When he pulled up to the curb in front of the address Velis had given him previously, Crick felt a small twinge of uncertainty. Had he gotten the address wrong? The house he found himself looking at through his passenger side door’s window was a pleasant ranch-style domicile, quite wide from one end to the other, with three vehicles parked in its driveway, and an open garage door revealing a fair amount of professional-grade workout equipment housed within. He realized he had the right place when Velis came out the front door, her sister and her husband visible just behind her in the entryway of the house. She wore a heavy purple hooded Vikings sweater over plain black jeans and combat boots, and much to his own surprise, Crick found himself appreciating the obvious placement of a sheathed long knife clipped to her waist on her left hip. He liked seeing that she made no bones about letting the world know that she would brook no trouble, physically. Velis smiled and waved to him as she approached down the driveway, hooking her way around to his car and clambering in a moment later.
“Before you ask, yes, I live with my sister and her husband, for the time being,” Velis said as she buckled herself up. “Glad to see you found the place easy enough.”
“I may not trust Google farther than I could throw this car, but their Maps app does a pretty good job,” Crick replied, checking his rearview mirror before pulling away from the curb. “It’s a nice little neighborhood.”
“Lots of our folk in the area,” Velis said, an observation that Crick had seen hints of while driving through the small residential area. Burnsville boasted a goodly-sized population, as did his own township of Savage, but Crick realized that he had seldom gone anywhere in the town that wasn’t right along 42 to do his various shopping errands. But since he had first turned onto Allen Avenue, he had spotted several goblins, minotaurs, lizardmen and elves walking to and fro in the crisp autumn afternoon, biking, jogging, and children running around in front and side yards, children of the various Outworlder races. “That’s actually why I’m kind of surprised you live in Savage instead of around here; not too many Caldeans there.”
“Could be worse,” Crick observed, coming to a roundabout and easing his way through it. “Could be Prior Lake.”
“I think that whole town has a bit of a problem with that,” Velis observed.
“It does. There’s maybe two or three elf families there, and that’s about it. One of them’s a city councilman or something, though.”
“Progress.”
“Not too much, though. According to my folks, elves are used to being in charge all over the place back in the homeland, so it seems like more sort of a natural fit, now they’re in this world.” He considered Chef Taylor for a moment, an elven gentleman with whom he had worked for three years now, but who didn’t ever really strike him as overtly stuck in the ways of his people. Then again, with their kind, there’s almost no way of telling how old they are once they hit 30, he mused. “So, Velis, what do you do for a living,” he inquired, turning onto 42 towards his place.
“I’m a dispatcher for the Scott County Sherriff’s Department,” she replied. She reached into the pocket of her sweatshirt, and from the corner of his eye, Crick saw her pull out a hard cigarette case. “I assume you don’t mind?”
“Not a bit,” he answered, snagging one out for himself from his own case in the cup holder console between the front seats. “You been with them long?”
“About five years now,” she said, blowing a long streak of smoke out her window. “I used to be with a document destruction company, Shred-n-Go, for about a year. Had to leave, though. Owner moved operations, and tell the truth, he was kind of an asshole to boot.”
“How so?”
“Cheapskate, and pretty nasty with the drivers,” Velis remarked with a shake of her head. “Before that, I was a dispatcher for the Ramsey County Sherriff’s Department. That’s how I got started in the field, right out of high school.” Crick nodded, pulling into the lot of his apartment building, lucking out and spotting an opening right up by the building’s front walk. He slid his car into position, parked, and got out, taking a deep breath. He came around to the front of his car, waiting for Velis to join him, and when she did, they started up the path toward the front of the building. “How long have you been a cook?”
“All in all, close to twenty years,” Crick replied. “I took a year-long break from it about ten years back, did some janitorial work over at the casino.”
“Mystic?”
“Yeah, Mystic Lake. I ended up transferring to their restaurant outlets eventually, going back to the work I’d known for so long,” he said, using his front lobby key to unlock the main entrance interior door. Velis followed close behind, nodding along with Crick to the few other folks they came across as they made their way to his apartment. “Well, this is us,” he said, unlocking his apartment door and leading the way inside, into the uplifting aroma of the food he had meticulously prepared. As he set his keys in the little bowl on the entryway side table, his phone began chiming, the timer alarm going off at the ideal moment. “Starters are ready,” he explained with a smile, scratching the side of his long, hooked nose. “Spinach puffs.”
