Just North of Nowhere by Lawrence Santoro

. .where he might even. . .like he ought to stop this indoor biking stuff, step down and rest a bit, consider the future!
    Without thinking, Bunch sprung and tossed himself through the door. He rolled across the porch, tumbled down the step in one long leap, flop, roll and scrabble! He was onto soft sand and damp cool pebbles! Morning light washed over him where he lay. His feet felt like they’d walked a slow mile of hot rock. His body was all over one big brush burned bruise, he dripped sweat and grease but he was outside the inside of the critter house and rubbing himself happy.
    From where he sat, Bunch considered.
    He considered ax. He considered fire. He wished dynamite. He relished all manner of destructions onto the place.
    The place shivered, sucked in, a balloon tire oozing flat, collapsing on itself. As it wheezed, it exhaled a stink breath, once live things now dead and gone to rot.
    Damn place shriveled until it was the near the size (and almost the shape) of the bike. When it couldn't wrap itself around it any more, the house squirted the cycle at Bunch like a melon seed through pinched lips. Bunch ducked as the bike spun past his head and crashed onto the path near the creek.
    Free of the bike’s steel shape, the house shriveled to the size of a good raccoon. The radio popped past Bunch's head.
    At that point Bunch felt the urge to kick the damn thing. He wanted to drown it in the creek or stomp it, barefooted as he was, into the earth.
    The damn thing sucked even smaller. It sucked slower, now, maybe because from all around, the late-blooming plants, the rotted stumps, all that stuff – the just for show stuff – sucked into the earth. Part of the critter, Bunch figured.
    Now cat-sized, the beast let a stinking wheeze of breath as Bunch righted his bike. Like Bunch, the cycle was slicked over, something both oily and gritty – like MyOwne sandy-soap Einar kept by the sink at the Formerly Amoco. He and the bike dripped with the stuff.
    The damn radio was bust, the plastic chewed, cracked and melted. Useless! Damn, if that didn’t piss him.
    When the old strange place got to be the size of a good black squirrel, it pulled one foot, then another, then another, then three, four, a half-dozen more out of the ground. The little critter skittered its ugly ass out of the depression where the house had stood for the past nine months, and scooted into the forest.
    By then it was no bigger than a really good-sized centipede. Bunch felt like grabbing a stick to whomp it but he didn't. Hell, it was just a critter like others. It didn't float in a galloping way, it didn't slip like a cat, sneak like a fox, not even flow like a thousand-legger might do shivering down a wall. It crashed and ripped through the bushes and the trees with one hell of a racket. It just bashed into the thicket. For a good two minutes after, twigs snapped and branches crunched before the sounds faded to nothing.
    Little as it was, the damn thing probably weighed out about the same as a good cow. No wonder the noisy son of a bitch showed up during thunder season. No wonder the damn thing couldn’t catch a decent meal and just sat around all summer and stuck it out, stupid, into Fall. No wonder. Bunch just pitied the damn thing!
     
     

Chapter 5
ENGINE WARM
     
    Some people saw Eagle Feather Proud just fine. Most did not. Bunch could not, and he saw more than most.
    Eagle Feather Proud said he wasn’t there, though, and that was good enough for most people. Fact was, Feather Proud couldn’t see a lot of people, himself, so it was a standoff.
    If you could see him and he forgot to let you know he wasn’t there and you got to know him, he’d tell you he’d been around, running or looking, for hundreds of years. Couldn’t say exactly because his people counted time different than the soft shirts did – that’s what he called people, “soft shirts.”
    Why?
    “Because your shirts are soft,” he’d say. Then he’d be off. Running. He