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been, and how proud, and how
stupid. George shucked his uniform backstage and tossed it into a
laundry hamper, noting with dismay how brown the insides were, how
much of himself had eroded away during his shift. He looked at his
clever left thumb and his strong right thumb, and tasted their good,
earthy tastes, and then put them away. He dressed himself in the
earth-coloured dungarees and workshirt that his own father had stolen
from a laundry line when he left the ancestral home of George's people
for the society of the soft ones.
He boarded a Cast Member tram that ran through the ultidors
underneath Pleasure Island's midway, and stared aimlessly at nothing as
the soft ones on the tram gabbled away, as the tram sped away to the
Cast housing, and then it was just him and the conductor, all the way to
the end of the line, to the cottage he shared with his two brothers, Bill
and Joe. The conductor wished him a good night when he debarked,
and he shambled home.
Bill was already home, napping in the pile of blankets that all three
brothers shared in the back room of the cottage. Joe wasn't home yet,

even though his shift finished earlier than theirs. He never came
straight home; instead, he wandered backstage, watching the midway
through the peepholes. Joe's Lead had spoken to George about it, and
George had spoken to Joe, but you couldn't tell Joe anything. George
thought of how proud his father had been, having three sons -- three!
George, the son of his strong right thumb, and Bill, the son of his clever
left thumb, and Joe. Joe, the son of his tongue, an old man's folly, that
left him wordless for the remainder of his days. He hadn't needed
words, though: his cracked and rheumy eyes had shone with pride
every time they lit on Joe, and the boy could do no wrong by him.
George busied himself with supper for his brothers. In the little wooded
area behind the cottage, he found good, clean earth with juicy roots in it.
In the freezer, he had a jar of elephant-dung sauce, spiced with the
wrung-out sweat of the big top acrobats' leotards, which, even after
reheating, still carried the tang of vitality. Preparing a good meal for his
kind meant a balance of earthy things and living things, things to keep
the hands supple and things to make them strong, and so he brought in
a chicken from the brothers' henhouse and covered it in the sloppy
green-brown sauce, feathers and all. Bill, being the clever one, woke
when the smell of the sauce bubbling in the microwave reached him,
and he wandered into the kitchen.
To an untutored eye, Bill and George were indistinguishable. Both of
them big, even for their kind -- for their father had been an especially
big specimen himself -- whose faces were as expressive as sculptor's
clay, whose chisel-shaped teeth were white and hard as rocks. When
they were alone together, they went without clothing, as was the
custom of their kind, and their bodies bulged with baggy, loose muscle.
They needed no clothing, for they lacked the shame of the soft ones, the
small thumb between the legs. They had a more civilised way of
reproducing.
"Joe hasn't returned yet?" Bill asked his strong brother.
"Not yet," George told his clever brother.
"We eat, then. No sense in waiting for him. He knows the supper hour,"

Bill said, and since he was the clever one, they ate.
#
Joe returned as the sun was rising, and burrowed in between his
brothers on their nest of blankets. George flung one leg over his
smallest brother, and smelled the liquor on his breath in his sleep, and
his dreams were tainted with the stink of rotting grapes.
George was the first one awake, preparing the morning meal. A
maggoty side of beef, ripe with the vitality of its parasites, and gravel.
Joe came for breakfast before Bill, as was his custom. Bill needed the
sleep, to rest his cleverness.
"God-damn, I am hungry!," Joe said loudly, without regard for his
sleeping brother.
"You missed dinner," George said.
"I had more important things to do," Joe said. "I was out with an
Imagineer!"
George stared hard at him. "What did the Imagineer want? Is there
trouble?"
Joe gave a deprecating laugh. "Why do you always think there's trouble?
The guy wanted to chat with me -- he likes me, wants to get to know
me. His name is Woodrow, he's in charge of a whole operations
division, and he was interested in what I thought of some of his plans."
He stopped and waited for George to be impressed.
George knew what the pause was