Jason Weiser

Girls, stop.

her mother had said that evening.

Thousand feet knows what she's getting into.

She loves him.

She won't mind learning to make a single-legged trouser and an impossibly long coat and then spending each night washing it because he travels around all day in the dirt.

Right, dear?

The millipede mom looked down with mock concern.

Miss Thousandfeet crawled out of the hole with metaphorical tears in her ocelli, the structures on her face that can really only sense degrees of light.

Was she a fool to think it could be different?

But she imagined every couple thought it would be different for them, until they got married and became their parents.

Old Timber Top had some clothes he borrowed.

He would pay the owner back, eventually.

He also had the sticks, the ones that had transformed him, that he had stolen from the butcher couple.

Though you could barely call them stolen, since they were sitting outside like the butcher was scared of them or something.

Now, he was waiting to get back into town.

His town.

Behind an especially chatty kid.

The local stable hand.

Shun.

Yeah, there's no magic in that salt.