Pretty words and sentiments aside, Crick Solomon found himself being ground down into a fine dust against the pressure of some previously ill-understood natural drive, one he couldn’t deny. In the four days since the last Children of Outworlders meetup, he found his thoughts consistently returning to Velis, the goblin woman. He had lived in Brooklyn, New York, for the first 28 years of his life, from the time of his birth to just a few days after his 28th birthday, and had never had to go much further than the front stoop of his building to spot his fellow goblins in fair-sized groups. New York City seemed, in fact, to have drawn quite the population of goblins, elves, lizardmen and felises, the cat-people of Caldea. He had known plenty of different goblins of both the male and female persuasion, seen the multitude of differences from one specimen to the next.
As a boy, the only appreciable difference he’d known outright was the visual presentation of the ears; male goblins’ ears tended to be pointed in a vertical orientation, with almost square-like lobes that seemed appropriately proportioned for the rest of their heads. Female goblins’ ears, on the other hand, were pointed more horizontally, almost like those of the elves as a whole, and the average female goblin’s earlobe was a small, rounded bobbin on the underside of their ear canal. This much was easy to see in even the newborn infants of his people.
Moreover, in terms of physical differences, there were more, well, obvious, differences, when the kindness of clothing was done aside with. In this regard, goblins and humans were not actually all that different, other than measurements best left to one’s own imagination.
But behaviors and instincts seemed to be where Crick had the easiest time spotting the delineation between what made a goblin man a man, and what made a goblin woman a woman. For starters, goblin men were among the most hot-headed, temperamental, physically aggressive creatures in all of Greater Creation, insofar as Crick had observed in his forty years of life. If a news story involved a seemingly random and nonsensical assault with a blunt or bladed weapon, there was, in his estimation, at least a 20% chance that the attacker was a goblin male, probably between the ages of 30 and 60. Secondly, goblin men between the ages of 30 and 35 usually started to go through something their people referred to as ‘rick-shay-tah’, an instinctive drive to start figuring out which of their people’s females they would like to try to pair-bond with for life.
It should be noted that this is not the same thing as the standard human puberty, where males of the species start getting the urge to just rub themselves against every damned thing in sight for reasons that they can’t themselves put into so many words, but which are more akin to the strange, guttural, animal noises that a housecat might loose if spotting a small field mouse just outside of the window. Goblins of both sexes in their teenage years and early 20’s experience a fairly similar thing to human puberty, and they are no more immune to the urge to copulate like wild animals at rutt than any Homecoming dance attendee.
What he was feeling was not completely unknown to him, of course; his own brother had gone through it just a few years before, and he was now married (the humes’ word for it, though the term in the goblin tongue literally translated to ‘bound to another until doom’). As most people in the modern age do when faced with such an ‘in-between’ feeling or situation, he had decided it was finally reach out to someone about it. After breakfast, though, he thought as he set his plate down on the kitchen table and scooted himself up, sipping his coffee. Before food and coffee, there’s no use in even trying to push through this conversation.
After a few minutes, Crick stirred a fresh cup of coffee, savoring the last bite of his omelet. Like the dutiful, believing penitent, he allowed the last motion to linger just long enough to achieve its own sense of import, letting go of the handle of the spoon, allowing it to swirl in the tan liquid like a ship being swirled in a whirlpool at sea. His throat fluttered, the swallow completed, and he reached out his right pointer finger, tapping to call his mother. The next tap turned on the speakerphone option, and he leaned back on the kitchen chair, reaching for his smokes as the line trilled. After four rings, the line ‘click’ed, and his mother’s voice echoed out.
“Morning, son,” she said, clearing her throat. “Early to be calling. You sleepin’ okay?”
“Sleeping fine, ma,” Crick replied. He took a long drag of his cigarette, and for what felt like the thousandth time, wished his father was alive to talk to. He loved his mother, and would never rate her as less knowledgeable than his father about, well, anything. However, he had now a situation that was going to be awkward to discuss with her by dint of the fact that they did not share a sex. “I’ve been a bit, troubled, lately. Antsy.” He took another drag, exhaled evenly. “I think the time is hitting me.”
