Mulberry Wands (22 page)

“This her room?”

At their nod of assent, he walked in and
looked around. Most of Susan’s belongings were still in boxes. Her
closet had a few shirts hanging up, and a laundry basket full of
folded laundry sat next to the dresser. The top shirt in the
laundry basket was covered with black cat hair.

“Is this her familiar?”

Darius laughed like that was a dumb
question.

“No,” Zoë said, picking the cat up and
cuddling it. She had a frown on her face, and wouldn’t look at him
directly. “She’s my cat.”

“You aren’t that great a mage,” Darius
said.

“I’m not a mage at all, I’m a handyman.”

Zoë was still holding the cat, still not
looking at him directly. Either she was attracted to him and didn’t
want to show it, or she didn’t like him at all. He hoped it was the
former.

Zoë asked, “Why does a handyman want a
mage?”

“I was selling wands. Side job.” Griff
counted rooms. “You looking for a roommate?”

Zoe blinked. “Maybe. You have any pets?”

“One. A rat. His name is Nullus. He’s tame,
lives in a cage. Very quiet.”

She named a price.

Darius stared at her like she’d gone insane.
He cleared his throat and spoke with exaggerated calmness. “What
room were you gonna rent to him?”

“Not Susan’s room,” she said.

Darius nodded, and he folded his arms in
front of himself. “Good, cause that ain’t right. She’ll be back
soon. She will.”

Zoë turned away from them and set the cat
down. She watched the cat walk down the hall for a moment before
turning back to them, like she didn’t want them to see her face.
“It’s going to take me at least a week to get the last bedroom
ready.”

“A week is fine.” He could last a week.
Somehow. “You okay with rats? I mean, in a cage. A pet rat. He’s
tame.”

She was. They agreed on a date ten days from
then. Griff gave them his contact information and left.

He didn’t start whistling until he was out of
earshot. He felt better. He still didn’t have the job situation
sorted out, but at least he wasn’t going to have to move home
again. And Zoë was hot. Petite too. She could wear spike heels on a
date and still be shorter than him. He pictured her in spike heels,
and started whistling louder.

Griff’s whistle ended mid-note when he got
home and walked into the foyer, toting some empty wine boxes he’d
gotten from Trader Joe’s. Belatedly, he realized there had been
extra cars out front. The house reeked of sex. He only liked that
smell when he was the cause of it. In a biology class he’d once
learned that when you smell things, you are inhaling particles of
the substance that caused the smell. So he was actually inhaling
molecules of semen from other men.

“Hey little buddy,” John said. As usual, he
was naked except for the white fisherman hat. His pale hairy belly
shadowed his junk, which stood half-erect as if happy to see
him.

Kathy stood in the kitchen, also naked,
throwing kale into a blender. A flabby man and a plump woman were
having sex on the futon couch, her ballet top pushed up to reveal
brown nipples as big as her palms. As she rolled to one side, and
Griff noticed a second man.

“You want some juice?” Kathy offered
brightly. “It has acai in it. Loaded with antioxidants.”

“No, thank you,” Griff said, sidling towards
the closed door of his room.

Griff opened his door and closed it behind
him. Spartan, but tidy, his room had fresh paint, new carpet, and a
large window looking out over the landscaped backyard and the water
feature spilling into the swimming pool. The room, and the rent,
had been what made him overlook the strange questions when he’d
first moved in. How old was he? How much did he weigh? Did he have
a girlfriend, or a boyfriend? Was he circumcised?

Griff went to Nullus’ cage and lifted the
lid, then extended his hand to the rat. Nullus scampered up his arm
to rest on his shoulder. Nullus stayed on easily, climbing from one
shoulder to the other as Griff took off his hoodie. He hung the
hoodie up on the hook behind the door, then sat down on his bed to
take his shoes off. When he went to the closet to put his shoes
away, he noticed the wastebasket had been moved from its usual
position. The wastebasket had been filled with wadded up tissues,
and resting on top was a condom, tied into a knot. Griff resisted
the urge to throw up, and used the toe of his sock to push the
wastebasket away from the closet. He glanced at the bed, a nasty
suspicion rising up. With two fingers, he lifted the corner of the
blanket. Sure enough, his hospital corners had been undone, and the
top sheet wadded back under the mattress.

