Killian and the Runaways

 Killian frowned, because it was raining cats and dogs, and the dish had run away with the spoon.

He wasn’t quite sure which one was more usual or unusual. On the one hand, it was unusual for water to be composed of domesticated animals, and on the other foot his cookware was usually more well-behaved. He surveyed the various appliances arranged in his workshop, neatly stacked and ordered, all sitting quite still but ready to leap into action. He then turned back to the window, through which, struggling through smatterings of canids and felines, his newest dish and oldest spoon were quite decidedly fleeing. He shook his head. This just wouldn’t do.

Exiting, he commanded his works, “Now don’ ya be gettin’ ideas now. I’ll be back soon, and ya better all be sittin’ here, in yer places!”

The crockery and appliances tooted and clattered and whistled their various acquiescences as the door swung shut behind him. Now in his hallway, the artisan considered his various umbrellas and jackets. What did one take for a deluge of domesticates? He eyed the inclement weather out his doorlight, then cast his gaze over his rainwear.

“Not the light jacket, no,” he muttered, “why, I’ll be shredded by claws in’an instant! Then, the trench?”

He picked out a long, thick trenchcoat. The coat in question sighed in pleasure just at his touch.

“Hmm, I’s left ya too long, eh? No gettin’ frisky now!”

He shrugged the coat on, and it settled a loving embrace across his bent shoulders. A hat, far more well-worn, jumped on his head without prompting, earning a chuckle from his grizzled throat. He picked out an umbrella, a heavy thing that was quite uncooperative when he tried to open it.

“Come on, we’ve no time fer this!” Killian growled.

The umbrella was stubborn, and old-fashioned, and would not open inside, simply not!

“Fine then!” he snapped, and bustled out the door.

He was met by a tide of fur and yowling. Not a step beyond the porch the adverse animals were tumbling and rolling all about. The cats, being liquid, were tolerating being rain quite well. The dogs were faring poorly by comparison, and most of the noise was coming from them. The artisan squinted, his heavy umbrella finally flowering to shield him from the downpaw. Through the wall of flesh and claw he espied his wayward works, skittering through flailing limbs and flashing teeth with troublesome ease.

He scowled, and set off after them.

His umbrella did its job with aplomb, bouncing both burly beast and fierce feline off course and into the gutter. It did nothing to part the sea of animals already landed, however. These Killian brushed through, earning both protestation and copious side-eye from creatures pushed aside.

“Oh, shut it!” he grumbled after the seventeenth protest, “ya’ shouldn’t be fallin’ from clouds anyhow!”

As if his observation had been heard by some distant god, the rain stopped. Killian cast looks of astonishment all about, seeing only dirt dry of both cat and dog. He considered the dark clouds still gathered above, a bushy brow raised in suspicion. These seemed to consider him back, huddled together like a chorus of wintering sparrows. He raised his free hand to close his umbrella, then stopped. The clouds roiled as he moved, freezing as he did. He lowered his hand, keeping a firm grip on the stodgy implement with the other, and forged on, pointedly ignoring the nimbus above him.

The cupple of dish and spoon had made sterling progress in his moment of pause, and Killian was hard-pressed to make up the distance in his pursuit. He was not a young man, and his years of hunched work had not been kind to his bones. He could barely recall the last time he had walked this much.

Must’ve been the marathon, he mused.

He shook the faint memory from his craggy head. Best not to dwell on the past, or so was his motto. The crockery wouldn’t catch themselves, after all! As he trudged on, umbrella now a parasol before the sun that split the mischievous clouds, he pondered why the dish and spoon might have taken their flight.

Had he mistreated them? Had the plate fallen to the floor, had the spoon been left too long to rust? He couldn’t recall such transgressions. That aside, his works had never before been rebels, even in the face of poor care and worse upkeep. He’d been sometimes disturbed as to the uses his clientele put them up to.

“Maybe that’s why yer such a poor salesman,” he thought aloud, “too soft!”

The trenchcoat shivered at that, and his hat laughed a clothly laugh. The umbrella sat, stiffly, focused on its work. He didn’t ask them what they meant by their reactions, as he knew they wouldn’t tell him. Killian’s walking and thinking was interrupted when he noticed the stranger that was suddenly walking beside him.

He’d appeared out of thin air… no, he’d been there the whole time, but had gone unnoticed. He was holding a stopwatch in one hand, a spyglass in the other, and wearing a tophat with his head. The hat held instruments in little bandoliers all up and down its length; rulers and tape measures and little brass thermometers.

Below the hat was a bespectacled face, below the face a short, smooth length of neck, and below that a three-piece suit missing a jacket. The individual thus described turned his head to Killian, nearly poking the latter’s eye out. His spectacles extended far beyond the confines of standard eyeglasses, the lenses sticking out like cones.

“Hold this, would you?” he said, grabbing Killian’s hand and filling it with the stopwatch. “Be back in a minute.”

He disappeared. Disconcerted, Killian found his eyes drawn inexorably to the watch, though he managed to keep some attention on the runaways. Exactly ten-point-five-two seconds later, the besuited man reappeared.