“Probably it is, son. You’re forty; bit of a late bloomer, but the same age your father was when he started trying to seriously catch my attention,” his mother commented. There came a ‘clink’ noise over her end of the line, coupled with a string of curses in the goblin language. “Thrice-damned cat, I swear to Kyan,” she muttered at the end.
“Big difference between me and dad, ma; I don’t have a very handy selection of available mates out here. And let me prevent the next question- I’m not trying to go native here.” A pause from his mother at this.
“Have you ever tried a date with one?”
“A few times. Always felt, just, weird,” Crick said, stubbing out the first cigarette of the conversation. He immediately lit up another one, sipped his coffee. “Last one was a collector.”
“A what?”
“A collector, ma. It’s like a kink, for some humes. They try to sleep with at least one member of each Caldean race. Almost seems like some kind of fucked-up scouts’ badge they can earn for being open-minded or diverse, or some such nonsense.”
“You can’t force things like attraction, Crick, and it sounds to me like those folks are just trying to win some kind of brownie points for internet clout,” his mother grumbled. “’Ooooh, lookit me, aren’t I so inclusive and thus better than you?’ That kind of shit always drives me nuts. Your father was no big fan of that kind of fakery either.” There was another brief pause, and his mother cleared her throat loudly over the line. “You still going to those meetings?”
“Yeah, I am. Actually, there were a few new folks at the last one, a few nights ago. Including a few goblins.”
“Any potentials there?”
“One, maybe. But I’d have to actually spend some time with her to see if there’s anything, you know, there. And don’t come at me with ‘beggars can’t be choosers’, ma; plenty of guys go their whole lives as bachelors.”
“Sure, the creeps and weirdos maybe, the ones no self-respecting woman would touch with a ten foot pole,” she replied dryly. “But even your brother found somebody, Crick, and he’s my kid, I love him dearly, you know that, but I swear on your father’s grave, if either one of you was going to peg one of you two as the lone wolf oddball, it would’a been him.”
“You are just a, font, of motherly support here lady.”
“Hey, I don’t sugarcoat shit, honey. You want somebody to make things sound pleasant when they’re on absolute fire, talk to a White House Press Secretary. You want some honesty, you call me. Except maybe that blonde lady that Trump had, she was pretty on-the-nose with stuff.”
“People hated her.”
“They hated her because she was always ready for their bullshit, son, she had those binders with facts and responses for whatever they threw at her. That’s what you want in a good mate, son, someone who’ll call bullshit even when they hear it coming from their mouth of the man they share a bed with. That’s why your father picked me; I was never gonna win no beauty contest for our people,” she said.
“Ma, I’m begging you-“
“-but your father and I could go round for round with each other at a bottle, and round for round in an argument, and I’d call him to the mat every time.”
“I get it, ma.”
“Didn’t hurt his case that he knew how to sling that-“
“For God’s sake, ma! I got a whole breakfast that I’m trying to convince to stay still in my stomach, you cannot finish that sentence!” Silence, broken by muffled laughter from his mother on the other end of the line as Crick sat half-curled up on his chair like a man being beaten on the ground in a prison fight, arms wrapped around his own head.
“My point is, Crick, I think you’re gonna be just fine, and I think you’ll find the right lady for you,” his mother continued. “Maybe it’ll be this one at your group, maybe it won’t. Either way, I know you’re doing good for yourself out there, and I couldn’t ask for more for you right now. Anyway, I gotta get going, I’m meeting Sheila for breakfast before we head in to work. Promise me you’ll call your brother some time this week?”
“Yeah, ma, I’ll call him.” Crick hung up, his food still gurgling angrily away in his gut. “Quiet, you,” he muttered to his own midsection. “At least she didn’t give us any gory details this time.”
