Mulrox and the Malcognitos

by Kerelyn Smith

  She jerked her head at the blackboard.

  “Now?” Mulrox groaned. “But I have training tomorrow.”

  Geraldine turned and hopped up the series of ascending toadstools to her viewing platform next to the blackboard.

  Mulrox hesitated. He wanted to. He loved the feel of the chalk in his hand, the calm peace that came from concentrating. But Groxor had warned Mulrox a million times about being late, and when he stayed up, his eyes could barely hold themselves open during the day.

  The toad growled.

  “Have I mentioned how pushy you are?”

  Geraldine smiled.

  He made his way to the board, examining the poem he had been working on for the last few weeks. It was slow going. He tried to write from inspiration like he had read about, but it seemed his inspiration was broken because everything he came up with ended up wrong. But Geraldine wanted him to try.

  Mulrox picked up his chalk.

  He stood there for several moments, thinking.

  The wall rumbled with a deep, grumbling snore—Griselda must have fallen asleep. Good. It was one less thing for him to worry about.

  He turned back to the board and scribbled out the words.

  “Like a tree with frog legs, he grasped the sky.

  His smashing fists could never lie.”

  It… It was—

  TERRIBLE.

  Mulrox seized the old mop head he used as an eraser and dashed the words from the blackboard, kicking up a new cloud of dust.

  The last lines had to be perfect. You couldn’t end a poem of heroic smashing with a weak flail of words. It had to resound with the strength of Ikarax the Insidious, who had single-handedly sunk a warship with only his bare fists. It had to grab the listeners and shake them until their teeth rattled. More vicious, he told himself.

  He tried again.

  With eyes like eels and rocklike skin,

  He crushed them all—his might did win.

  He considered. It had the finality and weight he was looking for, the bone-crushing tone the poem needed, but as he tried to picture the victorious ogres, all he saw was a bumpy, wriggling mess. This was no good either.

  He grabbed the mop and demolished the lines, littering the room with another cloud of dust.

  Mulrox pressed his palms into his face. Why couldn’t he be good at this one thing? Mulrox tried to think of what Vroktar would do. How would he end this battle-worn poem? Not with victory. Mulrox was approaching it wrong. A truly gruesome poem always ended one way.

  He turned back to his board, an idea racing through his head. Mulrox copied out the words, smiling to himself at the meter that matched his racing heart. This was it; he knew it. He had finished it.

  His eyes sped down the poem verse after verse until he reached the end.

  To spare you now would be remiss,

  So I seal your death with a kiss!

  His heart stopped as he realized what he’d done. A kiss… An ogre writing poetry about kisses, even death kisses, was simply unforgivable.

  Mulrox snatched the mophead from the floor. The whole thing was tainted. Kisses. It might as well have been a love poem. If anyone ever saw this—he slammed the blackboard. The board tilted and then keeled over, crashing to the ground.

  There was a snort, then Griselda grunted through the walls. “What was that?!”

  Terrible.

  Griselda would tear him limb from limb if she saw this. Poetry of any kind disgusted the old ogre, but this… He expected to hear her storming over to him any second. He attacked the board, banging it with the mop.

  Horrible.

  He dashed every stroke from the board’s surface.

  “Gather the generals!” Griselda bellowed. “We attack the wall at midnight!” Another garbled noise escaped her and then faded into the droning din of her snores.

  His chest heaved. She was still asleep. It was lucky his great-aunt dreamed of nothing but smashing. He could bring down the hut around her, and she wouldn’t know the difference.

  Mulrox closed his eyes and, as he always did when things got too intense, tried to picture the swaying gray waters of the sea, the build and ebb, the crash and swell. He held the image until his fists stopped shaking and his heart slowed.

  Mulrox opened his eyes and looked into the night, letting his thoughts drift into the darkness. Something caught his eye, moving outside his window.

  The night was dark—there was only a hint of a moon—but a dark shape lit up by a bobbing halo of small blue lights crept outside. Mulrox leaned toward the window.

