Second millennium Anno Domini, first year, tenth month, thirty-first day. You get a knock on the door. A doubled knock, slightly out of phase. It's us, it's you, it's me. It's that damn time of the year again, kids in sheets or freshly out of the opaque cathode ray glow, innocent visitors from the past life of madmen who in another century would declare themselves prophets. Before radio towers were monuments or new growth redwood children verging on consumptive sat and read the Bible and daydreamt of having ghostwritten the Sermon on the Mount; in worse cases daydreamt of having made it better, having received the new light - the birth of sects is an adult who bothers not to have grown out of it. Joseph Smith, Fellow of the Ring, elves and seraphim.

They leap off the pages of Youth Classics League Magazine, their creational clay is dot matrices. They're ready to pose before me a leading Socratic question and make me look like an idiot, trick or treat?

They are still children despite their proclivity beyond their days for the parsing of stories already told by way of modern classicists, who define a "classical" as anything other than a river into which we do not step the same way twice, one in which fish bite at our feet hungrily, of philosophers of yore who held up featherless bipeds before Socrates, which leads me to believe they are nec procul from the exegesis of the Ogdoad from obscure Gnostic texts, despite the numbers preferred by the longer-haired daughter, both of them my nieces, presently being the integers ninety-nine and one, the count of names and then the symbolic monadicity of Allah, in whom she earnestly believes, as does her mother, yet from the moment she emerged from the incubator, uncrying but obviously without the closed-off language of her two most immediate forebearers. Although neither her nor Thebes have directly spoken to me in my faulty memory, I may reveal myself as knowledgable in flashes of epiphany as to whom I defined myself as prior to my forget, prior to the Space Age, prior to the moon landing, prior to absolute desolation. My sisters are crabapples from neighboring trees who fall too far. I am not reading too far into any of this, and this is my promise. I cannot think with Hadal-zone depths anymore, for there exists no such will within me. Consider my nieces' Halloween.

This year I'm trying to take my own advice, walk in the direction I point a stranger to on the street to find this or that thing, play to the script. One comes bearing a chicken born without feathers, as their mother assures me sometime later.

"Behold, Plato's man. The proof of the Academy's fraud."

Said in the tonality of a nocturnal cardiac arrest. Said with the nonpluss of the electrician sent to check your wiring finding your body after your suicide. You gave him the keys to your mansion because most likely that day you will be away again bartering and kissing ass and pretending to enjoy schmoozing with the executive class and you're going to have an extra bad day if you come back and the lights blow a minute after you attempt to relax in your own oversize living room. You never asked his name. He knows yours. He expects you are not here and does not expect you to answer. He is sent on his appointed rounds, undeterred courier of entropy and finally reaches your bedroom. That smell. Is it smoke? No. Nothing blew. You are presumed to be where the suicides go until the coroner subpoenas Heaven or the bloodvein in the toxicological discovery phase. Death is the only crime where even the victim is guilty - to err is human because to be accused is human. Err on the side on the caution. It is written E=mc². Catchy shortening, like a jingle. It is said to err is human. What is energy within relativity actually? E=(mc²)² + (pc)². You can then make an educated guess. What are the words no one says after "err"? His voice in the halfdark where you rot for several days, and her voice delivering the punchline is bloodchilling or bronchitic depending on how you look at it. But she is alive. Whisper floating in the wind, whistle of a runaway kettle flying off the heating apparatus. Born of room tone carried through every building of every class of every diameter, every circumference, every development, the steady heartbeat of conversations isolate. You know one day she'll want to kill herself but most likely she'll want to be found having drank herself to death, Ari Augustenburg. Voice arid as the desert. First woman who you have to consciously implicate in a harmless innocuous joke to find the comedy of whose words. Intention of comedy, false accident of death. Size of bottles in gallons poured in perfect fit to task. Receipts for aged spirits clumsily buried in the trash. It is tragic to be an overdose, it is not so tragic to pretend to be an overdose. But seeming is truer being to the accused philosopher whose place I now take - the seeming of a man is a featherless biped. I have been beaten by my own role's rules. Clearly I must escape into the sunset driving a Rolls Royce. It is convenient for the philosopher to pretend to be a poor man until he has nowhere he can stand to convince others of his cash's unexplained vagrancy. Money off on a wandering preaching tour, making fools out of men. The status is the man. That is why she wants to be a suicide of false accident, and why I, Platolassa, am fucked, and why her voice is dead serious until assumed humorous. Assumptions and pretensions to create assumption.

