But spending that much time in my room talking basically only to Skallagrim had the unintended consequence of making me feel a lot closer to him than I was comfortable with. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be his friend the way it kind of seemed like I was now. I wanted to understand him, and anyone else here, so that I could survive and figure out my next steps, not so that I could let down my defences in front of the person who’d essentially abducted me.
But more and more, it felt impossible to keep him completely out. Despite the violent way we’d met, Skallagrim had otherwise proven himself trustworthy. Other than a slightly annoying propensity to pretend not to understand me in certain circumstances (I swear I reached for my toes and said, “I bend over,” about a dozen times before I realized that he was messing with me, a grin stretching his snout, eye glittering with amusement) he didn’t seem to want me for any nefarious sexual purposes. He didn’t appear to need me as some kind of forced labour, either. All he did was make sure I ate and drank and didn’t collapse on my way to the bathroom, all while asking Jolakaia pointed, borderline obsessive questions about my recovery.
Maybe I should have been less worried about accidentally becoming his friend and more worried about...
“Am I your pet?” I asked Skallagrim about four weeks after my arrival at the place called Callabarra (I still wasn’t sure if Callabarra was the word for hospital or clinic or village or if it was just a name of some sort).
Skallagrim was seated, his massive body folded onto a stool that, even with its alien construction, seemed a little too small for his bulk. He lowered the bowl of fish stew he’d been trying to foist on me for the past five minutes. In trying to feed me, he had been reminding me of how I’d tried to coax my old, sick cat Viiru to eat before he’d died, and the question had just burst out.
He replied with a phrase that I still hadn’t quite figured out but that I thought meant something noncommittal, like it depends. Then he said, “What is a pet?”
“It’s... it’s an animal you keep for... companionship. Like a little friend. You feed it and...” I faltered. These concepts weren’t as easy to explain as lifting up a cup and clumsily stating I have a cup!
Skallagrim appeared to ponder my words before replying.
“An animal used for-” He ended off the sentence in a way I didn’t understand.
“Didn’t get that,” I muttered, waving off the bowl he’d surreptitiously tried to pass me while talking.
With a grunt, he placed the bowl on a nearby wooden table.
“Some animals,” he pointed a claw at the fish stew, “are caught. Some-” He said something else I didn’t understand. Then he made an upward motion with his fingers that looked like a plant blooming. And when he added something about animals pushing the ground – ploughing? – I realized he was talking about agriculture.
“No, not farm animals. Not work animals. It’s pretty obvious I’m not going to be able to pull a wagon or plough a field for you. A pet is just... just an animal you...”
I barely stopped myself from saying, “an animal you love.” It felt weirdly embarrassing even though I was certain he’d have no idea what the English word “love” even meant.
“It’s an animal you like,” I finished lamely, cheeks flushing. “It lives in your house with you. You take care of it.”
Skallagrim gently rubbed at the underside of his snout with his knuckles, something he often did when thinking or trying to grab onto some particularly complex English sentence structure. He no longer ran his claws through his hair like I’d seen him do before. Now, he retied it into a long, neat braid at the beginning of each day.
He curled his hand into a fist and let it drop from his snout. Then, he leaned forward and looked at me with so serious an expression that it was almost hilariously at odds with the absurdity of the following question.
“Do you want to be my pet?”
It was a quirk of Bohnebregg language to switch into the third person for emphasis or when asking an important question. Which meant that, instead of Do you want to be my pet? It actually sounded more like, Does Suvi want to be my pet?
Using my name like that made the question feel both uncomfortably intimate while also creating an odd distance – like a parent asking something of a child.
“No!” I said emphatically. “I can’t be your pet!”
“Why not?” he asked, seeming sincere. “I feed you. I take care of you. If I had a house, you’d live in it.” His scaly brow bunched slightly. “When I have a house, you’ll live in it.”
Oh, my. Deciding not to touch that little morsel of information with a two-metre pole, I retreated into just repeating, “I can’t be your pet. A person isn’t a pet!”
But he only frowned and asked, “Why?” again, throwing me back into the feeling of a parent-child dynamic but this time with the roles reversed. Only a toddler or an alien would ask why a person can’t be your pet...
“Because! A pet is not... It’s a part of your family but it’s not your equal.” I raised both my hands, indicating an equal amount of space with each by holding both index fingers a centimetre away from my thumbs. “Equal,” I said. Then, I kept my left index finger and thumb a centimetre apart but stretched the distance between my right finger and thumb. “Not equal.”
“A pet is not your equal,” Skallagrim echoed thoughtfully. “A person is above their pet?”
I grimaced, wondering what Viiru would have thought of that if he’d been alive and able to understand what had just been said. He probably would have immediately puked somewhere inconvenient just to watch me clean it up and prove the concept wrong. But I was getting tired, and couldn’t figure out a way to explain how cats in particular weren’t equal to their owners because they were actually the supreme beings of the household.
So instead I just nodded weakly. “Pretty much.”
“Hmm,” he rumbled. “Then perhaps I am your pet.”
I smacked my hand to my forehead. Clearly, I’d done a piss-poor job of explaining what a pet was. But at least now I knew that wasn’t how Skallagrim thought of me – he seemed to have absolutely no concept of what owning a pet meant.
“No, Skallagrim, that’s-”
But he cut me off.
“Little star,” he said, cocking his head slightly so that the side of his face that still had an eye was closer to me, as if he could see me better that way, “you are so far above me that-”
The rest of the sentence rumbled right past me in a rush of unknown words I had no context for. I truly couldn’t say if I just didn’t recognize any of the words, or if exhaustion was starting to slow down my ability to translate. Skallagrim must have noticed my blank stare. He grabbed the bowl again and thrust it down onto my lap without waiting for me to take it from him.
“Your strength fades. Eat this,” he muttered.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat it anyway.” He smirked. “It would make your pet very happy.”
Good grief.
I stared down at the surface of the stew, not returning his expression of lighthearted mirth. I was done with the inane turn this conversation had taken. Goddamnit, I wanted something real.
“Why am I here, Skallagrim?”
“In Callabarra? You were-”
“No. Why am I here?”