  He immediately wished he hadn’t. It was his neighbor, the one responsible for the grotesque garden. Though Mulrox was far from popular, his neighbor Yahgurkin, with her wild spray of springlike hair and even wilder ideas, was the laughingstock of Ulgorprog. And as if determined to prove her insanity, here she was outside his window in the middle of the night, wearing a necklace of glowing mushrooms and heading toward the Woods Mercurial.

  Normal ogres didn’t go there. His parents had read him stories about the things that happened to ogres who set foot beneath those trees. There were too many vengeful princes, boot-stealing villagers, and mystic rodents. You might even run into a lost princess, and woe to the ogre who encountered one of those. No, the ogres stayed out of the Woods Mercurial. This was a tradition Mulrox was more than happy to follow.

  Geraldine thumped her viewing platform.

  “Yes, it’s her,” Mulrox said. Those two had developed an inexplicable bond. He didn’t know how it started, but he wished Yahgurkin would mind her own business. “She’ll get herself turned into a squidnaut or worse.”

  Geraldine growled.

  “It’s true,” Mulrox protested.

  Yahgurkin must have felt them talking about her because she turned toward the hut and gave a big, friendly wave before turning back and skipping down the hill. Mulrox watched as the bouncing blue lights disappeared in the distance.

  I might be weird, Mulrox thought, but at least I’m not her.

  He turned back to Geraldine.

  “We’ll try again tomorrow,” Mulrox said. “Come on.”

  Mulrox set down his chalk, and Geraldine hopped off her platform and down the hall toward the spare room. Mulrox straightened his stack of notebooks, dusted off his hands, and then leaned over the row of beeswax candles. He stopped midbreath.

  Something was moving.

  Mulrox scanned the room. Nothing unusual, just the worn-out furniture, stacks of books and notebooks, and layer upon layer of dust. Wait. There it was again. Mulrox straightened and crept back toward his blackboard, where he thought he had seen something. He held perfectly still as he watched.

  Nothing.

  But then, over in the corner, something. It was—dust. The draft from the door had stirred the chalk dust into a sad, little cloud. All my broken terrible ideas, Mulrox thought and sighed. No matter how hard he tried, he never escaped them.

  * * *

  Mulrox lay stretched out on the guest bed, staring up at the mobile his mother had carved for him. He watched as the wooden figurines spun in slow circles—a sheep chased by a funny-looking bird that his mother had called a cedar waxwing. You knew a waxwing by the angled swoop around the eyes, the ridiculous tufts of feathers that stood almost upright on its head, and the little dots of red on its wingtips, like pools of spilled wax. His mother had made each one exactly like the drawings.

  There was a croak from Geraldine.

  “What’s that?” Mulrox asked sleepily.

  She was pushing a sheet of paper toward him. Mulrox took it from under her feet and groaned. “No, it’s a good thing I didn’t enter. Not with a poem like that. They’d laugh me off the stage.”

  It was the flyer for the Beatific Behemoth, a talent competition. Flyers had gone up months ago, but now it was only a week away. The competition was being held in each ogre village in celebration of the great ogreian poet Vroktar. Winners from each town would perform at Vroktar’s six-hundredth birthday
party in front of the poet himself. Mulrox ran his fingers over the lettering and sighed.

  He pushed the flyer away and pulled his newest notebook out of his pocket. “We stick to our private poetry readings.”

  The toad rolled her eyes.

  Trolzor, the barkeep, had given Mulrox the notebook as a surprise a few months ago. The tiny book was wrapped in purple fabric and, on the front, was a toad outlined in gold. It was so lovely he hesitated each time before writing in it, afraid to screw it up with his messy ideas. He couldn’t help but thumb through it, watching the blank pages fly by. Empty of good ideas—like him.

  Mulrox rolled over onto his knees. Behind the guest bed hung a giant tapestry of a unicorn trapped inside a corral. It had hung there for so long, Mulrox hardly thought about it, but tonight the captured beast fit his mood.