**
Sometimes, a story will abruptly shift from one day to several days, weeks, or months later. This usually happens for one of two reasons, the first and most frequently used one being in order to move swiftly from one important set of events to the next. In these cases, the technique is used to keep the blood pumping, to not bog the reader down, and to keep up the pace of an action-oriented tale. The second common reason is to allow for some padding between the story’s subject character and the reader, to not lose the audience in the banal minutia of the character’s life. We aren’t itching for details about their bowel movements, or the way they may take fully five minutes to select what socks they’re going to wear that day, or the highly rigorous and nigh-neurotic thought process that goes into that selection process. They're great filler details, I’m sure, wonderful for padding a word count or doing early character establishment, but for our purposes here, we can safely skip ahead a few days’ time.
There’s also the corollary in Crick’s case to your own. You are, dear reader, I suspect, the sort of Joe or Jill Everyman/Everywoman who punches a clock, and who sometimes suffers the ‘blur’ of day-to-day living. If you don’t know what I mean by this, you either lead a life of constant adventure (doubtful, given you’ve opted to spend your down time with the likes of my writing), or you’ve been too occupied trying to just get by day-to-day to do the navel-gazey thing of considering this phenomenon, and would the author please kindly get to his goddamned point, there isn’t enough time in the day for these would-be David Foster Wallace-esque asides of metanarrative!
Monday morning finally rolled around, the first of his two weekly days off, bringing Crick awake at the undeservedly early hour of about six, according to his phone. With a groan and a shift of his legs, he swung out of bed, sitting on the edge for a moment, eyes pinched shut against the darkness of his bedroom. “Get up,” he told himself in a muzzy voice, sliding down off of the bed, stumbling half a step on the thick carpeting as one of his long toenails caught the fabric. This, he considered, was perhaps the grossest misunderstanding most humes had about goblins when first meeting one, the notion that they were entirely proportional in terms of the human anatomy. Goblins of the male variety tended to have almost clownishly large feet compared to the rest of their bodies, but this had its roots in natural adaptation; living and developing for millennia in the foothills and mountainous regions of Caldea, the goblin race’s hunters and warriors had adapted to having long, flexible feet in order to better navigate and function on uneven terrain. Humes had no idea what it was like being four feet tall and still needing to buy a men’s size 9 or 10 sneaker just to comfortably walk around on any given day.
Crick stretched, wincing at the small crack issuing from his lower back, then made his way to the bathroom to make his morning necessary and brush his teeth. The bags under his eyes helped to confirm that there was no good reason to be up at this hour on one of his two days off, so why not go back to bed? Because I have shit to do, he admonished himself, scrubbing at his teeth with practiced motions. Shit that can’t be put off forever. He rinsed out his mouth and tried out a smile in the mirror, wondering when the glass would give up the ghost and shatter in reply. He scratched the left side of his large hooked nose and headed back to the bedroom to get changed into decent clothes for the day.
Using social media, while never one of his favored past times, had turned up a positive response for once a couple of days earlier. Using Facebook, and his membership in a small Group dedicated to members of the Outworlder community in the southtowns of Minneapolis, he had managed to track down Velis, the single goblin woman who had shown up at his Children of Outworlders meeting the previous week. After a few brief text exchanges, she had agreed to go on a date with Crick, who had invited her to the simplest of all such outings- dinner and a movie. Of course, being a professional cook, he had offered to make dinner for them at his place before they would go to the Marcus Theater in Shakopee, across from the nearby Walmart, to check out one of the films on offer at the time.
Velis had selected the film in question, and though he had tried to look up reviews for it online, Crick had a feeling that he was going to be miserable with it one way or the other, some kind of high-octane popcorn action flick that he’d only heard of vaguely because it was the tenth or eleventh installment in a too-long-running series of such joyride films. As he poured himself his first cup of coffee of the day, Crick looked over to the spot beside the microwave where he’d left his latest selection of reading for entertainment, and wondered if perhaps he should indulge in it as much as possible to counteract the effects the movie would have on him later.
“When did I become such a snob,” he mused aloud, shaking his head and ignoring the book for the time being. It would do him no good to read anything just yet anyhow, not being awake enough to retain anything of value. So instead, he fired up his Rumble app on his phone, sat down at the kitchen table, and struck up a smoke, listening to one of his favorite daily news video podcasts from the previous day. As he got about halfway through his first cup of coffee, his phone vibrated, and he saw that he had a text message from Velis.