“Sorry, buddy,” he said to his rat. “Hang
on.”

With two hands, he lifted the mattress off
the cot frame. A half dozen condom wrappers fluttered down. A
nearly empty bottle of lube lay on its side under the cot, along
with two more wadded up tissues.

Griff went to his bookshelf, sliding off
books to pack in the wine box. The life of Seneca. Writings of
Plato, in both Latin and Greek. Cicero. He picked up the small bust
of Caesar he’d gotten on his Senior trip to Italy, and wrapped it
in some shirts to keep it safe. The rest of his clothes he shoved
into pillowcases, his suitcase, and trashbags when he ran out of
room. He grabbed Nullus too, putting him in the travel cage. Nullus
squeaked in indignation.

Fifteen minutes later he was knocking on
Zoë’s door. Zoë answered wearing paint-spattered sweats. It wasn’t
as sexy as her vinyl skirt and leather midriff-bearing top, but she
looked friendlier, as though she’d turned into a different person
now that she’d changed clothes. Loud music blared from
upstairs.

She glanced at his suitcase, at Nullus in the
travel cage, then back at his face. She raised her eybrows.

“Your room isn’t ready yet.”

“I can sleep on the floor.”

She paused for three long breaths, her hand
on the door. Then she stepped back to let him in. “Have any old
clothes you can paint in?”

When Susan woke up, on the first day she felt
clearheaded enough to know she was waking up, she had a large baby
on her. He was heavy, and hot, and as soon as she shifted to get
into a more comfortable position, he woke up. He was a chubby
little mouth-breather with a line of spittle dribbling down his
chin, and when he smiled at her, she fell instantly in love.

“Aren’t you the cutest little thing,” she
said, snuggling him closer.

She’d been leaning against what appeared to
be the feathered skin of a bird, stuffed with gravel. She was in
the infirmary, where she’d been for many, many days now, another
cinderblock room, this one lit by a half inch seam in the wall at
one end. A translator lay sleeping on the other side of the room,
the back of a gray-haired head the only part of him or her
uncovered by a feathered blanket.

Susan’s breath plumed out, and she had
gooseflesh where she wasn’t touching the baby. She found a
feathered blanket that she must have thrown off in her sleep, and
pulled it back over her. It appeared to be the skin of several
birds that had been sewn together. She flipped it around.
Skin-to-skin was less itchy, than skin-to-feathers, as some of the
feathers had been cut short and they pricked her.

It was cold, colder than November ought to
be. Maybe it wasn’t November anymore. This part of Arizona didn’t
really have autumn. October was still hot enough to need the air
conditioner, then a couple weeks of grace, and then it was suddenly
winter, with no changing of the leaves to warn you it was
coming.

She wondered how long she’d been here. Time
didn’t have as much meaning here, especially when you were sick and
fevered. She stroked her abdomen, where the finger-thick cat
scratch was pink and finally healing. Her hair was longer, coming
down to below her collarbones. She ran her fingers through it,
expecting to find a tangled mat. Instead, her hair had been knotted
into tiny ropes. This she remembered. The children had done it,
said that she looked naked without strands in her hair. She’d been
too sick to laugh, but had found it funny even then. Looked naked,
they said. Nobody here wore clothes, even her.

The baby had been sucking on her wrist, then
thumb, and now that he discovered her breast, he was clenching it
with pudgy fingers and trying to put her nipple in his mouth. She
pulled him away from her, and he began to cry.

“Let’s find your momma, okay?”

His momma was Viiene, Tuusit’s sister’s
widowed daughter, and she hustled into the room a moment later,
arms outstretched for her son. Susan handed him over. Viiene popped
her nipple in the baby’s mouth and sat down to nurse him.

“Fever broke?” she asked, using her free hand
to pull a blanket around her shoulders.

Susan nodded.

“That was a nasty infection you got. We
weren’t sure you were going to make it,” she said. She smiled
slyly. “Tuusit was especially worried about you.”

“I doubt that. He doesn’t like me.”

“Oh, I think he likes you very much,” Viiene
said. “I’m glad you’re finally clearheaded. We’ve all been so
curious about you, but he didn’t tell us much. Are you
married?”

