Toad Words (19 page)

Everybody stopped to watch.

Couldn't get out of the way fast enough

and then there wasn't any need

because the bear kept walking

didn't look right or left.

Somebody grabbed a gun from their truck

and somebody else told him to put it away
 

and not to be a goddamn fool.

He left holes in the road
shaped like bear tracks.

In another place they should have filled with turquoise

but here they were red clay and an inch of clear gray water.

The tracks ran past my neighbor's garden.
 

She planted wild lupine around them
 

which never does too well on clay.

These grew all right. Maybe that was the miracle.

For the rest of us

we didn't talk about it much

it was one more odd thing

in a season already filled with them.

I always used to roll my eyes at those five-page acknowledgements that showed up in the back of various books.
 

Then I became a writer. Heh.

Thanks go, therefore, in no particular order, to Sigrid Ellis for buying a short story and setting me down this dark road, to Maggie Hogarth for cover consultation and a lot of good advice about self-publishing, and to my friend Mur Lafferty, who writes short stories and runs a podcast that buys short stories, for discussing the existence of such things as if they were normal and not from some weird other dimension inhabited by people who are not me.
 

Thanks also go to Terri Windling, for running a poetry week on her blog which led to a couple of the poems in here, and to many long ago folklorists, without whom the world would be a far drearier place.
 

Thanks forever and always to my kind blog readers who have read my stuff and uttered variations on “I like this!” and occasionally even “I would buy this!” which is possibly the most heartening thing that a reader can say to an author.
 

Huge, massive, Sharknado-sized thanks to KB Spangler, who edited “Boar & Apples” and left snarky comments in the sidebar and who is probably reading this
right now
and judging me for not having used semi-colons. (Seriously, what is with editors and semi-colons?)

Likewise, thanks to my three faithful proofreaders, who went through it in record time and caught so many errors that I went and hid under the bed for awhile. Cassie, Jes, and Josh, you three are awesome and if you ever need a kidney, I will start hunting down strangers with your blood type.
 

And finally, my thanks and all my love to my husband Kevin. There is a place in everything I write, at about the 3/4th mark, where I lose all my confidence and force him to read it and tell me whether or not it will shame my ancestors. He has therefore endured more cliffhangers than any man should be forced to endure, as well as me hovering over him while he reads, going “You twitched! What made you twitch? Was it a funny bit? Was it a bad bit? TELL ME TELL ME OH GOD
IS IT HORRIBLE?!”

Despite this, he stays married to me. (I think it’s because I buy him sushi.)
 

You are all the best sort of people and I am flattered that you let me hang around with you.
 

As T. Kingfisher

Nine Goblins (Goblinhome Book 1)

The Seventh Bride (forthcoming)

As Ursula Vernon

From Sofawolf Press:

Black Dogs Duology

House of Diamond

Mountain of Iron

Digger
Series

Digger Omnibus Edition

It Made Sense At The Time

For kids:

Dragonbreath
Series
 

Hamster Princess: Harriet the Invincible (forthcoming)

Castle Hangnail (forthcoming)

Nurk: The Strange Surprising Adventures of a Somewhat Brave Shrew

Comics Squad:
Recess!

T. Kingfisher is a pen-name for the Hugo-Award winning author and illustrator Ursula Vernon.
 

Ms. Kingfisher lives in North Carolina with her husband, garden, and disobedient pets. She is fond of wombats and sushi, but not in the same way.
 

You can find links to all these books, new releases, artwork, rambling blog posts, links to podcasts and more information about the author at
 

www.redwombatstudio.com