“That wasn’t a minute,” Killian found himself saying, “that wasn’t even eleven seconds.”

The man took the stopwatch back, his thin eyebrows vanishing under his hat.

“Right you are, sir, though it should have been a minute. Likewise, you should have walked a mile, but-” he raised the spyglass to his eye, his cone-lens swallowed by its brass length “-it’s only been ten feet.”

Killian turned around, and was quite annoyed to see that he was still in his front yard.

“Bollocks,” he swore, “how’m’I supposed t’get my spoon and dish back?”

“Your dish and spoon?” the strange man inquired, “why, they’ll be back soon. A year or two.”

He looked at his watch.

“Or ten minutes ago. Did you check your cupboard before you left?”

Killian was quite irritated now. The man was unhelpful, perhaps even unhelp itself. He seemed more of the type to insert complications.

“Look there,” he commanded, pointing at the fleeing cupple, still plain in view, “are they in the cupboard?”

The man looked at the running dinnerware, then back at Killian’s run-down cottage, then back to the road again.

“Perhaps a very long, theoretical cupboard,” he postulated, then smiled as if he’d said something clever.

Killian, quite finished with this tomfoolery, left him in the dust. He marched, firmly and steadily, ignoring the urge to turn around and view his progress. He was tired, but took heart in the fact that his prey must be tired, too. Their legs were littler, and working much harder. He resolved, when finally he caught the cupricious pair, to first chastise, then spoil them. Whatever he’d done to make them flee he would correct. If only they’d let him catch up!

He stopped, because he could no longer see the dish-spoon combo. Disbelieving, he gazed all around, but saw nothing but desert.

Desert?

Yes, it seemed that way. The sand and rocks and pale sky above said, ‘desert’ more loudly than a shout. He lowered his umbrella in bewilderment and was immediately hit by a cat. He cursed loudly and shook his fist at the clouds now fleeing and sniggering. The cat looked at him with distaste and then boiled off the tarmac road.

“What?” he asked the empty dunes.

“Need a ride, sir?”

A car had driven up silently. The way it looked at him with one headlight as he stepped to the window marked it as the work of one of his fellow artisans. The woman driving was hard-faced and short-haired, and her eyes twinkled with a touch of feverishness.

“No, thank you,” he declined, “but, say, have y’seen a dish’n’spoon runnin’ along lately?”

The woman squinted at him.

“You one o’ them crazies, old man?”

The question took him aback.

“No, just lookin’ for a cupple runaways, s’all.”

The woman’s eyes opened wide, and she spat at his feet before rolling up the window and driving off. Killian watched her go with bewilderment.

“What was that about?” he wondered.

“Some don’t take too kindly to that kind of talk, I guess.”

Killian whipped around to find the man from before, sitting on a bench that hadn’t been there a moment ago. He had a long, white beard now, and his skin was wrinkled and cobbled, much like Killian’s own face in the mirror in the morning. He smiled a gap-toothed grin.

“Especially these days.” he finished.

Killian glared at the man with unconcealed irritation.

“I don’t have time for this,” he spat, then turned away and continued walking.

“Where are you going?” the man called after him.

“Anywhere but here!” he shouted.

“Better stop walking in place, then!”

Killian looked down at his feet and was apoplectic to discover that he was, indeed, lifting his legs and placing them back in exactly the same spot.

“What is-” he whirled around, but found only empty forest “-going on?”

He was definitely in a forest, though it was hard to see it for the trees. There were so many, so crowded together, that it might have actually been just two long walls of living wood along the dirt road. As he tried to comprehend the failure of reality to conform to its well-established rules, he felt a tugging at the hem of his trousers.

He looked down, and there was his oldest spoon. He was shocked at its condition, tarnished and rusted and bent. It looked like it had been kicked to the curb, jumped on, then left for a few decades.

“Spoon?” he choked, “what on earth…”

He was stopped by the sight of what lay not far beyond. The dish was shattered, trying its best to reassemble itself. He dropped to his aching knees, laying the umbrella down and gathering the pieces of plate together as quickly as he could.

“How did this happen? Oh, ya foolish crock!” he scolded, as he tenderly placed each morsel in its proper place, “oh, whatever I did t’ya, I’m sorry, but it can’t’ve been worse than this road!”

The dish skipped out of his hands right before he finished putting it back together. It didn’t break again, but cracks spiderwebbed out from the middle of it.

“Steady now, steady now! What’s gotten in’t’ya?”

It backed away from his attempts to approach on his knees, wobbling precariously with every porcelain step.

“Okay, okay,” he placated, fingers spread, “I’ll not hold ya. Just let me put this last piece back, eh?”

The spoon walked over to the dish and propped it up, steadying it. They seemed to converse, then the dish took a hesitant step towards Killian. Carefully, without grabbing it, he slotted the last shard back into the dish’s reconstituted body. It trembled at his touch.

Killian sat back, wiping the sweat from his brow.

“The devil’s gotten into you two?”

“I might be able to help there,” came a voice from Killian’s shoulder, causing him to fall over in shock.

