Cass Ration Jr. Sr. was already at the table when I came downstairs, doing something with a piece of string and a small wooden object that I decided not to examine too closely.
He looked up. "Ey man. You slept."
"I did," I said. "Thank you for the—" I looked at the table. "Hospitality."
He gestured at the table with the pride of a host. I sat down.
The tea arrived the same way it had arrived yesterday—poured directly onto the table's surface, spreading in a slow, deliberate pool toward the edges. I watched it spread. I leaned down. I licked it.
Concrete. Still concrete.
I sat back up. Cass Ration Jr. Sr. was watching me with the warm approval of someone whose guest had learned the correct procedure.
"You're leaving today," he said.
"Yes. Back to the farm."
He nodded slowly, with the unhurried consideration of someone approaching a subject from a specific angle. Then, he looked at me with the direct attention of someone about to say something that mattered to him.
"My dingalong," he said.
Not this again...
"I have upgraded it."
"...Congratulations," I said.
"Dingdadooooo," he said, with the reverence of someone describing something beyond ordinary language. "Dingalingding. Kadoopkadoop."
I nodded, but that wasn't the end.
"Dingadadingadadingdonglalawhopwhopkadoopkadoopdingalalinglinglongtangdingdadankaboompkadingladilonglongadong."
I was left speechless. My mind was left blank. I had to keep it blank, for any thought based on this... dingalong... may leave permanent damage to my mental health.
"My daughter has not seen it," he said. "The upgraded dingalong." He looked at me with the steady expectation of someone whose request was already formed. "Show her."
"I—" I started. "How do I show her something I haven't—"
"You know," he said simply.
"I really don't—"
"Ey man knows," he said, with the calm certainty of someone who had decided this was true and was not going to revisit the decision.
I looked at the table. I looked at the pool of concrete tea still spreading slowly toward my elbow. I thought about the fish outside, and the lion, and the Chimera who had claimed me as its owner, and the gold bar in my pocket, and the letter I had delivered yesterday, and Cast Ration three hours away who had sent me here because the rat riders had already gone.
"Fine," I said. "I'll show her."
Cass Ration Jr. Sr. smiled with the complete satisfaction of a man whose affairs were in order.
"Dingdooo," he said, by way of thanks.
"You're... welcome," I said.
I stood, gathered what little I had—which was the cloth bundle mostly empty of road rations now, the gold bar, and the clothes I'd been wearing since a dimension away—and walked to the door.
The lion was outside, exactly where it had been left, sitting with the composed authority of something that had been given a post and maintained it overnight without complaint. The fish emerged from the back basin looking refreshed in whatever way fish looked refreshed. The crow was on its wings on the gatepost. The Chimera was sitting in the exact spot I had last seen it, as if it had not moved, as if movement without me was not something it had considered.
"We go?" it said.
"We go," I said.
I looked back once at the house. Cass Ration Jr. Sr. was in the doorway, holding his string and his wooden object, watching me leave with the mild satisfaction of someone who had completed a transaction and found it good.
I turned toward the main road.
Three hours back. Same road. Same grass. Same aggressively happy sun, already doing its thing.
I walked.
...
The road back was quieter than the road in.
No fish and crow arguing about geometry. No lion emerging from the grass. No smell of something biological being handled professionally. Just the road and the grass and the four animals finding their natural configurations around me—Chimera at my left knee, lion two paces behind, fish slightly ahead checking the road surface, crow on my shoulder despite my previously stated preference.
An hour passed in the specific comfortable silence of people who had run out of things to process and had settled into the rhythm of moving.
"It's peaceful," I said.
I hadn't meant to say it. It arrived the way observations arrived when you weren't guarding the exit.
"Peaceful?" the fish said.
"Peaceful. As in—peace."
"Peace," the lion repeated, testing the word.
"A state with no depression. No war."
The four of them were quiet for a moment.
"Depression?" the crow said.
"It's—" I tried to find the entry point. "A state of mind. When everything feels heavy and nothing feels worth doing and getting out of bed is its own separate problem."
