He nodded.
“She says you never reveal anything about yourself, but your head is smoking every second.”
He shrugged and took another bite of his sandwich. “They can’t put you in jail for what you think.”
Nola nodded, picked up a slice of pickle from Benjamin’s plate, and placed it upon her tongue. As she slowly chewed it she said, “That’s why no one will go to jail for all of the murders that happened in here today.”
“Murders?” Benjamin frowned and studied Nola’s wicked eyes. “All of them?”
“Dozens. One customer was chainsawed to pieces just two stools down from you.”
Benjamin glanced at the gleaming silver stool and returned his gaze to Nola’s eyes. “I bet you had a time cleaning up.”
She lowered her voice. “Of course. We had to lock up the place and remove our uniforms to keep from getting blood all over them.” Her voice came deep and breathy. “I didn’t have time to shower. There’s still some blood on me.”
Benjamin stared at the waitress until he realized he had been chewing the same mouthful for minutes. He swallowed and spoke. “Nola, do you think I might call you some time? Maybe we could go to dinner and take in a movie.”
Nola nodded, her hooded eyes not even blinking as they fixed Benjamin to his stool. “I’m done here in another half hour, Benjamin. How about tonight?”
He sipped his coffee, nodded, and said, “Call me Benny.”
The Green
Ifelt myself dropping through the darkness, the words of my mother still in my veins:
I struck. My shell cracked but did not open. I reached to force open the crack, but my limbs were not yet full and still weak.
I forced my fingers against the crack until I saw green light entering, filling my tiny chamber. I traced the crack down beneath my legs and then I jumped up and landed upon the crack.
I knew this would make the seed move.
I heard the heavy sound of wings beating the air just as the shell beneath my feet gave way, sending me down between the leaves and blades, down among the roots and molds.
There, a creature of slime.
Tubular, segmented, colored with a hot hue. It filled its yawning maw with soil and long dead creatures of the green now brown, black, and rotted. I readied the thorns on the backs of my hands, soft as they still were, but the creature had no interest in me. I still lived.
I was flattened as a great weight landed above me and a mind shattering scream filled my hearing. When I could look again, I saw half of the tubular creature writhing among the roots, the slime pulsing pink and yellow from its severed end. Another scream and the huge beak snapped down once more and the creature of slime was no more.
I became as the roots around me: cold, motionless, unthinking, unfeeling, the brown over me like hair. The great beak struck down twice more, the second time turning over a piece of rotted leaf. Finding nothing there, the creature beat its wings and was gone.
Slowly I turned my face up to look through the blades of grass, the moss fronds, ferns, and vines. High above them, her crown almost hidden by everything between us, my mother towered above the world. She had taught me well, for I was still alive to say so. Now there was my duty to her.
The fireblades would surround my mother. I found her root, turned my face away from her, positioned the needles of light from above my mother’s crown to my left, and began walking through the blades as my thorns hardened. On my journey four times creatures of slime moved to make a meal of me, and four times I left them in pieces for each other. From the creatures of flesh I hid.
Child, hear this:
When I reached the edge of the world, the place where the fireblades stood their ranks, my head was above the mat of the forest. The upright grasses and ferns still towered over me, but now I was too big to draw the interest of the creatures of slime who crawled. The slime creatures who took to wing, however, now found the spaces between my thorns attractive places to lay their eggs. Twice each cycle of lights I bathed myself in the acid drips of the marabark. It made my skin brown and cracked, but it kept away the egg layers.
By the time the fireblades turned red and prepared to let fall their children, I was tall enough to see the curve of the fireblade’s circle around my mother. Too I could see another like myself preparing to gather the children of the fireblades far toward the morning light.
I crept close to her and said, “Child of our mother.”
The other whirled and presented her thorns and shining teeth as she faced me. “My sister,” she replied, although she did not relax.
I asked the question of burden. “How many sisters have we?”
“There is one other. She is dead by now. She was slow and stupid.”
I held out my upper limbs and cried at this. “Two? There are only two of us? How can only two of us care for the children?”
“We must,” answered my sister. “If we fail, our mother dies.”
Before we parted we shed our thorny skins, became soft, crept into each other, and embraced. It was a moment that lifted me far above the world into a land of feeling, warmth, and glory. Then we parted, prepared to do what we could to serve the children.
“There is only you and one other,” said a fireblade, its single scarlet leaf pointed toward the sky.
“This is not sufficient,” cried another. “Our parents had seven to care for them, yet they complained at how few they were. Our parents’ parents had sixteen.”
I could not quiet their fears, nor was that my task. Their pods were bursting and I had to gather the children.