Author’s Note: This novel was first presented as an audiobook presentation on my Rumble and Bitchute channels. I wrote it over the course of a seven-month period, during which I had been obsessed with the subgenre of ‘urban fantasy’, and what it might be like to have these fantasy genre creatures living in our world.
Crick slid his blade in at just the right angle, the clinically, efficiently sharpened edge sliding through the fat with the ease of repeated practice. He had become practically an artist at this, and barely a whisper of any sort of expression altered his visage as he plied his trade. Away went the fat, leaving only the pristine meat to be carved up into smaller fragments. Don’t be alarmed, dear reader. Crick was carving up shoulder clod beef, to be slow cooked in a giant stein pot for later use.
His coworkers knew better, when looking at the printed schedule hung up with a thumb tack by the office doorway, than to do this task themselves if Crick was slated to work. The man was a professional, and probably had the best knife skills of them all, save perhaps for Chef Taylor, the sous chef in charge on second shift. Even then, the gap between them in skills was marginal at best, requiring the fine vision of a hawk to discern.
Using knife and cutting board, Crick slid the cubes of carved up beef into the stock, peeking over his shoulder as he heard the familiar, telltale chime of the door alert buzzer sounding, informing the kitchen in the back of house area that there had been an arrival or departure of guests. Guests, Crick thought sourly, his lip curling slightly in a sneer. Just call them customers, for God’s sakes, can we cut out the cutesy bullshit? Though the window between the front of house and back of house areas was narrow, Crick stood far enough back at the moment that he could easily make out the trio of men being guided by Selena toward a booth. Though he didn’t know the men personally, he recognized the tribal tattoos on the left side of each man’s neck.
With no ticket, and without any of them even having yet asked for a drink, Crick reached into the prep line’s lower-right drawer, and put three breaded cod in the third fryer. Shawna, a dour-faced, doughy cook of 25 with hair dyed a powder blue, gave him a cocked eyebrow. “Just trust me,” he offered evenly in his dry, rattling voice. The other two cooks presently in the kitchen, Jacob and Chad, didn’t ask any questions, nor raise any eyebrows. Indeed, they barely moved at all, which was in keeping with their usual activity levels when there wasn’t an order on their boards. The habit of disengagement had been elevated by Jacob almost to an artform; indeed, hopeful bodhisattvas might have admired his ability to hold still and seemingly absent of thoughts, had their ilk been prone to such things as admiration.
This is no insult, if one understands the concept of attempting to move toward ‘thoughtless mindfulness’. But perhaps we should move along, yes?
The cod were almost finished in the fryer when the squat black plastic box set just below the order window whirred to life, its mechanical rattle-buzz accompanying the birth of a strip of paper bearing the fruitful reveal of Crick’s accurate prediction:
‘3 fried fish sandwiches
1 no tartar
3 no tomato
Add 3 pickles
3 tater tots
Dine-in’
Chad poured tots into a banged-up metal wire basket and lowered them into the second fryer, unleashing the bubbling, snapping noise that had just been completed with the cod, a noise like one might also expect in old cartoons where witches gather round a cauldron and drop in bits of frogs and eyes of bats in order to mix up some strange elixirs. Crick himself, the top of his black cook’s skullcup barely visible in the order window, set to assembling the fish sandwiches. Shawna handed him the pickles, which he added on, carefully putting each sandwich on its own small ceramic plate. The ‘clack’ and ‘clink’ sounds of the kitchen in motion soothed him, a known quality of daily life that spoke of the comforts of skilled repetition in application. This was Crick’s wheelhouse, and he knew it well.
A couple of minutes later, Selena’s narrow, angular face glided into view, the angled collar of her plain white server’s shirt jutting like knife blades away from her long neck. She set each of the three completed plates on her ovular black serving tray, then hoisted it up on palm and shoulder at a slight angle, whisking away out of view just as quickly as she had appeared. Chad leaned forward toward the window, the young man watching her walk-away as closely as one could without immediately being slapped with a sexual harassment accusation.
“She’s going to catch you looking at her like that one of these days, and she’s going to beat you over the head with the meat tenderizer,” Crick observed. Chad glowered down at him, jaw set tight.
“What the fuck do you care, man? What, are you hoping to get after that?”