Silence.
"What is bed?" the Chimera asked.
"The—" I stopped. "The thing you sleep on."
"Ey man sleeps on the floor," the Chimera noted.
"That's—yes, fine, the floor. When getting off the floor feels impossible."
"Why would getting off the floor feel impossible? You move. You get up. Done." the fish asked. Genuinely. With no frame of reference for a world in which this was a question that needed to be asked.
"Because—" I started.
I stopped.
I looked at the road ahead. The grass moved in the breeze on both sides. The sun was doing its thing. Fesceland was an hour behind us, still arguing, still loud, beetle lawyers still conducting proceedings by volume in a city that had never needed to organize itself into the kind of structure that produced the specific exhaustion I was trying to describe.
"War," I said instead. "You know what war is."
"No," the lion said.
"People trying to kill each other. Hurt each other. Organized violence. Armies. Bad words back and forth. Malicious. Life... life is war, or so I thought."
"War," the crow repeated.
"Groups of people with weapons who—"
"Weapons that kill," the fish said. "You mentioned this before. We discussed it."
"Yes."
"We concluded it was unnecessary," the fish nodded. "Words are enough."
"In your world, yes. In mine—"
I stopped again.
In my world. 12-hour shifts. Minimum wage. Rent rising. Depression that was fucking real. Wars on screens, always somewhere, the specific ambient dread of a world that had governments and systems and administrations and militaries and still—
Still.
"Meyer?" the fish said.
I had stopped walking without noticing. I was standing in the middle of the road, the grass moving on both sides, the sun doing its thing, the Chimera looking up at me with the patient attention of something that had decided wherever I was, it was there too.
"You really don't know," I said. "Either of those things."
"No," the lion said simply.
"Nobody here does?"
"I have not encountered these words before," the lion said. "And I have been alive since the beginning of the world, given that the world revolves around me."
The fish shook its head. The crow was still on my shoulder. The Chimera's tail moved in its slow, deliberate arc.
I thought about Fesceland. The arguing, the laughter, the beetle lawyers, the man with the knife who was losing until he found a better sentence. The no-government, no-ruling-party, no-administration city that ran on the specific energy of people doing what they wanted—which turned out to include, mostly, the things that kept a city running.
I thought about Cast Ration calling me brother within thirty seconds of meeting me. Cass Ration Jr. feeding a stranger without mentioning money. Cass Ration Jr. Sr. pouring tea on a table and genuinely believing he was being hospitable.
I thought about the tamer walking away with his brush and his dramatic speech, already planning a return. Already planning something. Not despairing. Just—planning.
Nobody here was despairing.
The chaos was real. The wrongness was everywhere. The fish was on land, the crow preferred a wingstand, the lion believed in its own gravitational significance, and someone somewhere was eating a meal that completed a loop I would never fully make peace with.
But nobody here was lying awake at 3 am doing the rent calculation. Nobody here was standing on a train that smelled like someone had made a decision in the back car and was hoping the next stop came quickly. Nobody here was watching an ad break interrupt a story and feeling the specific particular rage of a person whose life had been interrupted so many times that even fiction couldn't get through without a cut.
The world was chaotic and the world was strange and the world had no word for depression.
Because it had no reason for one.
I started walking again.
The animals fell back into their configurations without comment—Chimera at the knee, lion two paces back, fish slightly ahead, crow on shoulder.
"Ey man is thinking," the Chimera said.
"Yes," I said.
"Sometimes. Ey man overthinks."
I considered this with the same honest attention I was trying to give everything in this world.
"You are probably right," I said.
The Chimera appeared to find this satisfactory. Its tail moved in its slow arc.
The road ran ahead of us, straight and unhurried, toward a farm three hours from somewhere I used to be.
I walked.
The grass moved.
The sun kept doing its thing, aggressively happy, like it had never heard of seasonal depression.
It hadn't.
Nobody here had.
I kept walking.