Let’s get this out of the way first: You already know the first 3.25.
Uh, you think, already annoyed, there’s only really one.
Uh, I will reply, which one of us is writing a book called ‘35.25 Rapunzels’? I think I know what I’m talking about.
You already know 3.25 Rapunzels.
You know normal Rapunzel, the classic, obviously. Most people do. Pregnant mother’s cravings lead her desperate husband to steal from a witch who takes their child as payment and puts her in a tower and names her after the cabbage her mother ate, long hair, princes, thorns, blinding, yadda yadda, marriage, happy end.
So ding! There’s one Rapunzel.
You know that one mouse’s Rapunzel. It’s okay if you haven’t watched it. You should, it’s, like, a pretty good Rapunzel, even if they did give it that punchy one-word name that has nothing to do with anything and it was at the beginning of the mouse’s obsession with CG women who look like aliens. Anyhow, long hair, tower, frying pans.
Ding! Two Rapunzels.
Then there’s the musical. The Rapunzels don’t like to talk about that musical, and neither do I, but you probably know it.
Ding! Three Rapunzels.
The .25 is easy. That’s from the one story you know where someone drew her with brown hair. Like, that ONE. It’s okay. That’s why it only counts for .25. Give yourself a fourth of a thing for that one.
So that leaves us with 32.
Let’s start with Rapunzel Four.
Chapter One: Rapunzel Number Four
This was never really part of the plan. The little girl with her eyes clenched shut too tight to see their color, her little pink fists flailing, bawling herself breathless. It was an easy thing to ask for, the child who had been fed with the lettuce from her garden. It was traditional. Felt very witch-like. But Moira didn’t know what to do with her now that she had her.
(The witch’s name is Moira in this one. No, don’t go ding, that’s not what makes it a separate Rapunzel story. Just think about how rude it was of you all to keep calling her ‘the witch’ when her name’s been Moira all along. Mind you, not ALL witches are named Moira. You’ll have to ask each witch individually. Don’t be rude. For that matter, maybe just ask to borrow some lettuce too. Maybe trade them some nice cheese. Let’s just avoid adding any more Rapunzels please. I don’t want to write a part two. Right, anyhow, Moira.)
Moira wasn’t very good at loving things that weren’t her vegetable garden. Thus why she’d had to take some kind of payment. But she wasn’t a complete monster, she wasn’t going to curse a desperate woman. So she’d taken back the closest thing she could to what had been taken.
She named the baby after her lost lettuce in the hopes that she could learn to love her like she loved that little garden.
She built her a tower with a rooftop garden, and fed and watered the baby regularly. Made sure she got sunlight, and tried to forgive her when she took a few years to learn how to garden. After all, it was already new to have a lettuce who would help her garden. Though now that she’d had that idea, she had to try enchanting some lettuce to help with the work.
That didn’t work out, but it made her Rapunzel laugh to watch the enchanted lettuce flop lazily about before snuggling back down into the dirt.
They never did eat that lettuce plant, but it certainly didn’t help with the gardening.
Rapunzel did, once her hands were steadier and her mind was a little clearer with age.
“Will we get more plants one day?” Asked Rapunzel of Moira when she was ten. “I love our plants, but you talk about trees. I only see them on the ground. Can they be grown?”
“Oh yes,” Said Moira. “Perhaps fruit would be nice.”
“It would be,” Rapunzel grinned, her front tooth missing. “And I would take good care of it when your’e gone, just like I do the other plants and Baby.”
(Baby was what they had named the enchanted lettuce. He rarely did anything but lift his lettuce head and groan in annoyance, but they loved him. It was an in-joke, you see. The name. ‘Baby.’ Because the witch named the baby after lettuce. Get it? Yeah, it was pretty good. That Moira. Heck of a sense of humor. Did steal a literal infant that one time, but hoo. Man. Naming the enchanted lettuce Baby almost makes up for that, right?)
Moira brought her a peach tree sapling for her tower garden. They tended it together as the years passed, but most of Moira’s time she spent far away. Mostly studying botany and cursing people. She was a single-minded witch.
Rapunzel learned to pin her hair up with a broken tomato spike as it grew longer and longer. She tried to teach Baby how to be good company, and mostly failed at that. She tried to convince the peach tree to re-enact the book she’d read about Momotaro the peach boy, but if the peach tree listened it didn’t seem to matter much. After all, it would be another decade before it started to bear fruit.
“Okay, I know,” Rapunzel would say, sitting cross-legged in the sun with her wide-brimmed hat and her tomato-spike hairpin. “But when you DO grow peaches, I’d appreciate the company.”
“Uhhgh.” Groaned Baby.
Rapunzel blew a raspberry at him and flopped on her back in the sun.
She grew to adulthood like a lettuce. Which is to say quickly and with few problems. Moira made a good-faith effort to be the kind of kidnapping perpetrator who could later be called ‘well-intentioned,’ but she’d never really intended to have a daughter. She made sure Rapunzel had enough seeds to tend her garden, and delivered her proteins when she could.
What she didn’t know, what she wasn’t paying enough attention to notice, was her charge’s new obsession.
“Cheese,” Whispered Rapunzel to her peach tree and Baby. “Cheese, you two. I’m telling you. WOW. She’s brought it three times now, and each time it’s different, and each time it’s SO…”
She trailed off, stars in her eyes, at a loss for words.
“I have to find it,” she whispered to them. “I have to find some cheese.”
Perhaps it was an inherited propensity to defy witches for food cravings that she’d gotten from her birth mother. Perhaps it was that Moira had been unprepared for the strength of period cravings, though she’d at least kept Rapunzel supplied on pain-killing herbs and cloth pads for her time off month. If she had known, maybe she would have given her cheese too.
As it was, Rapunzel spent the next day cutting off her extremely long hair and braiding herself a long thin cord from it. She secured it tightly inside her tower. After all, she had to have a way back inside to water her plants.
And then Rapunzel freed herself and went off to steal some cheese.
The morning off her eighteenth birthday was dark and heavy with fog.
“It’s auspicious,” her mother said, tucking a stray strand of her dark hair under her cap. “You’ll have better luck in the fog. Do you know the way well enough?”