“I’d have better luck getting an elephant to dance the tango without trampling everybody in the dance hall,” the shorter veteran cook grumbled in reply. “But we just lost Crystal last week, since college started back up, so we’re short on wait staff as it is. Don’t make it worse.” Chad’s expression softened some, since this explanation made both perfect sense, and had been delivered with Crick’s usual odd commentary. At only 4 feet in height, it seemed that Crick Solomon had to rely on bizarre humor to get by in a world that, by and large, had been designed to suit the needs of an average-sized person like Chad. “Keep an eye out, I gotta go hit the head,” Crick finished, untying his apron and pulling the loop up over his head, hanging it from a hook on the doorway that led one from the rear of the kitchen to an employees’ only hallway near the restrooms.
Chad and Shawna shared a knowing look, and the latter offered him a faint smile. “I mean, he’s not wrong,” Shawna remarked. “But if I was him, I’d be more worried about someone who isn’t a regular of ours seeing that nose of his bobbing up and down back here.”
“Yeah, people suck,” Chad replied. “But something tells me those guys wouldn’t really care, one way or the other.” Shawna came up next to him at the prep counter/order window, and he quickly pointed to their most recent customers, who sat chatting with one another in their native language and chuckling while enjoying their meal.
“It was bound to be chicken or fish, anyhow, if they wanted protein of any kind,” the blue-haired woman remarked. “How do you think Crick knew which it’d be?”
“We can ask him when he gets back,” said Chad. When Crick did return, tying his apron back in place quickly and putting on a pair of disposable black food service gloves before picking through bits of the prep line’s shredded lettuce, putting the less savory-looking scraps in the garbage can, Chad asked, “How exactly did you know those guys were going to order fish?”
“The tattoos on their necks,” Crick said, clearing his throat briefly, not looking away from his task. “In their written language, those symbols mean ‘My heart is of the ocean’, meaning they’re fishermen.”
“How do you even know their language, though? Like, it isn’t required learning in any schools I know of, not nowadays,” said Shawna.
“Wasn’t required when I was a kid either,” Crick said, now moving on to the sliced tomatoes for discard consideration. “But there were a couple of families of them back in my old neighborhood growing up, and my mom and dad, they said it was important to learn about the other sorts of folks who came from their old homeland, their customs, culture, languages. They said it could help avoid problems, especially here, where there’s so few of our people.”
“Pretty open-minded of them,” Shawna said with a smile. Crick snorted, shaking his head.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, kid,” the older cook said, taking off one glove to scratch at his bulbous, slightly hooked nose. “My folks weren’t some kind of hippies, okay? This was about survival, and never forgetting too that back in their day, guys like that,” he said, hooking a finger up toward the order window over his head, indicating the trio of large men out in the dining area. “Well, they had a habit of killing or at least beating mercilessly people like me. So, yeah, I learned how to read and listen to their language, even if I can’t speak it very well myself.” Crick was just about done with the tomatoes when Selena came to the order window and knocked on it.
“These guys are asking to talk to the, ‘tiny cook’,” she said, using her fingers to motion air quotes, her tone dripping with disapproval. “Crick, do you want me to get Chef Taylor to come out and tell them to just pay and get out of here?”
“No, that’s not necessary,” Crick said with a sigh, pulling off the other black glove and heading toward the swing door that would take him from the kitchen out behind the counter where single diners could sit on stools to eat their meals. As Crick passed into this area, just barely able to see over the counter, he spotted the wide, blocky-toothed smiles of the trio of diners who had requested his presence, the leering, ‘this is too funny’ expressions they wore. Fuckers are just lucky I left my knives back in the kitchen, he thought acidly. He started to approach the trio, but one of them just shook his head and snickered.
“No need, man, we just wanted to see if you were for real,” the large brute said in a voice choked with contemptable laughter. “Kind of surprised that you used real fish for us, and not rat patties!” The trio then broke out into raucous laughter, slapping the table, which threatened to break under their considerable physical strength. Crick just let out a sigh and returned to the kitchen, washing his hands methodically in the sink.
Cody, Jacob and Shawna stood nearby, each one looking awkwardly down toward Crick’s feet, rather than directly where he could meet their eyes when he would reach up for the paper towels to dry his hands off. “H-hey, are you all right, man,” Cody finally asked as Crick tossed the paper towels in the nearby trash can.
“I’m used to it,” said the older, shorter line cook. “When you’re a goblin, you get used to minotaurs looking down on you in more ways than one.”
