I woke up on something that was either a very firm mattress or a very soft floor.
Uh, the distinction didn't matter. I had slept, which made more sense than when the day began with a talking crow calling me a dumbass in an empty field.
Progress for sure.
The smell reached me before I fully opened my eyes. Beef. Actual beef smell this time—the specific warm, savory smell that my brain associated with food that would taste like food.
Pulverize that thing like you never did, Meyer.
My eyes opened wide. I sat up.
Maybe yesterday's bread-beef had been a one-time thing. Maybe breakfast was different. Maybe this world's morning food operated on different rules than its dinner food, which would be completely consistent with a world where the rules changed constantly and without warning.
I dressed—same clothes, obviously, I had no others, meaning that I didn't have to dress, given how I sleep with my clothes on—and followed the smell to the kitchen.
Cass Ration Jr. was already at the table, eating with her usual focused efficiency. Cast Ration was across from her, greeting the morning with the unearned enthusiasm of a person who had never experienced a bad one.
"Brother Meyer!" he said. "Slept well?"
Looks like I got demoted to brother.
"Surprisingly yes," I said, and sat down.
Cass Ration Jr. placed a plate in front of me without ceremony. Beef. It looked like beef, it smelled like beef, and when I picked up the fork and took a careful, considered bite—
It tasted like beef.
Actual beef. Cooked, seasoned, the specific satisfying chew of meat that had been properly prepared. I ate another bite to confirm. Still beef. I looked up.
"This is—" I stopped myself before saying good, because the last time I commented on the food I ended up in a conversation about protein that concluded nowhere. "This is different from last night."
Cass Ration Jr. set down her fork. She had the expression of someone who had just noticed a mistake.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's overcooked."
I looked at my plate. The beef was perfectly cooked by any standard I had ever encountered.
"...Right," I said. "My apologies."
She nodded, accepting this, and returned to her meal.
I ate the overcooked beef that tasted exactly like beef and decided that this world's culinary scale was fucked up as well. Yesterday's bread had apparently been the ideal. Today's beef was a failure for whatever reason. I had no framework for this information and nowhere to put it.
I ate everything on the plate.
"You're polite, buddy." Cast Ration noticed. He beamed.
Looks like I got promoted to buddy once more.
...
After breakfast, I stepped outside.
The sun was doing its thing again—happy, aggressive, personally invested in the day in a way that felt slightly accusatory. The field stretched out ahead, the soil still mounded in neat rows where yesterday's cows had been planted. In the distance, the beef flowers from last season moved in the breeze in a way that I was choosing not to look at directly.
Then I heard it.
A sound like wheels. Fast, smooth, the specific rhythm of something moving efficiently across a surface. I turned.
Two men were coming down the path toward the farm. Each of them was standing on two rats.
Not riding a rat in the conventional sense—not seated, not holding reins. Standing on them. One foot on each rat, the way a person stood on inline skates, the rats running in perfect synchronization beneath them, their legs a blur, their expressions the focused neutrality of animals who had accepted their professional role completely.
"What—" I had to swallow the words "the fuck" that were about to come out of my mouth.
Just how were the rats not getting crushed under the weight?
The men on top leaned slightly forward with the practiced balance of people who did this every day and had stopped thinking about the fact that they were doing it.
Each man carried a bag.
Mail. They were mail carriers. They delivered mail on rats.
I watched them approach the farm with the specific quality of attention I had developed over the last eighteen hours—not the attention of someone trying to understand, because understanding was no longer the goal, but the attention of someone taking inventory. This is a thing. It exists. I am looking at it.
The rat riders came to a smooth stop at the farm's entrance, the rats decelerating with the coordinated precision of a well-trained team. One of them reached into his bag and produced a small bundle of envelopes.
"Cast Ration?" he called.