"I have discovered your tricks, and thus with your whole budget you will treat me. I have co-opted the falsity of your claims, I have followed every rule, and now I will dethrone you, your and your Socratic frameworks, yourself and your leading celebratory questions. You have no more tricks, so you give me treats."

Suppose I'll follow the principles of my own musings and surrender my sweet possessions.

She, Rico Eisenberg, now, before we set out, rolls around in a barrel proclaiming "This is my true domicile! Nothing else can contain me!" with utmost excitement and confidence mirroring the yesteryear philosopher's facetious cadence with an assumedly high degree of verisimilitude, enough to boil water on the Celsius scale but not excessive and unlivable enough for plasma's formation and the occurrence of fusion, using athematic gestures to imply blasphemous hermeneutics pertaining to the origin of the universe. It's as if she is unaware of her heritage as an Alarie, unknowing that the Alarie, immortal yet capable very narrowly of death in the edge-case freak occurrence of a corner case preventing the eternity of our lives, has already created a regulation for how death is to be commemorated: the body is cremated, the ashes bifurcated and divided into two piles, those two piles individually contained in wooden vessels of whatever is locally available for carving and then polishing, a carrier pigeon or some other bird trained to fly into high altitidues entrusted with the left and flown into the deep, the bird returned by its own accord, the right pile dumped into the Mediterranean Sea that it may circulate through the waters devoid of its original purpose as a body, a referrentless basalt headstone marked flat against the ground in a graveyard with a four-line poem of the widow's composition and dates of birth and death reckoned against the First War (of the Alaries) inscribed, and she will never have to worry that she may perish, yet there is no hint of planning a mausoleum to surround and entomb the remnants and relics of this pagan ritual passed down through her family for many generations - I, however, must always worry for myself. I fear death, and I surround myself with it, not knowing how many children I have mothered or the bastards' places in this world, though I may wish for a better life. There was a barrel for maturing cognac in the backyard where she went out back after I gave one or both of them, one for all, all for none all the candy. I never used it to mature cognac because after one sip of storebought I gave up on digging a hole in the yard for a cellar. There was a barrel for maturing cognac only in my memory. Obelisk at rest. Whole note of wind seeping through the loosely sealed lid, fini. Another whistle of the world's room tone. Some things just have to be done backwards - some jokes just improve after you put your head up your backside. Rico came carrying a lantern. We all knew what the intended joke was. She was going to be looking for an honest man, and we established earlier that a philosopher has none of the attributes of an honest man. Let us consider the question of parity: is a lantern really as special, really as Diogenes-like as a serendipitously born featherless chicken? We all the implication is that he plucked it himself, man without any manner but spite, rabid dog biting onto coat of fowl. But we can surmise that after Diogenes' intellectual humiliation, Plato would send for a chicken with no feathers after hearing whispers of it around the perimeter of the polis. He would choose to frame the miracle nude chicken as an example of the prototypicity of mankind and its nature or some such, something lofty. After all we know these men only through contrivance, stories wherein they're always right and no questions are asked and no holes are poked - I am contriving a scenario where Diogenes gets Plato's chicken before Plato can and chooses to, like a bully, to humiliate him repeatedly over the same thing, but now even more extremely. Ecce homo, nah, ecce canis: "Hey Plato, I found a fucking newborn walking around. Wow, you're looking at me like you were going to use this chicken to teach. Well now you can't, old sport." We are embodying Diogenes wholly by giving him another ball in his court, another positive contrivance, so Rico thought. So then she thinks: "so why the hell is Ricocococo not in a barrel like Diogenes? If we're like, being even more of the man because of the lucky chicken, somebody has to also be the man and there's nobody better to be the gnarly dog man than Rico! I see a barrel, I get into the barrel, got that?" I invite her inside and she inspects the perimeter of the house and out of the window out back in the yard she sees just the thing, my failed whispy cellar dreams. She would roll it across the sidewalk forcing others to make way. All the other kids on foot with heavy bags, Rico in a steamrolling vessel. But they need a strongarm to straighten up the barrel when Ari knocks on the door and presents the miracle chicken all skin like the dinosaur so all the candy doesn't fall out and she can swimmingly cohabitate with it as it gets heaped into the barrel. Considering the capacity, she will most likely to have roll around herself, centrifugal, trying to have her hands on the merchandise at all nonsides of rotation to prevent all the relatively small, storebuyable bags from sliding off the walls, and we cannot put a lid on the kid or her mouth screaming like a cock in the morning and leave her in the suicide dark. Neither I nor Ari question her logic - this is just physics. It'll be something to half remember and disregard as a fever dream for all of the other kids.