“Of course.” Her voice was as heavy as the fog and just as distant. She hadn’t slept. Her great grandmother hadn’t either, they’d said, when she turned eighteen. She’d survived, she reminded herself. Grandgranaugh had survived.
“I can’t see you off,” Her mother murmured, pressing a kiss to her forehead, cool against the heat of her anxiety.
“I know.”
She took the basket from the table. The scent of copper was heavy. The white cloth covering the contents was already staining red. The dark wood of the table was stained darker where the basket had rested.
She took a slow breath just inside the door. The hot spice of her father’s cooking, simmering over the fire to be eaten in celebration if she returned. The leather polish she’d worked into the straps hooked to her hip the night before, inch by inch, over and over, till it stained her fingertips, her clothes, her bed. The acrid copper of the heavy basket now hooked in her left arm.
She pushed out into the fog before she could hesitate longer. This was hers to claim.
The world was quiet around her. She watched the silent barn as she walked, the hem of her sturdy dress soaking already from the wet grass. The barn was a graveyard in waiting. A hole by their home, waiting to swallow them. She would deepen it if she lived through the day.
She stepped carefully around the new blade pushing up through the grass at the edge off their home. It would take years for it to have pierced significantly. Decades before it was a blade of any note, if the angry earth didn’t surrender this knife and go to another before it was done. For now it was just a glint of silver in the middle of a woven orange thread wound around four posts. She’d been the one to mark it months ago when she’d cut open the sole of her foot.
She walked on, her feet cold even through her woven socks and buckhide shoes. The mist was clinging, crowding around her eyes. It turned the massive sword jutting out of the earth in the east to only a vague shadow. If she hadn’t known to look for it, she never would have noticed the slightly darker sky.
It was a mile further that she reached the bluff at last. She’d walked that mile a hundred times. Hummed and skipped her way. Wandered and dreamed and scuffed her shoes on the path. Always she’d stopped at the bluff. Always she’d looked to the lake.
From above you could see so much and so little. The glittering surface, always slightly in motion. The dark, deep water, so full of little lives it was well-nigh impenetrable. It was a massive darkness. A swath of water that was in turns blindingly bright in the sunlight and achingly dark in its absence. It was a wild and an awful thing to live so close to. There were a thousand things within it that should never be thought on.
She was there for only one of them.
She straightened, taking a slow breath and gazing down at the dark mist where the pond should be below her. She couldn’t see it, but she could hear it. Hungry, thirsting, waiting for someone to drown. From here, she knew she’d already been noticed. There was at least one thing in the lake which could not have ignored her if it had tried. Not as she was. Young woman, alone on a cold morning. An appetizing scent around her covering the smell of leather and danger. The smell of the things in her family’s barn.
She tugged the white fabric back, letting the scent of the dripping offal she carried catch on the wind as she started down the winding path to the west of the lake. She couldn’t see clearly, but she kept her ears on the water, and in her mind she replayed the words of her grandgranaugh
“The lake is not a still thing,
and cowards jump with frogs
It is not the small quick splashing you should fear.
The ripples lap more hungrily
When true danger draws near.
The creature will be marvelous
The creature will be bold
He’ll take you up upon his back
And never break his hold.
Before you breathe your final breath
While on the kelpie’s back
Strike quick with what bridle you have
Or you will not come back.”
Childsplay, she thought, and walked closer to the lake, listening for the ripples at their hungriest. She knew the sound. She had laid on the bluff with one ear to the ground, watching, since she was a child. She’d only seen what she hunted once. Just once. From far away. She hadn’t heard much of the sound of it then, but through the years she’d seen many things coming and going in the lake.
That one she’d seen lived in her memory. Shining and sleek. Proud, beautiful, murderous. ‘I can’t wait,’ she’d whispered to her mother that night. ‘I can’t wait.’
Maybe it wouldn’t be the same one. It didn’t matter. Today was her day, at last. The ripples sounded hungry. She tilted her basket of offal, letting the entrails slowly drop onto the ground as she walked before dropping her basket as well and standing facing nothing on the muddy banks of the water.
Maybe it wouldn't be the same one, but she would not fail today. Her hand gripped the bridle at her him. And when the shining kelpie stepped out of the fog, all tender, slender horse, just on the edge of coltish, she was certain.
She was going to catch her kelpie and take her place, finally joining her mother and granaughs as a monster rider.
The first time she’d run screaming. The first time she was lying down, settling in, and felt something move. Felt the bed beneath her bow and arch. Felt herself move though she was holding still.
At first she thought earthquake. Then she thought building damage. The floor caving? Her mind already dreaming?
Then the mattress gave another shuddering, lurching breath. There was no sound. No inhalation. But it inhaled. Inhaled, and exhaled, and she ran. Ran hard an fast, barefoot, to her nearest friend’s house. She didn’t even think to scream.
“What happened?” Asked Nicole, drawing her inside. “Honey, what happened?”
She didn’t know.
You wouldn’t believe the day I had, she doesn’t tell her mattress. She doesn’t talk to it. It’s a mattress, right? It’s mostly a mattress.
“You wouldn’t believe the day I had,” She says aloud, in case it’s not.
Coming home after the first time is a nightmare. She picks up a knife from the kitchen. Enters her room slowly. Stares at the bed. Just a bed. Sheets and duvet, bed frame and mattress. She stares at it a long time, holding her knife. She could slice it open. If there was someone inside…
But that wasn’t what it felt like. It felt like air. Like lying on her ex-boyfriend’s chest, feeling him breathe. The lulling motion, but extrapolated. Made nightmarish and unreal.
Nightmarish.
“Just a dream,” She muttered, moving over closer and poking her mattress. She prodded it deeply, searching for the lump of a person hiding, or a hollow where they had been. “Just a dream. Like tripping over the stairs.”
She still slept on the sofa for a couple nights before forcing herself back to bed.
“I wonder if you’re haunted or just weird,” she says to her mattress, lying back on the inert bed, staring at the ceiling as she thinks. “Guess that applies to a lot of things.”
The second time the mattress inhaled beneath her, it was like her whole body had been waiting for it. She was out and on her feet in a moment. Had a knife and was back in the room in no time, lights on, watching.