‘Still on for 4pm?,’ her message read.
“Yes, I’ll pick you up then,” he typed back, setting the phone aside once more. The gruff, gravely voice of Dan Bongino rolled ahead with his current events prognostication, and Crick briefly indulged in one of his favorite mental exercises, wondering which Caldean race the hume commentator most likely would be if they were changed into one. Bongino struck him as a minotaur type, a former law enforcement guy who believed wholeheartedly in old-school traditions and mores. Put a battle axe in that guy’s hands, I bet he’d do some damage, Crick thought with a chuckle.
After his second cup of coffee, the goblin slipped his shoes on, grabbed his wallet and his wireless ear pod, sticking it in his right ear and switching over this his Stitcher podcast app to listen to his previously downloaded shows while he was out and about for the day. His first task, of course, would be heading across the street to one of his absolute favorite places to go, regardless of the day of the week.
If one lives anywhere in the American Midwest, there are a few institutions that can almost be hailed as foundational blocks that set the culture apart from their coastal or southern cousins. There’s Culver’s, a burger and frozen custard chain established in Wisconsin. Target, a world-wide department store that counts Wal-Mart as its primary competition in most markets, was first established and has its corporate offices in Minnesota. Big 10 college football is a Midwestern pastime that competes with every other sports arena for ratings and popularity, and is firmly seated in the region.
And there are, in various parts of the country, simpler things, like supermarkets and grocery stores, that tend to act as parts of this foundational base. In the east, there’s Wegman’s. In the west, there’s Ralph’s, and Kroger’s. Down south, it’s Publix. And in the lands of the Minnesota Vikings, the Packers, the Bears, Lions, Hawkeyes, Cyclones, and Chiefs, there is Hy-vee. Crick Solomon viewed the grocery store across the road from his apartment building as an almost sacred place, which, as a cook, should not be too far afield from the understandable. Sourcing its produce and meats (except for seafood) only from local/regional farms and growers, Crick could count on any grocery shopping trip to yield him the best possible ingredients for use in his personal kitchen, shy of going to an actual farmers’ market.
Being in walking distance of the store might have been wonderfully convenient, as one could simply bundle up a little (September winds in southern Minnesota are not pleasant) and mosey on over across the way, making sure to grab one of the little baskets or half-sized carts in order to grab just a small assortment of purchases. Of course, this would only apply if one were human, elven, or a minotaur, folks for whom height and general carrying capacity are not considerations when just making enough purchases to prepare a single decent meal. But if one is all of four feet tall, and can carry at best thirty pounds in each hand, and strain themselves to accomplish that much without an awkward gait, then taking the car is really the only way to get the job done.
As Crick pulled into a parking spot a few minutes later, eyeballing the way an errant gunmetal gray cart clattered and rattled its way across the mostly unoccupied lot, he took a moment to send off another quick message to Velis. “Any food allergies I should be aware of,” he texted. When she replied in the negative a minute later, he nodded, grinned, and clambered up out of his modified vehicle, heading into the store with his sweatshirt hood pulled up over his head. Once inside, he pulled it back, taking in the arrange displays of various fruits and veg right near the entrance. He headed to his right, snagged a half-cart, and took forth like a man on a mission.
He was turning a corner with his cart into the aisle with the canned vegetables when he nearly collided with someone, and found himself non-plussed, looking up at the curious glass pyramid-head of Libras, the golem from his Children of Outworlders group. “Oh, hey, sorry about that, uh, Libras,” he said as the creature turned toward him. He tilted his head slightly to the right, regarding the golem carefully; it was wearing the same clothes it had on the evening of the last meeting, but said clothes now appeared slightly worn and disheveled. “Um, what’re you doing here?”