Velis followed close behind once more as he led the way to his kitchen area, almost colliding with him when he abruptly turned around. “Um, you can hang your sweater over there,” he said, pointing to the three wall hooks just across from the kitchen entryway. Velis pulled the hoodie off over her head and sauntered over to the hooks, hanging it up before taking one of the two seats at his kitchen table. Crick used his oven mitts to pull the sheet of puffs out and set them on top of the stove, put them on the counter, then went over and hung up his own jacket. It took him a moment to appreciate that they had both opted for simple black polo shirts and jeans, since this was a date, yes, but neither seemed prepared to dive in too seriously just yet. He plated up their appetizers and brought them to the table, setting the plates down before ducking back over to his fridge. “I have water, soda, or beer,” he offered.
“I’m not driving,” she answered with a grin. “Beer me.” Crick brought over a bottle of water for himself, and a can of Miller Lite for her, settling down at last across the table from Velis. “So, tell me about your family,” she said, cutting open her first puff to let steam cloud out from it. “Brothers? Sisters? Folks still around?”
“I have one older brother, and my ma,” he replied, cutting open his own puff. “They both still live out in New York. My father passed away a few years back.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks. I’ve already met your sister and brother-in-law, at group,” Crick observed, taking a bite of his puff. Hmm, could’ve used a touch more butter, he mused, chewing and swallowing quickly. “If you don’t mind my asking, why do you live with them instead of on your own?”
“It’s convenient,” she said with a shrug. “Gelta and I bought the house together seven years ago, not long after our own folks passed; car accident, real gruesome wreck. But our father had foresight, had been paying on a good life insurance policy; it ended up paying off their place, their funeral, and left Gelt and me enough money to put a sizable down payment and closing costs on a place of our own. Tenak, well,” she said, her tone souring quickly, her shoulders bunching up. “He’s a convetcha,” she said, snarling the goblin term meaning ‘con-man’ or ‘swindler’. “And I mean that in the most literal sense. He won’t do jack squat to contribute for months and months, and then he’ll run some online scheme here and there, bilk people out of thousands of dollars, then wipe all trace of the underhanded shit he’s done. These are really good, by the way,” she added around a mouthful of puff.
The pair engaged in a little more small talk and ‘getting to know you’ as they ate their main course, soft-shelled burritos that Crick had mastered making through years of minor experimental adjustments, making them ideal for the typical goblin palate. When he had cleared their plates and washed his hands, he checked his phone for the time. “Well, we’ve got plenty good time to head over to the theater and get settled in,” he remarked. Velis rose from her chair, and proceeded to prove to Crick that he had plenty of capacity to be surprised; she kicked off her shoes and pulled her polo shirt off over her head, tossing it on the kitchen table.
“Or, we can skip ahead to the end of the date,” she suggested.
**
“We can catch the movie next Monday,” Velis said as Crick pulled up in front of her and her sister’s house, the cook trying not to smile like the vapid, empty-headed dope he presently felt like. It is incredible, really, the sheer absence of deeper thought that a male of, well, just about any species really, can descend to by dint of purging their system of sperm. “Maybe we’ll start with that next week, yeah?”
“That, um, sounds like a plan,” Crick replied, admiring the goblin woman’s features again. He wondered briefly why it was that goblin females didn’t share the same elongated hook of nose that the males did, but even this musing was but a momentary, curious flit of thought. Velis climbed out of the car, gave him a wave, and practically skipped up the walk to her front door, disappearing inside quickly. Crick lingered for a moment before shaking his head, gathering himself, and heading back toward his apartment.
Billy Thompson sat out in front of the building upon his return, though he didn’t have his usual retinue of teenage flunkies with him this time. As Crick approached the building, Thompson stood up quickly, an unfamiliar look of panic in his features. “Hey, look man, I didn’t do it,” the kid said, which statement, delivered as it was, birthed disquiet in Crick immediately. “I swear, hand to God.” Crick tilted his head to one side, cocking one eyebrow at the teenage hoodlum.
“Didn’t do what,” Crick asked, rummaging in his jacket pocket for his keys. With each step he became slightly more concerned, his recent euphoria vanishing as the Thompson kid kept pace beside him, nervousness radiating off of him in waves.