  “I get it,” he whispered to the unicorn and lifted the corner of the tapestry, revealing a small cubbyhole. There were a dozen notebooks stacked up in there, pens, scraps of paper, a few drawings and odds and ends. A rock, a feather, anything that had struck his fancy. Mulrox set the purple notebook on top of the stack and dropped the fabric back over it silently thanking his parents for supplying so many hiding places. The house was filled with them. It was one benefit to living in a house your parents had made for themselves. There were drawbacks too, things done not quite right, like his basement, which currently sat under three feet of water. But his parents’ forethought had allowed him to snatch his treasures from their old spot in his room and deposit them safely in their new home. He couldn’t take any chances of Griselda finding them.

  Mulrox rolled back around onto his bed and took one last look at the flyer. He had no business entering. He could barely walk down the road without falling on his face—there was no chance he would ever win a competition of any kind. But that didn’t stop him from wishing. He worried too. He had grown accustomed to being alone. But Geraldine. He looked over at the toad, whose head was so heavy it was swaying from side to side, her eyelids drooping up and down again as she struggled to stay awake. He didn’t want her to be lonely.

  “Good night, Geraldine,” Mulrox said. He leaned over to turn off the light. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll get to see Yahgurkin.”

  Geraldine gurgled and settled into the box of rags next to his bed. It was a poor substitute for the nest built into the side of his bed in their actual room, but it worked for now. And with that, Mulrox retired to his own thoughts of cheers and applause and a scrawny, bright red ogre accepting the award for the Beatific Behemoth.

  3

  The next morning, Mulrox and the dozen ogres who made up the Raid Brigade were yawning, stretching, and whispering to one another at the practice grounds. Yahgurkin was there too. She had traded her necklace of mushrooms for one of pine cones and was stringing together a chain of daisies, oblivious to the outside world.

  The practice grounds were a ten-mile jaunt from Ulgorprog. The place had once been a thriving human village, but finding themselves rather too close to the town of ogres, the humans had voluntarily relocated. At first, the ogres had been offended, but they soon realized their good fortune and adopted the abandoned huts, buildings, and pastures as their own. None of the ogres from the Raid Brigade were certified to enter a real human village yet, but here they were free to practice smashing to their hearts’ content.

  There were only two catches. First, the practice grounds were bordered on three sides by the Woods Mercurial. The wood was dense and snarled, a lightless landscape amidst the thick underbrush. No one wanted to be at the grounds too late; you never knew what might wander out of the woods. Second, there were no humans to go about fixing things. Instead, Ulgorprog’s mason and a handful of unlucky Raid Brigade students were forced into the distasteful tasks of rebuilding. The cleanup group was supposed to be randomly assigned, yet Mulrox always found himself among those picked to stay behind. He didn’t relish smashing, but he hated cleanup as much as the next ogre.

  The other ogres were still rubbing sleep from their eyes and complaining, but not Mulrox. Not that he wasn’t sleepy—he was. Last night, Mulrox had tossed and turned, dreaming the dream that had come almost every night for the past year. In the dream, he was standing in the middle of a magnificent garden, talking to a vortex of purple light. He never remembered what it said. The more he thought about it, the more the fog creeped in, clouding out the garden, the light, and turning the words to mush. He didn’t know why he kept having the dreams, but he woke up afterward feeling tired and content. He assumed it was nothing to worry about.

  Mulrox knew better than to mention this to anyone. Everyone thought he was weird enough as it was. He tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. He had found this to be the best strategy for avoiding torment. It had taken Mulrox several painful years to realize that the things that delighted his parents only angered the other ogres. That to fit in was to keep safe, and the only way to do that was to keep quiet.

  He forced himself to appear attentive as Groxor, their captain, addressed the group.

  “Ogres,” Groxor said. “Sit down. Three rows. No, Yexel, behind Wertol. Straight lines, not squiggles.” Groxor sighed. “Alright, listen, the village is shaped like a kidney.”

  It wasn’t. It was a rectangle like the other human villages, but there was no telling Groxor this.

  Groxor drew an unrecognizable shape in the dirt with a stick, his protruding bottle-cap ears wiggling in the breeze.

