“Sometimes I am happy that I’m not in your shoes.”

“You wouldn’t fit.  My family has always had big feet.”

“Not even with extra socks?”

“Hah!”  I grinned. “I do want to point out that you’re still breaking the essential rule.  You’re going out with a vampire.”

“She’s interesting.  She’s educated.  She’s not human.  That sounds like it should be the tagline for a movie.  It’s not really a matter of life or death, is it?”

“Life or death are not small things.”  I stopped cold, and repeated that sentence to myself mentally, adding the capital to the S.  I swore.

“What?”

“Nothing.  I just can’t tell if someone’s misleading me, flat out lying, or trying to get me into trouble.  Or any combination.”

“Meaning they’re not all the same thing?”

“Intent?”

“As they say, that doesn’t make it magical.  Um, unless, of course, in your world it does.”

“Freakin’ magical.  Well, that’s disingenuous, and it has to do with applying will, which belief by itself rarely does.  Philosophy.  Forget it.  OK.  You try to convince yourself that the dark powers are not manifest and clouding your mind.  I’ll sit at home and be moody about sending you off to your doom.  Don’t do it twice.”

“You have some weird hang-ups.”

“Most people say, `Good-bye,’ but sometimes I do push them far enough to just drop the receiver.”

“And you’re old school.  These days we just hit a button on the screen or flip the lid closed.”

I smiled wryly.  “I’ll call the local equivalent of the Frog Brothers if you don’t make it home by what time?”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“Midnight it is.”

“Huh.”  He gave it a fair guffaw.  “Fine.  And I’ll call you if I end up dead.”

“You’d better.”

We said our goodbyes and I got off the phone.  I set it down next to the computer and completed a perfect headdesk.  Life and death are not Small matters.  So was he playing with me?  They wanted me to go somewhere and do something.  I had presumed the whole time it was a matter of closing a door.

I have a recurring nightmare that there’s a door between life and death that someone will blast open some day.  It’s not the kind of nightmare that has places and events and people, it’s a feeling.  It was a sentence that crawled into my brain and down my spine one day.  I kind of believe in reincarnation, meaning that it’s more a revolving door, but even if it only opens up once, it’s a door that should stay closed.

Simulacrum, simulacrum… it sounded kind of like a girl’s jump-rope beat for a moment.  I guessed I could go and try to look at the body or something.

I busied myself with the more mundane tasks, trying to talk to the insurance company again, making payments over the phone and internet, and checking my gaming calendar.  My GM was due to come back into town.  I also looked at the phases of the moon, and some of my favourite Fortean almanacs.

There’s this bit in Ghostbusters where they talk about the end of the world.   For all that it’s a comedy, there’s a serious moment about, “What if it is?”  I mean, for all that I didn’t believe a bit about the whole concerns about 2012 (seriously, the only worry I have is the worry I have this and every year: that some person is going to flip out and do their best to destroy everything, and even then, there’s a lot of Everything to try to destroy) there was a lot of activity with which I was suddenly in touch.

I am actually surprised that I don’t have to suspend my disbelief so much at books where the protagonist finds themselves the center of a plot that destroys the world.  First, I am a tiny bit of a “personal world” viewpoint type, where we do have our own worlds that are under attack by our own insecurities, let alone that of others.  Second, I think that it’s like the bit about having an open mind and not trying to have it so open that rationality falls out: the more you are aware of happening, the more you know about other things.

I like to watch the news, although I hate the “packaged” feel of so much of it.   I vote, and I encourage other people to do so.  It’s important.  (It does matter.  I’ve seen too many stupid things get put into place legally by a margin of less than a thousand people.  I might not know a thousand people well enough to change their minds, but I definitely know a hundred who could have helped change that.  Besides, supernatural beings rarely vote, so I like to think of it as a way we keep our world ours.)  I keep my ears open at various jobs, and while I might not always appreciate the spin on a certain issue, I might learn a lot about what the opponents to my viewpoints have to say.  

(By the way, I am rapidly growing to be a disciple of the school that says you call bigotry and bullying what it is.  This is something changing in me that I would have to explore.  Maybe being nearly et by a Dragon is enough to put some steel into a spine?  Or at least fragments of Dragon teeth, enough to plant a warrior?  Nah.)

All of this is to say that I was beginning to think there was something to the timeline for which I was drafted to do a Small thing.  There were signs of something big on the horizon.  I wished I’d seen them sooner to know that something big was going to try and eat me, but without thinking there was some kind of cosmic conspiracy (the only fulcrum of my life is me: the Smalls and the Gillikins and the witches and the Shadow King and the -cubi are not all part of a net of incidence) I had a feeling something was truly shifting and, well, us small practitioners kind of just needed to learn how to keep our head above the waves… how to get to metaphysically-higher ground.