"Here!" Cast Ration emerged from behind me—I hadn't heard him follow me out—and took the bundle with the casual ease of a man receiving regular correspondence. He signed something the mail carrier produced, nodded pleasantly, and the rat riders pushed off again, the rats resuming their blur of legs, carrying them down the path and out of sight.
I watched them go.
"Rat riders," I said.
"Yes," Cast Ration said, already sorting through his mail.
"They ride rats."
"Fast and reliable," Cast Ration said, with the tone of someone reciting a slogan they had heard many times and agreed with completely. "Country or city."
Well, at least the "mails" existed. So did signatures, country, and city. A win, I'd argue.
Cast Ration flipped through the envelopes with practiced speed, opening some and setting others aside. His expression moved through mild interest, mild satisfaction, and then stopped.
He held one envelope for a long moment. Then he read it again.
"Hm," he said.
I had learned that Cast Ration's hm meant something different from my hm. My hm was the sound of a man encountering the impossible and choosing not to escalate. His hm was the sound of a man doing arithmetic.
"Everything alright?" I asked.
"Yes." He folded the letter carefully. "A relative in Fesceland—"
Fes-what?
"—needs this." He held it up. "Family business. Important."
I had to swallow an urge to ask about that Fesceland.
"Can't the rat riders—"
"Already gone," he said simply.
I looked down the empty path. He was right. The rat riders had the specific departure energy of people with routes to complete and no flexibility in the schedule.
"Fesceland," I said. "Where is that?"
"Three hours." He pointed down the path in the direction the rat riders had come from. "The major city. You follow the main road, you can't miss it."
Three hours on foot. I had spent the last eighteen hours with no plan, no direction, and no answer to the question of what I was supposed to do next. Cast Ration had fed me, sheltered me, asked nothing, and was now offering me something that was almost but not quite a purpose.
"I'll be honest," I said. "I have nothing else to do."
Cast Ration smiled. "I know."
"I don't know this relative. I don't know Fesceland. I don't know what's in the letter."
"Family business," he said again. "Important."
"Right." I looked at the letter. "What do I do when I get there?"
"Find Cass Ration Jr. Sr.'s house. Give him the letter."
I processed that name. I had been hoping not to encounter more members of this family's naming system for at least several more days.
"Cass Ration Jr. Sr.," I said carefully. "That would be your wife's—"
"Her father, yes."
"Right." I took the letter. "Is there anything I should know about him?"
Cast Ration considered this with the genuine thoughtfulness he applied to everything.
"He is also very cool," he said finally. "And his dingalong is especially awesome."
I did not ask what that meant.
Cass Ration Jr. appeared in the doorway with a cloth bundle, which she held out to me without ceremony. "Rations for the road," she said. "We need to make sure that you become fat on the way, not skinnier."
It was a bizarre way to put it. Nevertheless, I took it. It had the weight of several items wrapped efficiently. Given the household's track record, I had no idea what I would find inside, and I had made peace with that.
"Three hours," she said. "Follow the main road."
I hope the main road they were speaking of meant exactly what I was thinking.
"You can't miss it," Cast Ration added.
They stood in the doorway of their unplanned house, in front of their field of planted cows, in the aggressively happy morning sun, and looked at me with the mild warmth of people who had fed a stranger and were now sending him on his way with food and a task and no further explanation.
"Thank you," I said. "For everything."
Cass Ration Jr. nodded once.
"Safe travels, brother-buddy!" Cast Ration waved.
I turned and walked toward the main road.
After a few steps, I looked back. Cast Ration was already returning to the field. Cass Ration Jr. had gone inside.
The beef flowers moved in the breeze.
I faced forward.
Fesceland. Three hours. A letter for a man named Cass Ration Jr. Sr.
I didn't know what Ey was. I didn't know why I was here. I didn't know if the beef in the cloth bundle would taste like bread or concrete or something I didn't have a word for yet.
But you know what? At least I wasn't working in my 12-hour-long shitty job; travelling to the Shit-land—oops, Fesceland, sounded immensely better.
I walked.