“To tell you the truth, I am not entirely certain, Mr. Solomon,” the golem replied, tucking its hands (which Crick only now observed were slightly oversized for its frame, and possessing six digits each) into its overcoat pockets. “My master used to send me here to the store at the earliest opening hour every Monday, in order to procure his necessary supplies for the week. But, I have no money,” said the construct, shaking its head, the hue of which visibly shifted from its normal scarlet to a pale, smoky blue. “I, am uncertain what to do with myself.” Crick looked around, a sense of awkwardness rising within him. He felt badly for this poor creature, sure, but what was he to do about it?
“Well, uh, have you found a place to crash, for the time being,” the goblin cook asked, trying to make some conversation. “I mean, since your master’s place went, ah, ‘kablooey’?”
“’Kablooey’? Oh, yes, slang terminology, relating to the explosion in his alchemy lab in the basement,” said Libras, the hue of his head shifting back to its muted scarlet. “Yes, though I have not been there since early this day. I have been, um, mostly familiarizing myself with this township of Savage.”
“O-kay, but, where have you been sleeping?”
“Oh, you misunderstand, Mr. Solomon. I do not sleep,” said the golem with a hint of a smile in his tone. “None of us ever did. Well, do, now, I suppose; Magnus and Trilby were destroyed in the explosion. There is just me remaining. In any event, I am presently staying temporarily in the home of Mr. Samancha Coffet, in his spare bedroom.”
“That working out okay for you?”
“It is ideal, actually. I do not eat normal food, like an ordinary organic being does. As a golem, I am sustained by the absorption of environmental mana, or mana given over to me by magic-using sentients, like Mr. Coffet. It is a useful arrangement; I assist him at his garage, and in exchange, I am allowed to reside in his residence. This is especially helpful, since as a golem, I do not technically have any legal status here as a citizen.”
“Same story for millions of people coming up from Mexico, bub. If they can skate by without problems from the government, I’m sure you’ll be good, too. Just, do yourself a favor, eh? Ask Sam to get you some new clothes, or at least to clean the ones you’re wearing,” the goblin remarked. “You look like you’ve been camping outside since last I saw you.” Crick swung wide around the golem then, snagging a can of black beans, and continuing on with his shopping errand. When he had everything he wanted to make the meal for his date later that day, he rolled up to the only aisle presently lit up to signal that a cashier was ready to assist him, and started setting his goods on the wide black conveyor.
“Find everything okay,” asked the cheerful young woman at the register, adjusting the bright red Hy-vee polo as she scanned his purchases.
“By and large, yeah,” he said with a nod. “I see you folks are finally putting in a small section for goblin-specific items in the Outlander aisle over in the ethnic foods’ section; that’s nice to see,” he commented. The young lady let out a snort and nodded.
“Yeah, but don’t expect there to be anything like canned rat or squirrel anytime soon,” she remarked with a smile. Crick cleared his throat meaningfully, and the smile on the young woman’s face did not so much fade as it did vanish like the reveal in a stage magician’s act, replaced with abject horror at realizing what she had just said, and who she had said it to. “Oh, Jesus, I am so, so sorry, sir,” she stammered, head slightly shaking. “I didn’t mean, um,” she continued, but Crick just grinned and shook his head, putting one hand up to stop her.
“Hey, easy kid,” he said evenly. “It was a good zinger, tell you the truth. And hey, there’s a thread of truth in there, too. That’s what makes it a pretty good one; there’s plenty of folks like me out there that do, in fact, prepare and eat rat and squirrel. Me? I’ve had it a few times, mostly when I was a kid. My mom made it for our family, especially when money was tight. But I’m not fool enough to think you could sell rat meat in a grocery store that caters to humans and elves; plus, it’d probably scare off any gotrin customers, am I right,” he added in a hush-hush tone, nudging his elbow toward her, which brought the cashier girl the rest of the way out of her momentary panic.
“Right,” she said with a chuckle. “Again, I’m really sorry if, you know, what I said before-“
“Don’t worry about it a bit, kiddo,” Crick said, pulling out his debit card as she totaled up the last of his purchases. “You can’t go through life being worried about offending people with every word that comes out of your mouth. That isn’t living; that’s just surviving, and not with any kind of dignity.” She handed him his receipt, thanked him for stopping in, and wished him a good rest of his day. As he rolled away back out to his car, Crick hoped that part of the rest of that day would be making a solid connection with Ms. Velis.