“No.”

“Oh. How recently were you widowed?” she
asked.

“I’ve never been married,” Susan said.

“Why not?” Viiene asked, as if it weren’t a
rude question. “You look like you’ve been adult for several years,
and you’re not deformed or mentally broken.”

“I have questions too.” Susan really didn’t
like this conversation topic. “I’ve heard other people call you
translators. What do you call yourself?”

“Tuusit’s family,” Viiene said.

“I mean, as a whole. Everyone this size, I
mean, the small people.”

“We call ourselves the people. We call your
people the huge-mans, or humans for short.” She pulled the baby off
her breast and burped him against her shoulder. “It’s true what the
stories say. You look like us, except for the size. Do you think
you’ll pick a husband from our family and stay with us?”

“I don’t know.” She really wasn’t comfortable
talking about this.

“Tuusit is back from his trip,” Viiene said,
with another sly smile. Tuusit had been gone for a very long time
on an errand that no one gave her the details of. “I heard he got
back late last night.”

Susan stood up. “I need to find him.” She had
to ask him about the trial. She needed to get home. Zoë and Darius
were probably worried about her.

“Try there first, two blocks ahead and one
up,” she said, pointing down the passageway. After the baby burped,
he started fussing, so she clucked at him and put him on the other
breast.

Susan was still weak, but she’d been able to
walk to the latrine pit even when she was fevered (because the
alternative, a diaper, was humiliating). Walking was easier when
you were this size. She could only jump half as high as she could
when she was human, but half as high was two or three times her
current height. Even with a deep cough still lingering (from the
cold she’d gotten while knocked out by the infection) she could
climb up and down cinderblock passages without getting winded.

She didn’t find Tuusit, but she did find the
missing men. They were sitting outside. She heard them before she
saw them. Normally, entrances in the wall they lived in were either
so small and round you had to climb on your belly, or so narrow
that pregnant women couldn’t use them. This was so large that she
hardly even had to duck. Curiosity made her lift the bark strip
that was leaning in front of the hole in the wall. It led to a
cleared patch of earth underneath a cholla bush.

Cholla was her least favorite type of cactus.
It had spines that appeared to be two inches long, but were
actually longer because there was a thinner, sharper part at the
ends that you couldn’t see. She used them in any spell that was
meant to keep people away, as cholla was nature’s “piss off!” sign.
You’d think you were clear of them, and the next thing you knew,
you had several pads stuck to your shoes and socks.

They were less dangerous when you were small,
in that it was easier to see them, but more dangerous in that
getting stuck with one was more than just a nuisance. Luckily,
cholla was impervious to just about everything, so with the
branching thorny pads surrounding the wall on all sides, this was a
safe and secluded private garden, as long as you kept it clear of
cactus.

There were six men and one young woman on the
packed earth, tying knots in skeins of rope. They were chatting,
telling what sounded like a funny story. When she stepped through
the door, they stopped talking and looked at her. A moment later,
they resumed talking, this time in English. It was obviously for
her benefit, and she felt quite touched.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Writing,” one of the men said. He was the
one closest to her. He was about her age, lean and muscular in a
way that made Susan remember how long it had been since she’d
gotten laid. He held up a fringe of knotted rope.

“This is how you write?” she picked up a thin
rope off the floor. There was nothing marked on it.

“With knots,” the woman said. She was young,
a teenager, with small breasts, a narrow waist, and not a scrap of
cellulite. “We read the knots with our fingers.”

“It more … long time and not break than your
huge-mans paper,” said one man. He was the oldest man in the cholla
garden, perhaps in his late thirties, and he was heavily scarred.
One of his feet was missing the three smallest toes. “Also, we read
in dark.”

The young woman had come closer. She reached
out.” May I read your hair?”

“Um, okay,” said Susan.

She reached into Susan’s hair and pulled her
fingers down the little dreadlocks the children had put in there.
She did it twice more, tugging gently as the knots in Susan’s hair
slipped through her fingers. “It says you are a human mage and you
got your first scars from the same cat that killed Garaant. The
wound got infected and Tuusit’s family cared for you. Nothing
before that. No history before you came here.”