She stood, back to the corner, knife in hand, jaw set. She watched her mattress breathe, and she waited for what came next. For phase two.
It was a visible shift. Watching the damn thing inhale. Watching it bow outwards then sink back down. Steady and slow and deep. It was so inconceivably mundane, and so incredibly wrong. So impossibly wrong, and yet so… Useless. Harmless.
She circled it slowly, as her heart hammered. Looked for any changes. Any danger. Arms, or a face, or a mouth. Eventually she worked up the nerve and grabbed its side, yanking and hauling, flipping it over.
The breathing continued until she got it turned over, then petered out. There was no secret. No mouth. Nothing. Her mattress just lay there, askew and inanimate once more. As if she’d woken it up.
She moved to the corner of her room and kept ahold of the knife, and watched all night. It was hours later that it started breathing again. If it could notice things, it took no notice of her, though she stayed nearby, knife raised and ready, trembling with tension.
“Don’t tell me if you are haunted,” She was yawning already. Gods she was tired. School was such a nightmare, it was no wonder ‘breathing mattress’ had become less of a problem. “I can handle the breathing, but talking would be weird.”
The third time she’d screamed and slammed her fist down against the mattress.
“I can’t handle this!” She howled down at it, slamming her fist down again and again against the impossible motion. “I can’t handle this on top of everything!”
The breathing stopped, and she lay still and frozen in her place. She should have left ages ago (and gone where?) Should have slept on the sofa (and wrecked herself for work and school the next day.) Should have told someone (Who? And told them what?)
She should have gotten up and left when it started breathing. Instead, after it stopped, she sobbed and dropped into her pillow. Sobbed and sobbed, laying there,, fists still clenched, until the mattress started breathing again. And by then… By then she was SO tired. She was so tired of everything.
“Whatever.” She’d sobbed. “Whatever. Eat me if you’re going to then. No math if you eat me.”
The mattress didn’t eat her. She fell asleep without noticing, lulled by the steady motion. The slow breaths.
The mattress didn’t always breathe. She started to think of it as the bed ‘falling asleep.’ It usually happened around 2am. Usually happened about twice a week.
And now, when it did, she only woke up long enough to notice and appreciate the slow and steady motion.
“Night,” she whispered to her breathing mattress, and tried not to wonder when the next shoe would drop.
“Be still and listen, nena.” Her mother had whispered just before the family gathering at Christmas. “We all know how smart you are, but your father wants to talk to his brothers. Why don’t you and I play a game while they talk?”
“A game?” Sofia asked, straightening at once under the suggestion. “What will it be, mama?”
“A noticing game,” her mother whispered. “We will be very quiet, like spies, and see what we notice. And then when they are all snoring, you will tell me all the things that you saw.”
Years later, Sofia would wonder for the first time if her mother had intended the game at all, or if she had just hoped it would keep her quiet. She liked to think it was her mother’s often-smothered sense of adventure and curiosity. That perhaps she had wanted to see just how keen her daughter was.
“Mama,” Sofia had whispered as she helped her mother clean dishes while half the men slept and the other half complained about the latest football game. “Do you want to know what I noticed?”
“Of course, nena.” Her mother whispered, an air of playful conspiracy about her. “What do you know?”
“Uncle Phillip has fallen in love with someone,” She whispered, lifting a hand to her mouth. “And I think her name starts with an ‘N’. He pronounces them differently. More softly. He used to say them harder. And he touches his ring finger like he wants something there. I think he’ll be married soon.”
“Oh?” Said her mother.
(Phillip would elope with Nina two weeks later)
“Uncle Ernesto has ash on the bottoms of his shoes. He’s smoking again but doesn’t want anyone to know, so he’s been chewing that cinnamon gum, but he still steps out his cigarettes.”
(Aunt Amelia would throw her chancla at Uncle Ernesto when she found out, but they patched it up in the end.)
“And papa—”
“No unkind words about your papa I hope?” Her mother had asked, sounding suddenly anxious.
“No,” Sofia laughed. “Papa is afraid of me when I am quiet. He kept glancing over all night like he was wondering what I was thinking. What will he do when I am smarter than him?”
“I don’t know,” Her mother had said. “I really don’t.”
Years later, as Sofia unlocked the door to doscientos-veintiuno Panadero Street, she knew. Her father had sent her to school. Had funded two degrees and an insatiable hunger for knowledge. Had given her all he had to give and more.
And Sofia Humenez? She was going to make it worth every penny for him.
Armed with her official consultant position with the police, and her new license to practice as a private investigator, she set to her new life with the enthusiasm and fervor. First, she had to remake her home.
It was a beautiful building. Traditionally built, like the buildings in Tapalpa. White plaster and red border and wooden interiors. And her first task, as always in a new place, was learning about who had been there before. Becoming a spy in her own home. She paced around the empty rooms, her items in boxes at the door and the new furniture not yet arrived.
She found scuff marks on the floor (repetitive, centralized, chairs at the dining room table, well used, adult weights from the depth of the scratches. Sloppy, but multiple chair scuffs indicated a family with a routine. Her own dining room back at home would have looked similarly if not for the wider, softer feet of her family’s dining room chairs.)
One of the rooms had two types of drywall. Damage at some point. Extensive. Deep dents in the carpet where the beds had been. In the two bedrooms. Hastily filled pinholes in the walls from posters.
“Hm.” Said Sofia, and settled cross legged in the middle of the floor of what would be her room as she started to think through how she’d organize it.
The house was perfect. Dull and boring on the surface, with all the small details of a normal life for her to uncover day after day. The soft scent of cigarette smoke lingering even over the scent of a heavy cleaning. And of course, the empty space, hers to remake. What little marks would her new life leave.
She glanced over to the doorway of the open room beside her own. A second bedroom. She hadn’t decided yet what to do with it.
She built her room like a crime scene in reverse. Placed things where they ought to go as they arrived. Perhaps it wasn’t the most standard of rooms. Her dresser took up a little space, but the small closet became a three-walled bookshelf. She took the doors off it.