**
The modifications had been minimal, allowing Crick to operate the tiny car as deftly as any human driver. The automotive industry had had plenty of time to adapt; the Outworld Incident had occurred in 1972, and savvy businessmen had gotten to work quickly making these newcomers a valid customer base. The downsides of capitalistic thinking have been given plenty of airtime and digital space for would-be young socialists and theoretical communists to pelt out their grievances, but what they almost always seem to forget about is the innovation that is spurred on by the Profit Motive. One has to take the good with the bad, after all. The hook-nosed goblin motored along, appreciating how empty 13 was at this hour of the night, listening to the local Top 40 station on his radio.
Turning right at the light onto 42, Crick rolled his window down and lit a cigarette, chuffing out a stream of gray smoke. He felt a brief twinge of concern as a Savage PD SUV came up behind him, but the officer quickly swooped out and around him into the other lane, dome lights flashing on as it sped off to respond to a call elsewhere nearby. “Thank you, God,” Crick muttered, slowing down as he came to his next turn at a light.
His apartment complex’s parking lot, tall arc sodium lamps spaced strategically throughout, gave off an aura that always reminded Crick of the scene in David Fincher’s “Fight Club”, where Ed Norton and Brad Pitt first fought each other in the bar parking lot. He had even witnessed a couple of brawls as he came home from The Loon’s Café, circling right back out of the lot and driving around another ten minutes before returning to head up to his unit in the sprawling, 3-story complex.
On one such occasion, a young elf kid, maybe 12 or 13, sat in the building’s lobby when Crick got inside, left eye swollen almost shut, lower lip split and bloody. The goblin cook had almost walked away, ignoring the kid, but he couldn’t bring himself to be that detached. “What happened, kid,” he had asked.
“Billy Thompson called me a knife-eared half-breed, so I punched him,” the kid replied. Crick could see it then, the softened sylvan features not reduced due to youth, but because the kid had one human parent and one elven.
“Let me guess- Billy wasn’t alone?”
“Good guess. He’s never alone, always has his little goon friends with him.” This truism held on this night too, as the building’s most well-known troublemaker sat with a couple of his fellow teenage hoodlums on one of the metal benches flanking the front walkway between the building and the parking lot. Thompson, a broad, tall boy of 15, was handing a bottle of some sort to one of his three cohorts and laughing as Crick approached the front doors of the complex. He sneered at the goblin widely.
“Hey, Mr. Solomon,” Thompson said by way of opening an exchange. “How many of you little leprechauns can you fit in that clown car of yours?” This wonderful little sally birthed guffaws from his cohorts, but Crick just kept walking, opting for the wiser path through such encounters. His father, back in his home world, might have stabbed the little cretin in the face with a scimitar. Skirmishers were not famous for their self-control. Crick jabbed the call button on the elevator in the main lobby, waiting until it slid open, and stepped inside, poking the ‘2’ button and slumping back against the corner of the elevator booth.
“Leprechauns,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Little dope would probably shit his pants if he met a real one.” But Crick mused on this deeply as the elevator rose and then dinged open, depositing him into the hallway in which his unit awaited his arrival. He had never met a leprechaun himself, and according to his parents, theirs had been one of the many peoples from their home world that had not been ripped across the Divide and deposited in this world. Much like the fairies, dwarves, dragons and werewolves, leprechauns had not proven to be here.
This was not to say that none had come through, though. Unlocking the door to his unit, 207, Crick considered the fact that the gotrin, the wererats, had only finally allowed themselves to be identified and attempt to blend into world societies back in 2009. Now, 13 years later, the goblin would not be shocked to discover that leprechauns had simply exercised more patience and stealth, using their innate magic to remain out of human view around the world.
Stepping into his apartment, Crick instinctively flicked on the switch to his immediate right, flooding the entryway and narrow front hall with yellowish light. He set his keys in the small wooden bowl on a slender side table, situated as a dumping ground for his pocket clutter and mail whenever he returned home. The Nuvera bill stood on end in the slot for incoming mail, and as he shrugged out of his Vikings windbreaker and hung the purple article on a wall stud to his left, Crick snatched up the envelope. He kicked off his slip-resistant mule-style shoes, and headed down the hall toward the first open archway on his right.