Rico, then, is an agent of locomotion. She is fear and she is desolation to the surrounding children, much preferring not to have been present and becoming cantankerous to return home with the same dissatisfaction as elderly near-dementia-patients taken from their zones of comfort fully, and - in the same way middle-aged 'adult children' already deathly sick of that exact term coming from their themselves-benzo-addled therapists now turn down their kitchen stoveburners of empathy for their elders which, in perfectly anticipated fashion, fixing a gass leak still gone unacknowledged as a kayfabesque open secret within the nouveau riche household dynasty for decades that prayed to a God claimed to have been unbelieved-in that those now-grandparents would remain nearby after retiring, so they are not suffocated - no longer sharing in the wonders of childhood with the two nieces in my care who speak in references which will not be interpreted by those surrounding whose brains are developing at a pace not fast enough to keep up. The brains of phantasma, the species the three of us share amongs ourselves in some capacity or another - myself of pure blood, the two of them a pair of varying admixtures of mutant vampire and mutant phasma stock - mature at a rate similar to humans, yet Ari already seems to speak in terms of programmatic god objects, monads (beyond my own understanding at the moment), computational linguistics, the Willy-Nicky correspondence, historical materialism (between praise and derision of which she has zig-zagged for the past month), pieces of monumental Russian dictionaries written around 1880 (в тысяча восемьсот восемдесятом году, she tells me more precisely), and other such items on a list accumulating into an epic catalog fit to make the mythic semblance supposed as a single poet and conventionally referred to out of necessity for immediate, gratifying convenience as "Homer" blush into an expression aptly describable only as rhododaktulos - a term of which they are likely well aware, as their investigations of Diogenes would reasonably lead them to anecdotes wherein he references or even "re-owns" the famed Homeric Iliad. We Alaries have epics of our own, I've tried to tell them regarding this matter, but it would take perhaps a century of their lifetimes to go through the great depths of Liminality, world of the gaps, seeking one honest woman (touche!) with a version of those epics of yore unredacted, unsanitized of Their blood, but they do not believe me, for I too often forget the other trivia which are, for better or worse or maybe even just better, of greater interest to the two of them. The other children flee, and my nieces are left in an empty expanse of suburban New England homes to acquire all the candy they so please, dividing their plunders amongst themselves more or less fairly or maybe unfairly; I cannot be sure which. It becomes very late, and I decide to ask Rico a question to see how she answers.

"How do you get along with other children?"

"We don't need them!"

Ari helpfully adds:

"We don't need to trust them either."

"How do you mean you don't need them?"

"We decided we don't because all of them want us dead. Duh."

"We don't want to die if we don't die because we wanted to."

"We couldn't die even if we wanted to. But we don't want to die because we tried to be nice and helpful and all that crap to like, the wrong person."

"We only need them if we can raise an army. We only need them if we can sway them with money."

"We only need them if we can pit them against each other and make them like, beat each other up, and have cool gnarly fights that look cool."

"We only need them when they can be into positions that mimic history and they can be fooled into thinking what they have done will retain some greater value because it contains historical parallels."

"We only need them when needing them means someone we don't need can die."

"We don't need to get close. We can keep leading them on. We can pretend to be friends and we can give them material things to make them feel valued."

"But we'll betray them when they stop being useful because it is their fault for believing us."

"Truth hurts and why would we need them if they cannot operate under the assumption of that very basic fact that everything that is veritable is hostile and unforgiving? Why must we toil for those who see good in everything?"

"We will pretend to be dead if it makes them cry."

"We will pretend to rise from the dead if it makes them cry with a newfound sense of purpose and loyalty."

"Did… the two of you learn this from your parents?"

"I don't need Mother's word to have confirmation of what is obvious from the day oneself is born."

"Yeah, you tell her! We don't need Mom for like, anything but giving us food and shelter and stuff. But even if she vanished we could probably get even cooler, bigger and better food and shelter."

"We don't need nature. We don't need civilization. We can buy the globe. We own the globe."

"We can destroy anything."

"We can become anything."