She added floating shelves around the room. Loaded them with the small curiosities she’d collected over the years. Her abuelita’s hand-stitched dolls (their careful lines had taught her so much about the movement of hands, the patience of a person at work, the dedication of a quiet woman) She had the standard small bone collection had its own shelf now, rather than being hidden from her mother in a desk drawer. Her anatomical model she set in the corner. Her tia had knitted him a scarf years ago that he still wore. She occasionally used it to map blood splatter on the floor, but her tia didn’t need to know that.
Slowly her home came together. And slowly the calls came in. She made herself an extra closet out of the hall closet, and filled it with her disguise pieces. It was simple enough. She was a plain woman, and with a little effort? No one gave her a second glance. She used it thoroughly to her advantage. A cleaning lady’s uniform, with small touches for the places she was infiltrating. A three piece suit with a pencil skirt and some carefully applied contouring changed her into an office worker. She had work boots, heels, waterproof galoshes, comfortable working woman shoes (a nurse in heels was a dead giveaway)... It was a thorough collection.
The second bedroom stayed empty. First for the first week, and then for the second. Then for the first month, then for the second. She didn’t realize she was waiting for a partner until she met her.
Dr. Watts caught her off guard. Which was unusual. People usually didn’t. But she was in her most invisible outfit. Hair tied back, thick and curly, sweat beaded on her brow. It helped the illusion to look a little smelly. She was mopping. No one ever questioned anyone mopping.
“Excuse me,” the woman said, her accent starkly foreign though her spanish didn’t sound unpracticed.
Sofia looked up at once. Took her in in a glance. A three piece suit as blatantly boring and store bought as Sofia’s costume was, but much more interesting on the woman wearing it. Her prosthetic leg was on display in the short skirt. Below the knee amputation. Sneakers. Not enough ankle articulation on the prosthesis to wear heels with her look, so she hadn’t bothered finding matching flats. Not someone used to three piece suits, but not shamed. Shoulders back, back straight. Blatantly foreign. She picked the accent apart and settled on british.
As she thought, she was speaking.
“Can I help you?” Sofia asked, careful to keep her accent thick, slurring the words just a little, blurring them together. Being hard to understand usually made foreigners give up.
“I heard the victim in the attack last week was part of the cleaning staff,” The woman said. “They brought me in to ask some questions about the injuries, but I just…. Wanted to know how you were holding up, I suppose. It must have been traumatic for you all. And I can’t imagine they brought in another cleaning team to pick up the mess.”
Sofia gaped. Flicked her eyes over the woman. Visitor badge, not a doctor in residence, but not untrained. Empathetic. No one had questioned the staff beyond looking for the guilty party. Gentle. Kind. Her eyes quick and dark and her smile cautious and concerned. The shocking display of humanity. Sofia struggled with things like that. Found the details compelling, understood the actions and motions, but if she had been a real janitor…
“I’m on the case too,” Sofia said, straightening out of her character hunch and setting her mop aside so haphazardly it clattered to the floor. “You are marvelous. Will you confer with me?”
It was not the first impression she would have chosen to make, but it did to make an impression. Moreso when she pulled open the janitor’s clothing and pulled free her official badge. She was as certain as she’d ever been of any conclusion she’d drawn, though it had only been a moment. Though it was based on a prosthesis displayed and a show of kindness. Though it was before even she’d noticed the dirt under nails, and the shadow of tissues carried in her pocket. Before Dr. Watts had agreed to talk, but not before she’d checked in with the actual janitorial staff.
“None of them did it,” said Sofia frankly. “The police are only investigating because they’re afraid of offending a doctor.”
“I’m not looking for a culprit,” Dr. Watts had told her. “I just want to help.”
And Sofia knew. The two of them would be… A truly marvelous happenstance.
The phalanx approaching from the east was a marvel of waving silver. The glaring sun glinted off of the wide silver and black tarp from miles away. The first calls of their arrival had sounded hours ago from the old radio tower. Everyone in town had headed towards rooftops and hills, carrying binoculars and a few even setting out small picnics to watch the approach.
The energy harvesters didn’t ride fast. Precision and care were more important than speed in their line of work. The bicyclists were heroes of the new world. The carriers of energy, the new power plants of a generation. Each turn of the pedals stored power in the batteries they carried. Each hour in the sun captured in the wide silver fabric, the thinnest and most efficient solar panels thus far.
When they had first set out on the roads seven years ago, after the great meltdown, they’d been forced to carry so much equipment the energy was barely worth the toll it took on them.
Now with their custom welded bike phalanxes, with their mountain-biker guards, and the two-lane-wide solar fabric stretched between them like an odd trampoline, it had become the livelihood of heroes. The New Pony Express, sans ponies. Though there was word that some of the towns down south had a couple of horse divisions as well, it was less efficient than the bicycles, since the wheels were producing energy too.
Ashley was sitting on the side of the Radio tower. Usually they weren’t allowed up there, but the lawmen always made an exception when there were energy harvesters approaching. It was basically New World fireworks.
Don was swinging his feet beside her, restless. The meltdown had hit him worse than her. His right hand had been burned badly. He’d been close to a power source when it all went to hell. He always just grinned when someone brought up up and wiggled his left hand, saying ‘good thing it wasn’t this one!’
Most people didn’t get it. Some thought it meant he was left handed which, sure, he was now. He used his left hand a LOT more. But he hadn’t been in the Before. Now, it was something a lot less about necessity and a lot more about Calling.
“Think they’ll be on board?” Don asked into the cricket-filled dusk as the phalanx of harvesters neared their town.
They could hear them now, the churning grind of hundreds of bicycles, of batteries dragged on broken roads gathering more power with their motion. The restless flapping of the sail-like solar panels. “I mean, they’ve probably seen so many, like… Desperate situations.”
“Town’s not so bad off,” Ashley said, holding the clipboard to her chest. “We’ll have to wait and see. I’m rooting for us Don. A lot of people are.”
“Yeah,” said Don, and drummed his left hand’s fingertips against the beam they were perched on.