  “You four,” he pointed into the group, “head out that way. Cover the rear in the Wytrog pattern. You two take this bend here, standard Kuterbuck maneuver. We’ll approach in waves. Like when Ikarax the Insidious stood before the waters of the Taloob, or when I single-handedly took on the dread ship Billibob. Questions?”

  An ogre in front of Mulrox raised her hand tentatively, but Groxor looked right through her. No matter what new scheme Groxor came up with, the ogres did the same thing every time, yet Yexel was always trying to figure it out.

  “Good. I want nothing irregular.” Groxor smoothed out imaginary wrinkles from his shirt with his palms. “We’ve practiced this a hundred times before. No dithering, trust yourself.”

  Easy enough for Groxor.

  The ogres fanned out, sneaking along the borders of the village until they had it surrounded. By the time Mulrox found a secluded spot, the others had already started their rhythmic banging. He slung his soup pot round his neck, flipped it over, and pulled his bone mallets from their sling on his back. He pounded a matching rhythm on the bottom of the pot. This was all part of the procedure—announce your arrival, clear the village, destroy everything, let the humans creep back. A squashed debtor couldn’t pay the governors what he owed, but a scared one made amends quite quickly.

  Groxor’s shrill all-clear whistle echoed across the yard, and the drumming stopped.

  Mulrox sighed as he pushed the soup pot back behind him and scooped up an armful of stones. Time to smash stuff.

  Mulrox wandered to the center of the grounds, watching as the other ogres set to work, scrambling up walls, overturning flagstones, kicking at fence posts. They were a swarm of locusts, descending, demolishing.

  “Incoming!” someone called. Mulrox saw the rock hurtling toward him just before it hit him in the shoulder. He grunted.

  “Sorry,” Oogin said. He rushed past Mulrox, shaking his head and blinking. “Bad aim.”

  It was no wonder Oogin had hit him. Oogin couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him, and he refused to wear glasses of any kind. He claimed they made him look fussy.

  “It’s okay, Oogin. I—”

  “Look where you’re going next time,” someone else sneered. Broxli’s gangly green form appeared out from behind a hut. Those two were inseparable. Oogin clung to Broxli like a sloth to a tree. Broxli was so busy smashing things with his wrestling moves he hardly noticed the outside world. Broxli clamped a green arm around Oogin’s shoulders and, bringing his head of short, curly hair down next to Oogin’s bald y
ellow one, steered him away from Mulrox. The two barked in laughter as they disappeared behind the nearest hut.

  They weren’t locusts, Mulrox decided. Locusts didn’t relish destruction like ogres. Locusts were hungry. For ogres, smashing and crushing were practically sacred. Even Vroktar had written poems about it. Mulrox had done his best to study these, hoping to better understand the urge, but despite the striking words, the poems didn’t connect with him. The only things he tore up with relish were his own terrible ideas, and that was out of self-preservation.

  Mulrox tossed a stone at the nearest hut. The rock ricocheted off the wall, falling into the weeds. He threw another to the same effect.

  It was as though the other ogres were connected, receiving a hidden signal he didn’t hear or understand.

  “Deaf to the dinner bell of destruction,” he said, the words popping into his head and out his mouth unbidden.

  Someone snorted behind him. Groxor was doubled with laughter.

  “That—that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. Next you’ll be singing about ribbons and hearts and unicorns.”

  “I…” Mulrox started, glaring at the dirt as though he might disappear under it. He knew by the heat radiating from his face that it had darkened by several shades. “I read it somewhere.”

  “Not a chance, mumble mouth. No one but you would come up with something so awful. Broxli, come here. You’ll never believe this.”

  “I liked it,” a voice said from behind them.

  For the faintest moment, Mulrox believed someone had understood him. “Dinner bell of destruction. It certainly makes you think.” He turned and his hope died. It was Yahgurkin.

  Mulrox closed his eyes. If she liked it, it was surely another terrible idea. “Groxor,” Mulrox said. “You’re right. It’s awful. I’ll…”