"We can like, seem to be anything."

"We can make seeming into being."

"We can kill anyone in the world."

"We can kill anyone that can't even be killed."

"We can take away anything."

"We can give anything to anyone for free."

"We can destroy each other."

"We can annihilate each other."

"We can end each other."

"We can begin each other."

"We can assume the guise of one another."

"We can like, steal your identity, Aunt Thalassa. We can have your voice."

"Surely you can't."

"Oh but we can."

"It is not a matter of 'can', it is a matter of 'will' and will."

"What will I have left then?"

"The whole world because you're, like, one of those people that's convinced you're like, part of something and not above it. You don't need a name but there's eight billion other names and they don't like, determine anything."

"Remember Diogenes comically quoting the Iliad to truly elucidate the pretensions of those he is in opposition to?"

"You can be named 'sea' and you can be afraid of something. Thalassaphobic Thalassa."

"I'm just fine with water, though."

"When we went to a pool you sat in a chair the whole time. So I don't buy that, that's fishy, fishy like the sea. Tell her about the sea, Ari!"

"Yes. When we went to the beach you took your leave about ten minutes later, judging it to be the polite amount of time before you sneak out."

"See! You don't seem too good with water."

"That's why antecedent fools the gullible. Historical parallels. Eternal recursion."

"That's why people believe like, names, mean things. What kind of dumb- dummy believes that?"

"You can say 'dumbass', sister. Who is watching?"

"I am."

"You are of a linguistically liberal inclination, Aunt Thalassa."

"I am but-"

"Let myself finish, and we all know you want us to swear. Fuck. I said it. A word profane. Here is a statement. I'm named Ariadne Thebes II. What does that mean? That's not myself. That is not even Saturn Thebes - no soul calls her Ariadne. Mother does not employ that as her manner of reference for Mom. Why is it then that I am the Second? Is it a decision made for myself to be an incremental improvement on the original?"

"That's a lot of expectations! If our parents can't even like, not have expectations for us, all the other people will have weird expectations and they will also want us dead."

"Yes, because their operative manner will be influenced by those who are influential, which are our politically embattled parents."

"They only want us dead so they can bargain with our parents. But we're already bargaining with our parents over the whole stupid name thing, stupid stupid stupid, uncool in any way, so they should get in line and back off."

"That's why we are not creating any openings for them to diplomatically engage with us. We will not allow for concessions on the part of ourselves."

Oh.

"We don't need nominative determinism, we don't need agnatic lines and we certainly don't need friendship."

Overtelling. This is something I once strove to avoid, but now it doesn't phase me one bit. It demonstrates that I exist as opposed to permitting myself abandon and a gradual fading into unbelieffulness - not that that would ever really matter; I and all others persist regardless of the desire for them to have a sense of being about them or to have possessed one otherwise - so I will say everything, lest my memory fail me and my name, my nominative determinant, my friendly fire in the general direction of those who have either forgotten me by my own means or truly never knew me from the onset of their limited perception of my immortal gamut, be lost to the sands of time as I once intended. I do not know how many times I have failed to realize this by now, but at present I promise myself I will not allow myself any losses at this grand game of Cards, my life an object so complex it could not be reasonably produced - despite the glaring omission from recorded, ink-dipped history of the fact that it was produced nevertheless. This is what little lifeblood remains in me, transplanted from an outside source, soon to be rejected by my frail body anyway. Brain death. Flotsam carnage in a municipal sewer.

"Not every sign is entirely literal, or as I would begin to explain to anyone else other than you two, you have to take everything with a grain of salt. Would you allow yourself to be guided by the application of a name, or would you simply select a new name?"

"New name! It'd be totally bleh if the trap of being was the thing I got caught up in! I want entanglements with forces I can control, not anything beyond that reach!"

"Your little arm doesn't reach very far at all, Rico! What do you mean, being so lofty in front of your own aunt who knows your power is just as soft as iron-unpiercable?"