The first mountain biker reached them not long after. Ashley saw him coming and clambored to her feet on the beam. Sometimes there were a lot of people waiting with their requests. This time there were only four of them. Ashley and Don, Georgette from up the road (she had a garden that had saved some lives all those years ago) and Madison the librarian. Ashley let Georgette go up to the road first. She even hung back for Madison. Her and Don… They’d wanted to ask for this a long time, but things had always seemed so dire. Now the radios were coming back online, and the hospital had enough healthy bodies to keep the generator charged. Now they were settling back into their lives with energy as a non-standard resource.
It had made things hard for her whole band, though maybe hardest for Don of all of them. He’d really been going places, back when there were places to go for a musician. Now, in this new world…
“Hey ladies,” Said the biker Liaison, pulling up to the side of the road and tugging down the bandanna that covered his face. “Pass over your requests!”
“Panel access for a greenhouse setup,” Summarized Georgette to the biker liaison as she stepped forward. The biker grinned at her, glancing over the request form.
“Energy access for an educational film for the kids,” Madison said, her smile reaching her eyes and her voice both as she passed over the board.
“Um,” Said Ashley, tugging her own facemask higher up anxiously.
“It’s okay,” said the biker. His face was filthy where his goggles and the mask hadn’t covered. There was a new beard growing in, and the wrinkles around his eyes were so friendly as he smiled that she was afraid to dampen his enthusiasm with her request. “I’ve seen it all. Don’t worry.”
He probably has, thought Ashley. She glanced back to Don on the radio tower then passed in her request.
“One night garageband performance,” She whispered, her face heating up at the nature of her request in comparison to the other women. “If there’s enough. I mean… It… There are some signatures so…”
“No judgement,” The biker said, his grin only seeming to widen. “I’m glad. A town that can think about music again is doing pretty well. I’ll deliver them, okay? Make sure to wave to the crew as they pass, they’ve had a hard week’s ride.”
“Sorry,” Muttered Ashley as the biker tore away, calves bulging as he tore back towards the slowly approaching phalanx. “I know you both have actual important things.”
“My educational film is an old Disney cartoon.” said Madison with an air of admission, clapping Ashley on the back. “I just didn’t want to say so in front of my personal hero Georgette.”
“Honestly,” Georgette snickered, turning to grin at them. Her milk-pale left eye and the surrounding scars were her mark from the great change, and she bore them with good humor. “You girls are so bashful. You know I only want the panels so I can set up an automatic sprinkler system again. It’s perfectly nice having some fresh produce growing, but I’d love to laze about some days.”
“Besides.” Said Madison. “It’s not just you.”
“He’s nervous.” Said Ashley, bouncing on her toes with her hands in her pockets. “It’s been a long time since we could… You know. Plug in.”
“You lot were good before the power burned.” Madison said. “They really were Georgette. They did one of the benefit shows for the library, remember?”
“Well, it was very energetic.” Georgette said tactfully. “I remember that much. I think it would do some of the others good. It’s been hard with only hand-crank gramophones.”
“I thought that’s what you were used to, G’ette,” Don said, finally having made his way down to join them. “You know, before all us young folks and our blu ray players.”
“Don’t tease, son, I know perfectly well Blu Ray was for film.” She scoffed. “And I never had to hand crank a gramophone Before. Not that I mind terribly much that records are popular again. Between the garden and the records it’s no wonder you lot tried to put me in charge. I basically turned into the town grandmother at the ripe old age of forty five. Treats for everyone.”
They laughed like she hadn’t saved their lives. They averted their eyes like they all hadn’t been part of trying to elect her their new mayor.
There were only about four hundred people left in their little town. They’d consolidated as much as they could. Done their best to make sure that the empty buildings wouldn’t become significant pest problems--Generally by tearing out what they could and opening them up to both pests and pest eaters alike. But the main drag of downtown was still fairly lively. Most of the folks left had moved in. No more landlords, no more rent. Just the places that hadn’t burned to the ground, and the people who were left.
It was enough that when the phalanx of harvesters arrived cheer rose up from those gathered. It was twelve bikers per panel, with four mountain biking guards for each. This group of harvesters had four panels. Supposedly, when they traveled down the bigger old highways, they road two and two. Ashley had heard that some of the bigger city areas had phalanxes of twenty panels at a time trawling the old highway roads. She’d heard it from the same place they heard most of the news--the riders themselves.
Usually every time they passed few some folks stopped to stay in town awhile and some folks in town joined up. It was a fair system. One that kept their whole corner of the world going. Ashley hadn’t been much good, but even she had taken a tour once, riding at the back right side of a phalanx. It was a community ordeal, and she believed in fairness. Still, though the riders had been encouraging she suspected they hadn’t been sorry that their huffing, puffing slowest pedal churner washed out after one rotation.
“Here we go,” whispered Don, leaning against her side as they watched the ride leader unfold a little step stool from his ride on gear and climb up it. What was left of the town gathered in, listening.
“Only got three requests this month,” The rider called. “Hope that means you’re all doing well and not that those three ladies have a chokehold on the community!”
Laughter followed, and the rider’s grin brightened. She was sweat drenched and panting, but the phalanx always stopped to make the needed announcements before moving forward.
“For the appeal of Georgette Middles, we have a half panel in our pack that tore in a storm two months ago! We can spare it if that will do for your power needs.”
“Perfect for a start!” Georgette called from Ashley’s side. Don pressed closer.
“For the appeal of Madison Allens, we generally avoid films, but since there isn’t much non-standard need we’ll be happy to provide supplementary power to one of your own bike generators for a film. Will that do?”
“Perfectly!” Called Madison, waving with a grin.
Don’s good hand squeezed Ashley’s fingers.
“For the appeal of Ashley Drausser, first, let me thank you for specifying number of instruments needed for powering, that’s helpful, and second we can spare power for a set of roughly half an hour so long as there are no lights necessary. And only if it’s open attendance. Sound good?”
Ashley's mouth went dry. Her breath caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob. She jammed her fist up into the air in a motion of triumph, and heard a ragged cheer go up through the crowd for her.
“Perfect,” Ashley choked, as Don shook her by the arm in eager, delighted motions. A laugh was tearing out of his throat as he jumped up and down in excitement. Their other bandmates were somewhere in the crowd, she knew.
She couldn’t believe it. She’d thought it was over.