The man was there again, younger than the desert and older than the yard. Long, stringy hair dripped down his shoulders, and his clothes were patched and tatty. His smile had fewer holes in it here.

“I’ve been on the lookout for you,” he said, then thumbed towards the cupple, “they have, too.”

Killian scrambled back, and immediately was somewhere else. Buildings rose into the high heavens, taller than he’d ever seen, and people tided about in waves of business and pleasure. His breath was ragged and he coughed, the air feeling thick in his lungs. The clinking of coins drew his attention to his hat, which had fallen from his head.

He grabbed it and stood, brushing off the filth and letting the money drop. He cast about for his umbrella, but couldn’t see it anywhere.

“Looking for this?”

The man was there again, looking as he had in their first encounter. He had Killian’s umbrella, which the craftsman snatched from him. He stroked the implement, which was trembling with indigence at having been left behind.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“I’ll tell you,” the man said placatingly, “but don’t move, we’re a little unstable.”

Killian had no intention of finding himself altogether somewhere else, so he agreed.

“My parents called me Present, though I’m no gift,” the strange man joked, “and I’m a time inspector.”

“What?”

“A time inspector,” he repeated, “y’know, like a surveyor. I inspect time and space, make sure it’s all working.”

Unwilling to move towards him and risk travelling to another place, Killian poked the man with the tip of his umbrella.

“You’re doing a poor job of it, then!” he accused, “my time’s been wasted and my space is all out of wack! Why, it was raining cats and dogs earlier!”

As if to punctuate his complaint, frogs began to fall, eliciting sighs and eye-rolls from passers-by.

“Stop that!” Killian snapped at the clouds.

They listened, and a few people shot him grateful looks.

Present had observed this all with a little grin that made him look like a goblin.

“It’ll all be sorted out soon, sir,” he assured, “just a little hiccup. You understand, being an artisan yourself.”

“Artisan?” he exclaimed, “the management of time and space shouldn’t be left up to artisans!”

Present, amused by the outburst, replied, “would you rather politicians handled it?”

He had a point there.

“Fine,” he acquiesced grumpily, “how long will this take?”

“About ten seconds.”

Exactly one minute and twenty-three seconds later, the universe bent and twisted. The buildings warped, the people burst into abstract patterns, and the sky went opaque. Only Killian, Present, and the road were untouched.

“Just a little reset, sir!” Present shouted over the sound of overwhelming static, “you’ll be home in a jiffy!”

“Why did the dish run away with the spoon?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” Present yelled.

“I said,” Killian began, louder this time, “why did the-”

The world snapped like a rubber band, and suddenly they were standing on the little track outside Killian’s house, just beyond his gated garden. Before he could finish repeating his question, Present lay a hand on his shoulder.

“Because they thought you wouldn’t let them leave if they asked.”

He smiled one last time, and was gone.

Killian stood there, staring at the empty space where the time inspector had been. He thought about the woman who’d spat at his feet when he called the dish and the spoon ‘runaways’. In all his years as a living craftsman, he’d never wondered if his works might want things for themselves. Clearly, they did. The coat liked to be worn, the hat was adventurous, the umbrella took its job seriously, and the cupple had fled.

He looked down the road. The dish and the spoon were running, but they hadn’t gotten far. With reality all back to normal, he could catch up, even with his weak legs. It started to rain, water this time, though the clouds seemed a little disappointed at this. He watched them a moment longer, then turned and walked back into the house.

The umbrella closed before the door did. Killian wiped it down with his hands before carefully replacing it in its holster. The hat jumped off his head back onto the rack. He promised it another adventure tomorrow. The coat hung listlessly off of his shoulders, weighty at the thought of being replaced on the hook.

“S’a bit chilly in here,” Killian declared, not looking down, “I’d best keep me coat on.”

It perked up, hugging him from sleeve to collar, and he let the tiniest smile play across his lips. He re-entered his workshop.

Everything was in its place, from his tools to their children, his works. Utensil and cookware and furniture alike greeted him, and for the first time he could see the fear in them.

“The dish and the spoon’ve made off,” he said, “they’ve decided to be a cupple, far’n’away from all this...” he hung his head “...from me.”

He gathered all his willpower. What he was about to say wasn’t easy, but he knew it was the right thing. He looked back up. The gathered items were hanging on his words.

“Any’n who wants to leave, may.”

After much hustle and bustle, decisions were made. Most of his works left, along with some of his tools. His trusty hammer, his brand-new cooker, his coat-hangers and dinner-sets dispersed, slowly at first then quickly. When it was all done, only the clothes he wore, the hat on its rack, the stubborn umbrella, his table, one chair, and a few scattered tools remained. He looked about at the assembly and nodded.

“I’m grateful for you all,” he said.

As he set to work anew, he made a promise in his heart, that all he made would be free to choose their own paths for themselves, that he would never sell a piece again into enslavement. He had been a cruel creator. The path to redemption would be long, but he was committed to it. So Killian smiled, for he was content. The sun was shining, and the dish had run away with the spoon.