Free Land of Dreams by James P. Blaylock

grinning with delight and pointing at the two glowering men. MacWilt shook a fist in the other man’s face. ‘Don’t you meddle with me! I’m warning you!’
    ‘I won’t meddle with you, I’ll put you in that there tub!’
    ‘You’ll live to regret it, if you try! And you won’t do no more than try.’
    The other man reared back and cast MacWilt a look that was intended to topple him over. ‘I come from down south. If you ever been down there you’d of heard of me. You’d lick my boots if you knew who I was.’
    ‘Who
are
you?’ shouted a voice from the crowd, and everyone laughed.
    The man turned around and looked, as if he was sorry he couldn’t discover who’d said it and take care of him too.
    MacWilt spat into his hands and rubbed them together. Then he took his wet hat off and punched his fist into the crown, straightening it out. He put the hat back on and said, ‘My advice to you is to go
back
down south, before you run into a world of trouble. I ain’t a man to be meddled with.’ Then he dusted his hands together, as if he’d taken care of his end of the conversation.
    The other man swelled up and stepped forward a pace, balling up his fist. ‘I’ve chewed up bigger men than you and used them as bait,’ he said. ‘I’ll tear your lungs out, is what I’ll do. Just as quick as that!’ And he snapped his fingers in MacWilt’s face.
    ‘There ain’t nothing I’d like better –’ MacWilt began, but he was interrupted when someone in the crowd reached out and pushed MacWilt’s opponent in the small of the back, catapulting him forward into the tavern keeper.
    ‘Too much talk!’ somebody shouted, and the core of an apple flew out of the shadows and struck the man in the side of the face. MacWilt, seeing his chance when the man turned to curse at whoever had thrown the apple core, hit his opponent in the back of the head. But he overreached himself and toppled forward, clutching at his hat, and the man spun round and swung wildly at the air, a good foot over MacWilt’s head.
    The force of the swing threw him against the fisherman’s shack, knocking the tub sideways and dumping the now quiet creature onto the pier in a cascade of seawater. The fisherman shouted and went groping along after the slippery creature, wary of getting bitten again but fearful he’d lose it into the bay. MacWilt rushed in at the man from down south, who calmly knocked his hat off again with a single blow that he brought down onto MacWilt’s head. Jack could hear the rattle of MacWilt’s teeth as his mouth slammed shut and his chin jammed against his neck.
    In moments both men rolled and struggled on the pier, clutching each other, gouging and hitting. The crowd pressed back to give them room. They rolled back and forth, accomplishing nothing until they heaved up against the fisherman’s shack. The fisherman himself, abandoning the flopping creature from the tub when it slid, finally, off the edge of the pier and was gone, sailed in to pummel both of them with his fists. ‘Damn it!’ he shouted. ‘You –’ But before he’d got the words half out, the shack canted over and collapsed in a ruin of rotted boards. ‘By God!’ he cried, infuriated now, and he grabbed MacWilt by the seat of his pants and the collar of his shirt and pitched him into the bay. The other man leaped up cursing, waving his fists in a sort of windmill frenzy and inviting everyone there to step up and take his turn. So the fisherman very calmly and deliberately knocked him down, then dragged him off the edge of the pier too.
    The crowd cheered the fisherman. Then they cheered MacWilt, who hauled himself out of the water, dripping mud and weeds and still, miraculously, holding onto his hat. The fisherman, on his hands and knees, looked over the edge of the pier into the mud below, trying to find his escaped fish – if a fish is what it was. His creature was gone, back into the bay. The other fishermen, looking as if nothing they’d