"Lay off my sister for a moment and consider what she just said for a moment, will you?" I want to quip with a remark like 'needlessly high-and-mighty,' but any Arenberg would be glad to state these are children within whom there lies potential far greater than my own, and I would be glad to call it all lies, claim they only speak such things from their debased and vulgar mouths in acts of verbal defamation soon to be transcribed into libel, but I know it to be true, and thus I must commit idolatry towards my sister's twin daughters, even without faith. Would it be the source-filter articulation of a philosophical verisimilitude to state, in the absence of any true laws - or even customs - of succession within this quiltwork, collateral, and multiplicitous bloodline, that together, the Geminae Bigeminae, naturally tautological, redundant as a, as in engineering, overall positive, might, in one fell swoop, disregarding all else, meaning, in broad sense, the things which they, Ari, Rico, themselves, developed, wish to inherit, find themselves, half the time internally unacknowledged conventionally, being, in, inhalation, earnest, dissociated, as, more - now - or, often, equally, less, complete, by, firstly, reckoning, selves, lay accepted claim to the throne? I say something I know I will later regret: "I'm sorry, dear. All I want for you is for you to end up on the right path."

"Right path. What's that even mean?"

"Must she take a class in the moralities of the world's cultures to determine which one is the best fit for herself?"

"It doesn't have to be so a posteriori or academic. Often righteousness stems from only a sign, a name, a thing, a place. It may not be one you want or need."

"So I can find good in evil? Is that right, Aunt and Ari?"

"No."

"Not at all, sister, sibling, kin, first-degree, and so on, to myself.

"Sorriesies then. Guess I was right to think in absolutes."

"Even with your hopefully-not-defining act of defiance considered, I raise you this: is it still, at the barest of minima, unevil for you to provide myself with culturally-unrestricted sororial piety, so to speak in honorifics and terminology to be capitalized once romanized, My Most Deeply Admirable Divinely Provenant Heiress To The Throne Ignited Myriad Myriad Myriad Years Ago Persistent Having Passed Through The Dynasties?" (Note that the name would be somewhat less fancifully translated into te inelegant English tongue as The Heritable Dynastic (or Imperial by word of Choan) Royal Seat Burning Into Eternity. Ari inflates the terminology so much she must, unusually, take a breath before continuing to speak.) "Will you extend the care a sister is supposed to provide, even among the idiot otherchildren group in which we are entombed every time we leave home in this unpatchwork, unbespoke, and overall made-to-measure so-called suburban semblance of a settlement?"

"Pfft, anything else would be Babelite." Considering the nefarious ones a look seems to appear on her face nullifying any previous taboo against participation. I begin to feel worried, gesture towards the car I have parked. This is not the neighborhood in which I live anyway. We're rather far away from 'in my own backyard'.

Across the street in an inconspicuous office building men sit around a round table, faux-sequoia as if California has already all burnt or the continent has been totally deflowered, non-Arthurian (unArthurized?) just as the door creaks upon and they don't stand at attention. Ari would observe that their maggots fail to form any symmetries and fall onto the floor and turn to dust. This is highly unusual; when one perishes, another sticks to the cheek, or tries to is, in all conformist fateful determinancy, reduced to gunpowder. Most men have mirrored hives or some when particularly despised radial symmetries. It's visual feedback of the censor bleep removing any identifying information or client/eyelid/muscle/browtwitchside supplements of tonal intention. It's the Witness Protection Program. Something like that, she would say. One is saying: "I have my maid take out and put the gun into the bedside cabinet at the same every time every night by the emergency three lines of coke and smatterings of methamphetamines stashed in jars of caffeine pills. You can't be too careful these days." Another is saying something or another. Just what I feared: lounge style duochromatic ties in partyhat colors, aplenty. It is Casual Friday in perpetuating perpetuum for the living dead. Or is it Friday? Which year? How do I see inside? Millions Now Living Will Never See Saturday. Heads turn and maggots flail on the ground, the fetal position subsect of the ecstatic Shakers, the saints not called upon for All Hallow's Eve. There's a poor soul trying to leave work who still has to stand doorman, like a Walmart greeter.

Rico yells: "That's Babel!"

My attempt to herd them inside the car proves futile. Ari comments: "There are certain opportunities which we must not negate through our own actions, Aunt Thalassa."

Ari: "It is more Babylon, as dictated in the anti-gestalt theology of the American cult."

Rico: "All Babel to me, Ricocococo! The tower must fall!"

Ari: "It is more the Wichita Falls skyscraper."

Rico: "Yeah, cuz it's all a ratshit con job!"

Ari: "Isn't that where they're sending that girl of yours?"

Rico: "Why are you talking to me like Bathys, sis? That's like, not adorbs."

Ari: "But that's all her grandfather wants her to do. To be imprisoned inside that building."