**
“I mean, I can ask around, but this isn’t really anything we specialize in,” Eddie said on his end of the line as Crick continued stirring the corn, making sure to toast as many of the kernels evenly as he could in the pan. “And don’t forget, I’m just a paralegal, Crick. I’m flattered you thought to call me, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for an answer to that question.”
“Well, I don’t think there’s any rush on it for the time being,” the goblin said, turning around to face another counter, on which he had set a wide mixing bowl, measuring out a careful tablespoon of chili powder, adding it to the ingredients already within. “He’s staying with Sam for now, so I don’t foresee any trouble for him. Text or email me whatever you can find out when you have the chance.”
“Can do,” Eddie replied, hanging up. Crick clicked back over to one of his podcast shows and got it running again, continuing his preparations. When he had the corn salsa completed and set in the fridge to chill, he cleaned up quickly, grabbed his book from beside the microwave, and headed out to the living room to indulge in some reading. He had seen reference to the author many’s the time without ever actually having read the man’s material, and after a recent Netflix viewing of Starship Troopers, he decided it might be beneficial to track down some of Robert E. Heinlein’s works for reading and consideration. The first one he’d been able to find at the Half Price Books down the road in Apple Valley had been “Orphans of the Sky”, which he opened for the second time, picking up where he had last left off.
He was perhaps half an hour into his reading when a chirp from his phone broke his focus, a video notification from Rumble. Crick turned on his television, tethered his phone screen to it with a few swipes, and loaded up the video in question. For most of its early run, the video sharing platform had been predominantly focused on conservative and right-of-center political talking heads and commentary, but for about the last five or six months, Crick had discovered a decent variety of non-political channels and content creators on the platform. Among his favorites was a fellow in South Dakota who traveled around the Midwest and filmed himself going to various restaurants, reviewing the fare, the atmosphere of the locations he patronized, and sometimes getting brief little interviews with staff and ownership. It reminded Crick a little of a kind of localized, low-budget “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives”.
The young hume who made these videos, dubbing himself and his channel ‘Dave, the Fabulous Traveling Stomach’ (kid needs to work on his branding, Crick often mused), appeared on screen with his usual smirk, introducing his audience to his latest point of interest, shown over his left shoulder. “This place behind me, ‘Henry’s Diner’, has been in business for thirty-six years, and is presently undergoing the transition from being run by its original owner and principle cook, Henry Carlson, to being overseen by his second son, James. Before we head inside, I had the chance to talk a little to Henry yesterday when I first got to town, and we discussed some of his background, what this place means to him and his family, and what comes next for him, now that he’s decided to step back away from personally running the restaurant.”
The video cut away suddenly to a side shot of Dave, he of the ‘Fabulous Traveling Stomach’, and Henry Carlson. Dave and Henry shared a similar set of traits, both human men of average size with short hair and bright, happy green eyes. But there were some stark contrasts as well, starting with Dave looking all of twenty-something (he was 26, according to most of his online bios), where Henry looked like something that had been left in a tanning booth for a couple of days without the benefit of applying tanning lotions or oils of any sort. Crick found himself thinking that if the older hume applied some green body paint, he might be passable as a hobgoblin, the rare larger cousin race to his own people. At least, rare in this world, Crick corrected himself. Mom and dad insisted they were all over the place back in Caldea.
Crick relaxed for a little bit, watching his Rumble videos before heading back out into the kitchen to resume his dinner preparations. As the time drew nearer for him to go pick up Velis, he began second guessing his every decision, from the simplest things, like which shoes he would wear, to how much guidance to offer the goblin woman in assembling her plate when they returned to his place. He might have spiraled out entirely, but for taking a moment to shut his eyes, take a deep breath, and trust in the initial, loose plan he had set for himself. “Just treat this like any other date you’ve been on, Crick,” he muttered to himself. “You’ll be fine. It’s just a date.”
Had he been presented with a wider dating pool to swim in, he might have believed that a bit more.