“You’ll see. I went and told the super about it as soon as I saw it,” said Billy as Crick summoned the elevator in the lobby. “I mean, I know I give you and some of the other folks around here a hard time, you know, about not being humans, but it’s just a gag, you know? I don’t mean anything by it.” Crick clenched his teeth, and as the elevator doors swooshed open to release them onto his floor, he heard muttering coming down the hall from the direction of his unit. As he and Billy walked that way, he spotted the super, Jim Denton, and a couple of other Outworlder residents of the building gathered around his apartment doorway. When he came up alongside them, he felt their eyes boring into him as he looked at what had drawn their attention.
A pack of Trojan brand condoms had been thumb-tacked to the door, and someone had used permanent marker to write underneath it, “Don’t bring anymore of your kind into this world, you little green freaks!” Beneath this, there had been drawn an exaggerated, cartoonish rendition of Crick himself, the nose far too bulbous and hook-drooped than even his own visage. Denton, a middle-aged veteran of the war in Afghanistan, solid, stoic, and dependable, kept a fairly neutral look on his face as Crick turned his attention to him.
“You take pictures already,” Crick asked him evenly.
“I did, Mr. Solomon,” the super replied. “And I believe the kid here when he says he didn’t do it, because he couldn’t have; he only got home maybe ten minutes ago, I could hear his father howling at him for getting detention again. Their unit is right above mine.” Crick accepted this was so, as Denton was not the sort to ever dissemble or misrepresent a situation. “By the way, are you familiar with this,” he asked, pointing to a detail that had escaped Crick’s notice at first, a little ‘H1st’ written just to the left of the pinned pack of condoms. Crick nodded, let out a frustrated sigh.
“’Humanity First’,” he said. “It’s a, group, I guess you could say, of hume supremacists. They’ve picked up some steam the last two or three years.”
“If I find who did this, I will crush them,” snarled Bodrak Cappul, an older minotaur who had been in residence in the building since units first became available. He was a native Caldean, a shaman to a small tribe, and the only one of said tribe who had been brought to this world when the portals did their damage. Crick had spoken with the old-timer a few times, and had always found him amiable, if sometimes inscrutable in his mysticisms; he had never heard the old bull talk like this.
“I appreciate the sentiment, Bo, but I don’t think this is that serious,” Crick said, trying to wave the situation off. “Mr. Denton, can you clean this off?” The war vet waggled a can of some unlabeled solvent and a rag in hand at him wordlessly. “Good. As for this,” the goblin cook said, trying on a wry smile as he snagged the pack of condoms. “I might be making good use of them.”
**
Given the events of the day, Crick Solomon should have just settled in with his book and got some reading done before turning in for the night. A good meal eaten, some appreciable background learned about a potential romantic partner, and the unexpected coitus that she had initiated, all of these things had surely earned the man some rest, hadn’t they? Quite likely, yes. However, every Monday night during a certain portion of the year brought with it a ritual, one that he had partaken in since he was a boy of only seven years of age.
Turning his television to the appropriate station, Crick then made his way back for the bedroom, changing into his ceremonial garb; there were likely about a million other people across the country, hume, goblin, elf, etcetera, who belonged to the same order of practitioners, and who donned similar clothes. They would be joined this evening in group prayer, all beseeching the gods for effectively the same thing.
Crick gave himself a quick once-over in the bathroom mirror, nodded, and headed to the kitchen for a couple of beers and a bag of Doritos, the traditional vittles consumed during this Monday evening. As he returned to the living room, he set one beer on the end table next to the love seat, cracking the tab to open it. “Keeping the faith alive, Pops,” he muttered, tapping his own beer to the one he had set out symbolically for his father. Behind him, the television blared out its program introduction.
“We’re about ready for kickoff here, ladies and gentlemen, as the New York Giants square off in this Week 4 contest against the Dallas Cowboys, on Monday Night Football!” Crick adjusted his old Eli Manning jersey, settled into his armchair, and took a sip of his drink. Despite the vandalism to his apartment door and the possible connotations of its message, Crick thought that it had been one of the best days off he’d had in a while. When the game was over a few hours later, with the Giants eking out a two-point victory over ‘America’s Team’, he thought it couldn’t get much better.
Neat stuff. The fantastic and the realistic sit cheek-by-jowl in your work.