Rico: "Don't make me think about Ressie or I'll explode, explode, explode, explode! She's not Rapunzel! She's not even supposed to be a girl!"

Ari: "Is it not the simplest and quickest of associations in reaction to the building?"

No response. I can tell it's some unsolved tension. I stand just at the corner, having let them proceed to the front door.

Rico: "Should we ring the doorbell? Ricocococo, me, I think we should ring that doorbell!"

Ari: "I would consider that to be the best course of action."

So the door opens. Ari feeds the featherless chicken some grain.

Rico: "Behold, Plato's man! The lies of the Academy!"

Ari: "That's my line."

Rico: "You're the establishment, and you've been tricked!"

Guy at the door: "Huh? You're, are you supposed to be here? Do you have the wrong door?"

Rico: "What, do you not have like, some candy to spare for a couple of tweens?"

Ari: "Yes, I thought you were supposed to be a pillar of the community and the very image of American prosperity and abundance."

Guy at the door: "Well, it's late so like. I think we're all out of candy."

Ari draws a gun.

Ari: "Mister, would you please accede to the conditions of myself and with haste circumnavigate to the breakroom vending machine to produce one item of candy?"

At the other side of the door held open as if by a plank or a longsword the automatic actions of the human body are not alkaline. Sweat.

Guy at the door: "Would you spare me a dollar then?"

Rico: "You're at Bureau Hotel, how come you like, don't have a dollar of your own? This displeases Ricocococo! I am like, totes displeased. Not gnarly."

Ari: "I concur, sir. Has greed overtaken your pallid, blackened soul?"

Guy at the door: "If you ask for anything more, I'll call security."

Ari cocks the gun.

Rico: "As you well heard now, guy, double up. Two chocolate bars."

Ari feeds the featherless chicken more grain and pats its head.

Ari: "You are innocent of the sins of womankind."

Guy at the door: "There's no way that's a real gun."

Rico: "Ari, show him!"

She fires a couple rounds into the sky. If this were a cartoon, this would fell a stork and unwanted generations would be subsumed by the moral wisdom of homosexuality amongst mortals, who cannot reproduce via wishes for a child and incubator.

Rico: "Now move, mister! Are you going to say no to two little girls? What are you, some ungnarly like, gosh, trashass misogynist?"

Ari: "I would like to believe that Bureau Hotel upholds its progressive values, yes. Please demonstrate this."

Defeated, they procure what they want.

Ari: "My gratitude to the establishment. However, this cannot be your win as we have disproven the full program of your way of knowing."

She gestures to the chicken, which Rico holds underneath her arm. A nonchalant cluck.

Guy at the door: "Whatever, just go."

Rico: "Byebye, bestie! See you next year. Ricocococo will be back with a vengeance and I'll make sure to get all your candy that you were gonna give to your own sons."

Ari puts down the gun, it vanishing into the dark of night or just inside the gooey five-dimensional expanse of her hair. So I finally get to herd two girls who just mugged a guy for candy in addition to the entire neighborhood that they forced to stay home inside the car, and then hopefully herd the chicken into a coop. It strikes me to ask myself if I stole the car but why worry now. Jul wanted vegan for dinner and I didn't have time to go to the grocery store while making an enemy of every other family in the neighborhood. She's been trying to go vegan for a while even though we have a bunch of farmstock and she could always just kill and eat somebody. Like one of those modern takes on a vampire where they don't drink blood. I am immediately confronted with proof of this: I find a penis drawn in bougie liquid chalk marker on one of my windows, "SUCK IT RICO" written underneath. Rico yells: "No, I won't! I won't! I won't! I won't! You'll suck mine! Even though there's no such thing!" I have a feeling that if I let them outside they'll mug the original artist. Oh well, best leave settling that score for tomorrow.

"Girls, what do you want for dinner?"

"I will take whatever is on offer, Aunt Thalassa."

"Ari, I will take that as a threat."

"I hope my expectations are met."

"Jul wanted vegan so we're having vegan."

"Aunt Thalassa, I don't think the veganism of the food to be served is a guaranteed matter with Rowan around."

"You can feed Ro-Ro your mug candy."

"I admire your ingenuity, Aunt Thalassa."

"No, but sorries sis but you're not making sense - it's our hard-earned candy! It matters more than all the other bags we collected and put in the car while we were having that back and forth! This is our war spoils."