But Dragged Ragged was finally going to be able to play again.
She met up with the Harvester planner after the mayor had given her part of the speech. Had made sure the riders knew where to go for food and water, both for their stay and for their trip. Had ensured that they knew where housing was, and where the bathing house was currently functioning. The old YMCA had seen better days, but they’d gotten the showers up and running and converted all the work out equipment into small scale energy harvesters off their own.
“Garage rock, huh?” said the planner, looking over Ashley’s paperwork again as they ironed out the details. “Gotten to play at all since the big dark started?”
“Only acoustic,” Ashley said. “We’re not bad, but—”
“Not what you love,” the planner nodded. “We’re only staying two nights. So tomorrow?”
“Sounds great,” Ashley said. “We don’t need much light, so please put the movie first? I know it’s for the kids, and our music is probably a little loud for them.”
“Oh I was thinking of making you play at nine am,” The planner snickered. “We’ll put you on at eight. Got a location?”
“Roof of the old movie theater? We kind of converted it into a community space a year or so back.”
“Done.” The planner said. “Better rally your troops and make sure you still remember how to tune, ma’am.”
“Ashley,” She said, her cheeks hurting under her mask from trying to smile so much. “And thank you.”
“Looking forward to it Ashley,” Said the planner, shooting her a wink. They were cute. Ashley escaped, grinning, into the slowly darkening streets. She pulled out her hand-crank flashlight, but she didn’t need it yet. She knew the streets.
She didn’t go to her new home, the second story apartment off of main street, its green paint finally fresh rather than flaking after they finally got around to some aesthetic work three years ago.
Instead she went to her old one. The one she’d lived in all through high school. The one that had been her home before the burnout. Where she had lived with her parents before they were gone. Before so many people were gone, and the power with them.
She’d had a lot of time to come to terms with it. A lot of days spent moving in and out of that old home since. She still felt wistful, approaching, but it wasn’t the raw ache of loss it had been. Especially when she saw the flashlights around the open garage and heard the murmur of voices.
“Dude,” Called Don, the first to see her. “She’s here!”
Saanvi must have set up her drums, because a drumroll started as Ashley approached. It ended with a symbol crash just before Don caught her in a tight, squeezing hug. His left hand was flat against her back, his ruined right pressed against her other shoulder blade still curled.
“Thank you,” He whispered.
Ashley returned the hug fiercely as the crickets and cicadas sang around them, joined by the frogs in the creek near her old home and the distant howls of coyotes.
“We’re gunna have to do some dusting on this gear,” Saanvi warned. “Not to mention pulling out our old outfits.”
“Ooh, I’m gunna have to figure out what to do with the other leg on my old leather pants,” Melvin sighed, gesturing down to his missing right leg. “Like, is it more metal to tie it up or to slice it off? Probably slicing, right?”
“That’s usually pretty metal,” Ashley agreed. “Slicing.”
She didn’t have to worry about changing her old garb. She remembered, vaguely, putting her look together back in the day. Draping on black and patterns in careful tatters. Draping dingy silver and bronze around her body.
She remembered the careful makeup routine. The dark lipstick. She remembered loving her lips. She spared a moment, touching a fingertip to the mask she wore over her ruined lower face. She pulled it down with a slow breath, allowing her bared teeth and the burned, curled remains of her lips to show. She was going to have to to sing. Couldn’t do that behind a mask. She straightened up and faced her band.
They smiled back. Don swung his guitar strap over his shoulder, his curled hand still just barely good enough for him to strum with his thumb. Melvin leaned back in his chair, his one leg splayed out before him and his fingers already picking out notes on his electric bass. Saanvi twirled her drumsticks, her empty eye sockets heavily shadowed in the scant light of their crack-charged flashlights.
“Alright,” Ashley said, grinning as much as her burned face would let her. “Let’s rock their worlds.”
Warning: Some body horror occurs in the following story, and lots of body modification!
At first it had been a simple, practical choice. In her line of work, not taking up the offer of the body modders would have been madness. There were people who didn’t--The same sort of people who insisted that the kill didn’t count if you cheated. Strange, because May had never known a monster not to cheat.
The cross embedded in the back of her forearm didn’t make her happy, per say, but it was useful. Not as useful as it would have been if she was religious, but useful enough. She kept it wrapped under a bandanna most of the time. It worked a lot better when the vamp didn’t see it before she shoved that poisoned arm under their teeth.
It was a desperation move, sacrificing some blood and some pain to incapacitate the enemy. She tried not to use it when it could be avoided.
It took her longer to decide on the more decadent mods. The crosses became normalized. A lot of hunters had them. Plenty of other people did too.
She’d seen spies with small crosses fused into their necks where a vamp would try to feed, seen young hunters with their crosses in their palms, sacrificing grip for a holy symbol in the palm of their hands. She’d seen mothers with crosses over their chests. She heard the vamp poison transferred to infants through breast milk. She wasn’t sure she believed that.
When the modders first started working with the sigil tattoos she was just entering into the second phase of her monster hunting career. Going from the beat on the street, patrolling neighborhoods and alleyways, to an outright hunter, doing the tracking and the killing rather than merely guarding. She’d consulted with her superiors, and been given a flat ‘anything that keeps you alive longer.’
She got two sigils to start. On her left shoulder a simple lighting sigil that required only a hard slap to activate a shine like a flashlight. On her left hip she received a sound sigil. Trace her fingers around it clockwise and whatever noise she was making increased. Handy for calling in backup. Trace her fingers the other way, and it muted her movements, her breathing, her natural sounds. She could still kick a rock and the rock would scatter, but everything from her panting to the ruffle of her clothes she could dampen down to almost nothing.
They were expensive, and she had to cut holes in her clothes to use them. And worse, they gave a dull shine most of the time, even if they were inactive. But in time she put them to good use. The light sigil kept her abreast in the nocturnal dens, and gave her a brief advantage if she could blind her enemy, and the sound sigil? There were at least two wolf encounters after which she credited that mark with her life.
Shen she got the sigils of secrecy tattooed across her lips, so she could speak only to the ears which she intended, her mother finally commented.
“It’s just… A little much.” She said.
