ Tower Theater Company

Starring:

Meredith, as Mercury

Emily, as Emma

The Gibbelins’ Tower players, and

Magic Angel, as herself

Mercury is a cookie. She is tall and gorgeous. Her hair is long and flows down her side. Her primary ingredients are whole grain rolled oats, brown sugar, and coconut. She’s a lot like a gingerbread man, but she’s prettier and has less ginger.

She cools on a pan for a while. Then Emma, who is five, picks Mercury up and puts her on a shelf next to the other cookies.

You stay, Emma says. Talk to other cookies! If you have to go outside, tell Mommy first. That’s the rule! Then Emma leaves.

Hi, Mercury says to the other cookies.

On the shelf, there’s a rabbit, and a dashing pirate, and a wolf, and a faceless man. All of them are cookies. All of them say Hi, except for the faceless man. He doesn’t have a mouth, so he doesn’t say anything.

I’m a cookie, Mercury explains. I just cooled.

Welcome, says the pirate. We’re telling stories. Do you want to join in?