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exhausted sleep. Pirkle settled comfortably into estivation beside the monster as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
    Her own tired mind whirling, Crutchsump considered the exotic guest sprawled across her bed.
    Did the monster eat the same food as she? How could she get some victuals at this hour? She had the two-scintilla piece she had found, but that would hardly buy a minim of livewater. Perhaps she could rouse Rheaume the bone wholesaler, show him her harvest, and get an advance, even if he didn’t care to process the shifflet bones at this hour. And clothes! What of clothes for the monster, and a real caul? Did anyone make prosthetics for lost introciptors? The sex toy at the Mudflats! That might’ve served, if only she hadn’t tossed it away—
    A whole catalogue of chores assembled itself in Crutchsump’s brain. Many exacting tasks, not easy of accomplishment. Challenges and trials.
    But somehow they seemed so very unexpectedly welcome.

3. Interview with a Noetic
    THE MONSTER WAS “HE” NOW, just shortly after his arrival at Crutchsump’s shabby basement digs.
    The lonely-no-more bone-scavenger found it hard, in fact, to recall the early days when she had regarded Lazorg as a non-sentient, menacing thing.
    Although he certainly did retain enough oddities of aspect, behavior and worldview to qualify as decidedly freakish, still.
    But somehow his eccentricities only made Lazorg more endearing to Crutchsump, as if he were a quirky, knobby ideation—marked down for sale on a seconds shelf, malformed and unaesthetic, dusty and ignored by all the other customers of some third-rate ideatory gallery—whose odd curves and implications only she could appreciate.
    Lazorg—still nameless, at this point in Crutchsump’s memory of events—had slept for thirty-eight hours, nearly a whole night and day, after he had collapsed naked and muddy upon Crutchsump’s sweat-redolent doss.
    Crutchsump herself had passed the interminable hours of darkness until Watermilk’s rising by sitting uncomfortably on a backless stool, alternately dozing lightly and jerking awake to contemplate the anomalous stranger she had taken in with a feeling of unreal anticipation. She had decided against venturing out for food until daylight, and her own stomach rumbled, engendering odd surreal dreams in her neighboring enteric cortex.
    Throughout the long night, her caul—splashed with sea water from the Mudflats, and now brine-crusty—itched her, and she longed to remove it, as was common practice amongst all civilized people during their solitary moments.
    But the notion of baring her private parts to even a sleeping monster left her with a mixed feeling of revulsion and illicit thrills.
    When at last dim wands of daylight slid in the small windows inset high in the basement walls—windows that showcased only the hastening feet of passersby—Crutchsump roused herself fully. Pirkle, who had not abandoned his own snoozy vigil by the somnolent monster, cranked open one true eye and regarded his mistress as if to say, “Go about your business—I’ve got this one under watch.”
    Crutchsump took the wurzel at his unspoken word, and set out, clutching her bag full of shifflet bones.
    Rheaume the bone wholesaler operated out of Boxall Alley, from a fairly capacious warehouse with slate floors splotched with organic matter. Beyond doors that rolled open overhead directly onto the alley, a small messy weigh station occupied the front part of the premises: bins for sorting, hand-trucks for toting, a pegboard full of differently colored and shaped discs for identifying miscellaneous lots of bones.
    Luckily, Rheaume, in competition with many others in his trade, opened early.
    Crutchsump found the fat ostealist ensconced behind his scales, sprawled in a spavined chair and noisily eating his breakfast, a mess of looby porridge. To accomplish this meal, of course, Rheaume had loosened the drawstring of his caul and raised the hem above his