“It keeps my friends and I safe, mom.” May said, and though her mother didn’t like it, she at least accepted that.
The marks on her lips glowed green when she touched her forefinger to her lips and spoke to the one she thought of. Her commander received updates, and though she still wore an earpiece, they rarely needed to give her a mic anymore.
When she slept with her partner Diana, all their sigils glowed in the dark. Diana’s lips traced the ragged cross and the many scars around it. Both of them trailed their fingers around their sound sigils, and made not a sound. Both of them spent their secret hours pressing their fingertips to their own lips to whisper adoration to no one’s ears but each other’s.
Diana got the monster’s eye first. May got it only a week after. Just one eye, replaced with that of a monster, well preserved and heavily altered to fit well. It was a pity, replacing body parts. Becoming more like that which they hated. But it was necessary in their changing world.
“You’re still beautiful like this,” Diana whispered, a finger over her dark-red lips. The sigil glowed green past her lipstick. Her new eye shone unnaturally in the light of the tv at night.
May was not a vain woman, but she spent more and more time looking in the mirror, trying to decide whether she was alright with the cost. Her left eye was reptile. She had special eye drops for it. Her lips carried the sigil, glowing ever so slightly all the time. She met her own eyes in the mirror before she set to use the blood magic she’d learned and carved a summoning circle into her palm.
Her sound sigil kept her screams from catching.
“I’m worried about you,” Diana said, both hands on May’s bandaged palm. It was strange not to hear her voice in a magically intimate whisper.
“I know,” May said softly. “It will help. All of this is to help.”
It did help. She was very good at killing monsters.
She bound two things to her summoning circle. Bullets if she tapped it twice, her knife if she slashed her finger across it. It cost something, but everything did. They had to be in a specific location. In the dark days, it would have been, like, a cave. Now she had her own private lockbox at work that she’d been allowed to set up as her summoning circle.
“Beware the Ides of May,” Her boss said once, jokingly, and clapped her on the shoulder. It was the one with the flashlight, and his affection turned it on. May laughed, but it felt distant. Her reptile eye was aching. She needed more eye drops.
Diana’s cat eye started crying blood when they made love. It was unpleasant for both of them, but not the most unpleasant thing they’d run across. She started wearing an eyepatch at night, and when their new neighbors started moaning too loudly, they unanimously turned up their sound sigils to drown them out.
“It’s complicated,” May told her mother, her hands spread before her, a warped tattoo of red ink traced around her finger like a wedding band.
“But you do love her?” Her mother asked, holding May’s hand in both of her own.
“Absolutely.” Said May. She kept her reptile eye under an eyepatch around her mother. Usually she kept a glove on her scarred hand as well. But she’d wanted to show this part, at least.
“Well.” He mother murmured. Then “well” again, and May knew she was trying to find something helpful to say.
“I don’t suppose you could wear a normal band too?” She asked at last, and May found herself smiling.
“I probably could.”
Silver was good in their line of work. Her mother funded the rings. Both argentum silver, one for both of them.
“Vows would be difficult,” Diana whispered, not into her finger, but into May’s ear. “Do we have to have a wedding?”
“My mom would really like it,” May said, the wedding band tattooed on her finger burning fondly with the magic imbued by Diana. It was their chosen red strand. In times of trouble, they could unwind their tattoos and follow which way the ink pointed to each other. “Why, what were you thinking for vows?”
“Well, it’s hard to say something more powerful than what we do. I’d kill ghouls for you, and drag you out of the teeth of mimics, and exercise the world, even my favorite ghosts, if it kept you safe.”
“Romantic,” May drawled. The cross in her arm itched. It had ever since they gave her the fangs. No vampire in them anymore, they’d promised. Just a new weapon. Daggers for the mouth. They were even retractable. But the cross didn’t like them.
“Would they let us in a church?” Diana asked.
The cloth of her eyepatch was slightly damp against May’s cheek. Bleeding again, but ignored. So many things between them were bleeding.
“Doesn’t have to be a church.” May answered. “Let’s have it in the sunlight somewhere.”
She didn’t say ‘while we can still stand it,’ but she thought about adding that. They’d realized a long time ago that they’d changed themselves for good. Somewhere between that first augmentation, gotten for necessity, and their latest, the bonds they’d chosen together.
Some days, May wondered what kept it all separate anymore.
When they sild the silver wedding bands over their tattoos, there were people crying. And when they kissed, their teeth too sharp, their bodies not entirely their own, people whooped with joy for them.
It’s enough for me, May whispered, her finger to her lips, her makeup smeared with tears below her human eye.
It’s enough, Diana replied, and kissed her again in the sunlight that only burned a little.
Naila’s cat allergy, she had often proclaimed to her friends, had ruined her chances at a happy life. She was enamored of cats; adored them to her extreme detriment.
Of course she’d never owned one--it would have suffocated her— but she couldn’t resist chirping at them and wiggling her fingers when she saw them on the street. She often ‘forgot’ to warn her friends of her allergies in the hopes that she’d get a few snuggles and pets before the sneezing and swelling became too apparent. And gods help her, once she’d found one in the rain and smuggled it under her jacket all the way to Kyle’s house. She’d been grateful for the rain by the end of the night--it had probably saved her from a hospital trip--but she’d had to have her shirt and jacket dry cleaned before she could wear them again.
“Naila,” Kyle had scolded, scooping the sopping cat up out of her arms. “You’re going to get sick doing this to yourself! Go shower off, I’ll get this little guy dried off.”
“I named him Archibald.” Naila said around her stuffy nose.
“Of course you did.” Kyle’s face had been stuck somewhere between admiring and exasperated. It was an expression a lot of people who loved Naila wore quite a lot of the time.
Rinsing the traces of cat off herself in Kyle’s shower, knowing she would now be even more firmly solidified as the catless cat lady in her friend’s minds, Naila couldn’t regret her choices. She just wished.
It was another two months before that wish really began to solidify. Two months of knowing that Kyle had fallen for Archibald and adopted her. Knowing that meant another friend’s house she couldn’t go to without wheezing, even after her allergy pills. Knowing that a silly name and a warm new home was a good gift she had given that little cat. Knowing that she had wanted that warm home to be hers.