Another flipped switch lit up his kitchen, a tiny space compared to the living room, which dominated most of the apartment unit, or even the bedroom, which he kept relatively Spartan in décor and arrangement. Don’t own too much crap, son, his father had often cautioned him. It weighs you down, pins you in place. Our people have been nomadic for millennia for a reason- it has always helped us survive. Crick sat down at his squat, square kitchen table, a simple white wooden thing that he’d picked up at the nearby Goodwill for 20 dollars when he had first moved into the unit. The smell of stale coffee, still sitting in the carafe over on the counter beside the sink, called to him, his nose twitching slightly. He grumbled at himself, got up, and headed over to the step stool situated by the coffeemaker and microwave, pouring himself a cup and heating it up. “Waste not, want not,” he muttered to himself, adding a bit of sugar and cream, stirring quickly.
Ducking down to his bedroom briefly to fetch his laptop computer, Crick quickly returned and opened it up, hopping online and maneuvering to the Nuvera website. Using his debit card, referring to his bill, he quickly paid the current internet bill, ripped the sheet up, and tossed it in the garbage can standing over by his short bookcase, lined with all manner of cookbooks and his current magazine subscriptions, the most recent four issues. This habit he had picked up from his mother, one of the few curiosities she had developed that Crick found not only practical and useful, but revealing of the woman’s character. His mother had been an avid reader, often non-plussing the parents of Crick’s few human parents as he grew up with her knowledge of modern American culture and literature. Crick had decided early on that this was not only an admirable trait, but one that he would be served best to emulate.
With the internet/cable bill out of the way, and no podcast filling the smallish kitchen with noise, Crick had only his reheated coffee and his thoughts for company. This has historically been some of the worst kind of company to keep for single American guys of a certain age range, who host a deep-seated sense of alienation from the society around them. Such fellows have a bad habit of occasionally making themselves notable by means of eccentricities like taking off their shirts and yelling at ants in the park; or walking into a Burger King, going calmly to a table and plucking up a plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup, mounting the table, putting said bottle to his crotch as an ersatz phallus while spraying it everywhere and loudly proclaiming himself the Grand Emperor of Zam-za-Bam, behold his mighty Heinz 57 member and tremble in awe; or by decapitating their nearest neighbor and wearing the severed head like a hat while they drive through three states in the dead neighbor’s stolen vehicle.
You know- it does something, to some folks.
The goblin sipped at his coffee, sighed, and took himself and his mug out of the kitchen and down to his living room, situating himself comfortably in the large, overstuffed brown armchair around which the rest of the room had been arranged. As one entered Crick’s living room, this seat was in profile view, to the occupant’s right. It was how his father had always arranged their living room growing up, and as boys, Crick and his younger brother, Dojin, had asked why this was the assemblage, with the couch against the wall opposite the television, somewhat behind and to one side of Kontura Solomon’s seat.
“Because I’m right-handed, boys,” their father had answered. “And I’m the head of this family. If a threat comes where we are gathered, it is my duty to present the first target to an intruder or enemy, and to have my weapon hand nearest them.” It was, in short, a tradition of their culture, of all goblinkind, for time out of mind. His father had answered in much the same tone and cadence as someone might explain to a small child how water fills a glass from a tap, which is to say, as if it should be obvious, the ‘why’ or ‘how’ of it.
To the left of this chair stood a small end table, upon which sat the most recent book he’d picked up from Half Price Books down in Apple Valley. Minnesota was one of the many states across the country fortunate enough to host several of these discount chain bookstores. It might have been quicker for him to head to Barnes and Noble, only about ten minutes away from his apartment in Burnsville, but he had always been willing to drive the extra ten to fifteen minutes to get to the other location, which often hosted a far more appreciable and ever-fluctuating stockpile of materials to select from for one’s enjoyment.This one, titled “How We Fit”, was one of the very few non-fiction books he had picked up in the last year or so, a book that had been heavily recommended by several members of the support group he attended twice a month, ‘Children of the Outworlders’.
He had only picked up the book the day before, and only gotten through the introduction before almost falling asleep the previous night after getting home from work right there in the armchair. With the coffee to keep him up at least a little longer, he returned to his bookmarked position, and started in on Chapter 1, hoping that the author, a lizardman fellow by the name of Cedric Welker, would perhaps offer some illumination on how his readers might better find ways to assimilate into the societies they were now full-fledged, tax-paying members of.