"Ro-Ro can just pick whatever out of the bonanza you've stolen from literally everyone else this Halloween. They're gonna have Bureau announce a second day of Halloween and charge parents 10 dollars for a Bureau-sponsored bucket of Twix, Mars and garbage."

"Garbage is code for Herscheys!"

"It is, Rico!"

"Isn't it Hershey's?"

"Ari, how can you tell the spelling in my mind from my pronunciation? That's like, weird. I always forget you totes can do that."

"I also would have respelled it in that Germanic fashion."

Rowan staggers upright, leaving the couch. They seem to just stare at the television all day. Why do I call my own kid 'they'? Should be a girl, right? Chimes in. "I'll take the European Bountys."

"We will take inventory and if we can produce the coconut candybar in question we will assauge your desires."

"If you don't have those, I don't know I'm illiterate, just give me the M&Ms. The 13th. Like the good Friday."

"Not the holiday."

"It's sometimes both. I can't read a calendar and I know this."

"I am only making a factual assertion that you were most likely to have spelled it with a lowercase g."

"Whatever you say, I'm not even supposed to understand I have thoughts yet."

"You seem to have self-actualized already."

"You're saying that like you know life ends in no life."

"If I figure out a way for it to end in no life, it will."

"But you're not gonna die by Jul. So who? Who'll kill you? Whatever, I'm not supposed to understand murder yet. Oi, Mum."

Jul came out the bathroom without still smelling of blood and already put a fresh change of clothes on. I think she's really been doing no-kill lately. Like those people that quit masturbating for some spiritual reason. Why would you do that? "Mum, what's murder and what's suicide?"

"Rico, what'd we do with the barrel?" I ask her.

"It's in the trunk, Auntie. Of coursesies it is, did you forget?" I seem to have. Shit. It's a really big trunk. I drive a truck, right? Yes, out of the window, a truck. Big and gaudy truck. Raised chassis. It's a pickup. Surrogate Mom-Mobile. So we were taunting everyone in town that went into hiding after we robbed them of all their candy. Serves them right.

Jul chimes in. "Murder is spondaically-scansionwise-broadways-long-divisible into two categories at-large regardless of what the told-otherwise-blither-life-syrup-drinker masses may tell you. One side is the normal sort-lot-category-schema-norm, which is an act of honor, while the other is my sort, which is an act of hunger. Suicide is even simpler to define: it entails escaping murder the coward's way."

Ro: "Thanks, Mum."

Ari: "That's where you're wrong. You can only commit suicide as an immortal via murder."

I ask her: "Is that your own theory?"

Ari: "It's my own certainty. You just do away with the mortal population of a whole country."

I ask her: "Well, it's untested, isn't it?"

Ari: "It's not."

Does she mean the genocide?

Ari: "I suppose you are correct in the assertion that it is untested by myself in particular. The a priori, evasively erstwhile, condition for the plan's completion is that you also manage to nullify the combat-readiness of every other immortal who tries to stop you. Then the essence of a flower can be its petals' fall." Mishima? Since when do little girls read Yukio Mishima? Or is she just interested in suicide?

Jul shrugs her shoulders. "Thalassa, dearest-loveliest-closest-most-kissed, Thal, when's dinner?" I don't think she's perturbed enough by Ari's claim. Whatever, whatever.

"I've been doing this all day so I haven't gone to the grocery yet."

"Auntie, what? What what what what? No, we stopped at the grocery store on the way, right? Totes? Ari, help me here! It's a Ricocococonspiracy!"

"Myself supports this assertion."

"Auntie, Thalassa Alarie, you must be really really tired!"

"I am, yeah."

When I start having lapses for real this'll just be one long blank sheet, regardless of whether Ro lives or dies. Best not think about it for now. Indeed, a bunch of fresh veg. Huh. It's just as well then. Best return to my duties as a housewife. The no-murder diet is waiting for implementation. Did I put the chicken in a warm coop outside? "Rico, can you check on the chicken?" "There's no like, way, no wayz at all, that anything's changed since the chicken sat down by the extra hot lantern on the collapsed haybale in the barn." "Thank God for that." No, but it's 2009, isn't it? Because Ro's here? And Ro was born in '05? And Ro's talking. And seems to remember things. So must be 4 or something, right? Why did I think it was '01? It's the Recession. Yes, it's all recessed into my memory now. And Ari and Rico are what? Twelve. So why'd she say tweens? Well, just borderline. Okay, okay. Always things to do.