It was a silly project she embarked on. The wire frame took forever to build in the first place. Working the mesh over it finely enough to hold the dirt in place but not too firmly that she couldn’t root her plants inside took twice as long. She pricked her fingers on wire and bled into the soil more times than she could count.
It was what she came home to, and what she woke up to. Her days were weaving dirt and metal, with a gap in the center for earning enough money that she could afford to spend her days weaving dirt and metal.
She took pictures off the process as she went. If it turned out cute, she told herself, she could put it on pinterest and feel a little validated for the time it had taken. If it didn’t… Well, pinterest fails were pretty popular too.
The night she finished the structure, she spent all night smiling at her little dirt-filled scaffolding. Its pose was more lifelike than she could have hoped, now that she was seeing it fully. The little paws, the tilted head, the tail curled neatly behind it. With the dirt filling it and the marble eyes, it looked like a perfect little brown/black cat.
The next day she got the plants. Succulents and mosses. She brought them home to her homemade cat potting project and set to work. She settled the branching antler-like succulents behind his ears, the broad floral one in the center off his head. Down his back where velvety ground covering plants, and atop each of his paws she settled delicate little tenacious cacti.
Each piece of him she held up plant after plant to before deciding what would fit best. The small studs of smooth leaves down his tail like platemale, the fuzzy crawler at his chest like soft fur, the beginnings of wispy vines where his whiskers would be. They would grow longer and curl in time.
“You will be so handsome.” She told him.
She ground her mosses in milk and painted the slurry over his details. Used different mosses to highlight different pieces of him. In time they would grow however they pleased, she knew, but to begin he would have a dark velvet nose, and a mixture of soft green mosses for his fur between the succulents.
She stepped back at last when she was done, and laughed a little at the sight of him. Slightly off-balance from the different plants. Stained green with moss and pale with milk. She patted the succulent on his head ever so softly, and brushed her fingertips over the antler fronts behind his ears.
“Give it time.” She told him, picking at the bandaid on her finger from where she’d pricked herself on his ‘claws.’
She snapped a picture and went to sleep.
The next morning she gave him a light misting with milk. More food for the moss than water for the plants. She had to be delicate about it, overwatering would kill her sweet succulents before they had even begun to take root and reveal their full shapes in the grand scheme of it.
She paused before leaving, looking back to her statue-garden. It wasn’t perfect, but there was something about it this morning…
“Have a good day,” She told it, scooting it a little closer to the window in its shallow aluminum bin that kept her desk from decaying under the moist soil. “Grow lots, alright? I’ll do my best to take good care of you.”
She tapped the tip of his wire-wrapped nose lightly.
“After all, I always wanted a cat.”
It was a slow day at work. There was only so much for a secretary to do when no one was calling. Naila texted Kyle the picture from that morning of her slightly-grungy but finally-growing cat sculpture.
‘Ask Archibald what he thinks?’ She wrote to accompany the image.
‘Archibald says you made a good call changing the positioning a little. Looks more natural. It’s gunna be cool Naila!’
He accompanied the reply with a photograph of Archibald, fluffy and forbidden, flopped in his cat b ed with his fluffy white belly exposed and ripe for the petting.
“I didn’t.” Said Naila out loud, frowning at the message. “Must look different with the plants.”
“What?” Asked Dawn as she walked back in from her coffee break.
“Nothing.” Naila assured, and put her nose down to organizing her old files before she got noticed on her phone.
When she came home, the sun was setting and at first she thought her planter was gone. There was only the aluminum holder, sitting on the desk where she’d left it in the morning sunlight. Her stomach dropped at the absence. At the crumbles of dirt on the desktop.
She searched the room in jerking motions of her head, her mind flying in every direction. Burglars, thieves, pranks by friends she thought kinder than that…
She found her planter across the room, sitting in the sun next to the sink.
Naila stood for a long time, staring at her cat. At its demure pose, ears perked, antler succulents tracing the angles she’d sculpted them with, and the thin film of milk and moss still covering its form. She tried to see shapes in it she hadn’t sculpted. She wondered if she should be afraid. She wondered if she should call Kyle and yell at him for messing with her. She wondered if she ought to change her locks.
She pulled the milk spray bottle out of the fridge instead and left it to sit and warm up while she went to find the broom. There was a small trail of dirt across the floor where it had shaken loose. Whoever had moved it, they’d at least been reasonably careful.
She was still in the middle of sweeping it up when the spray bottle hit the floor.
She turned as quickly as she could, and even still, it was only in time for her to watch the cat settle the last half inch into sitting position. Though now that she was looking for it, it was impossible to miss the tilt of its head and the shift in its expression.
“Alright.” Whispered Naila, sitting on the floor to keep from falling down. “Alright.”
She sat there a long, long while.
And in the spirit of all cats, eventually her planter came to curl up in her lap.
The most grew in even and handsome. The more it covered, the smoother her cat’s motion. His sharper spines pricked at her fingers, but she didn’t mind. She didn’t know how much of him was the blood and tears she’d poured into the project, but she didn’t mind. Her camera filled up with pictures of him, just like any cat in the world.
He broke her glasses and explored her home. He left dirt crumbs and flecks of moss, but seemed none the worse for wear. She misted him with milk, and he rubbed against her fondly, the smooth leaves on his tail winking in the light as he moved. She couldn’t feel the wire framework holding him together anymore when she stroked his fuzzy chest or when he headbutted her with the flat rosetta succulent on his head.
His whiskers grew in long and curly, and the antlers behind his ears moved with them and doubled his feline expressions.
Naila tried to come to grips with her new reality. She tried to comprehend how her little structure had lived. She wondered if she could do it again. But she didn’t tell anyone about it.
Not until Kyle came over for game night one Thursday and she suddenly found herself on the other side of a problem she’d faced many times before.
She forgot to lock up her cat before he came over.
“Um,” she said as Kyle pressed himself further into the corner. “His name is Floss. Like feline moss, get it?”
Yo! That’s right, it’s an original fiction side blog. Gunna post this June 30 day challenge here! Follow if you wanna read my fumbling attempts to write my own stuffffff!
Xoxo Boom
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