What-the-Dickens tried to think things through. To add things up. (Skibbereen have a hard time at this; the best that the smartest of them can do with adding two plus two is guessing: three plus one. Correct, sort of, but not always useful.)

In his first day of life, he’d gained very little and he’d lost his ambition to become a pet to McCavity. He’d based his hopes on a sorry notion, if being a pet meant prison. Suffocation. Slavery.

So he was out in the wind, out in the wild, with nothing but his drying wings and his loneliness to believe in. And even though he lacked a grasp of basic math, he realized that this didn’t seem to add up to much.

Without a destination, What-the-Dickens flew the way the mama grisset might have done — this way and that, meandering like a butterfly or a bee. A butterfly or a bee in panic mode. He touched down; he lifted off. He looked and then he closed his eyes.

He was not so much aloft as adrift.

He ought to have slept, you know. Sleep is good for anyone in distress. But he couldn’t. He bumbled left, right, up, and down. Like a moth, occasionally he was drawn to the light in some isolated window, but he grew too scared to come closer in case he became trapped again.

The mama grisset has her young, he thought. Maharajah and McCavity are clearly cousins of some sort. Even the shriveled crone in the attic seems to have her family downstairs. Whom do I have of my own? Nobody.

In his terror at this sudden clarity, he entered the hot airspace over the chimney flue of a baker who, in the ancient tradition of bakers, had risen early to knead the dough for the day’s loaves. What-the-Dickens tumbled in the thermal, heel over head and wing tips over heels. The heat made him pass out, but his wings didn’t entirely forget their new talent. Instinct told his wings to break the speed of his fall to earth, and his wings obeyed.

Still, when he fell at last, he was winded, wounded of limb, and shattered of spirit. Crumpled upon himself, he rolled to a stop against the back wheel of the bakery’s delivery truck. GOODNESS BAKERY: THE BEST BAKED GOODS, said the truck, black and gold letters on a red background, though What-the-Dickens was beyond reading anything.

Like it or not, he slept.

And so should I. And so should you. Do you hear me?