“Well, that was,” Velis said, lighting a cigarette as the pair headed back toward Crick’s car from the theater. “What’s the word I’m looking for here?”
“’Dreadful’ has a certain ring to it,” Crick offered, letting out his own stream of smoke into the chill evening air. “I mean, is it just me, or did these movies get dumber?” He clambered down into the driver’s seat, buckled up, and started the car, waiting until Velis was buckled in to back out of their parking spot.
“Oh, no, it’s not you, they totally have,” she replied. “So, back to your place?”
“I don’t have anything set up for us to eat,” Crick admitted. “I thought we were just going to the movie.” She gave him an impish grin, reaching over to rub his inner thigh.
“I think we need some better entertainment than what we just watched. Something a little more, interactive.” Though he didn’t exactly break every vehicle/traffic law to get back to his place, the speed limit was pretty well ignored all the way. In the aftermath, as he lay breathing heavily under a thin white thermal blanket, he stared up at the ceiling of his bedroom, feeling pretty good about life in the moment. Velis brought him around to the moment again by asking, “Do you have any beer in the fridge?”
“Yeah, there’s some Miller in there. On the left door,” he replied, watching as she sauntered naked out of his bedroom. While she was out of the room, he slipped into the bathroom, used the toilet, and when he came back, he found her taking a swig as she used her other hand to pull her pants up over her hips. “You can stay the night if you want, you know,” he said, remaining in the doorway between his bedroom and bathroom.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, turning around and setting the beer can up on his nearby dresser, grabbing her bra up off the floor. “I have work in the morning. Um, we don’t have to go right away, if you wanted to hang out.” Crick gave her a gentle smile and shook his head, sensing her hesitation.
“Nah, it’s all right,” he said, pulling on his own boxers and pants. “But maybe one of these times we go out, we don’t end up here,” he said, inclining his head toward the bed. She snickered, pulling on her plain black sweater.
“Where’s the fun in that,” she asked, patting him on the cheek as she walked past him out of the room. “I’ll be by the door,” she called back over her shoulder, leaving Crick somehow both smiling and confused. This woman had not matched his expectations, not from everything he recalled about goblin women from his upbringing. But everyone’s different, he mused. And she’s a couple of years older than me. Maybe she’s going through the same thing I am. The goblin cook got his shirt and hoodie pulled on overhead, slipped into his shoes over by the bedroom door, and led Velis out of his apartment and down to his car.
“So, what time do you get off work tomorrow,” Crick asked as they started off from his parking spot.
“Around 2. My sister’s got a couple of friends from her work coming over to catch the Wild-Avalanche preseason game; you want to come over, watch some hockey with us?”
“Yeah, that sounds good,” Crick said. In truth, he knew very little about the sport, though he wouldn’t necessarily say he didn’t enjoy it. His television viewing habits tended toward the culinary, however, and news programming. Realizing that they had avoided certain topics of conversation altogether, he decided it might be time now, since he’d already slept with her twice, to dip his toe gently into certain sometimes-dangerous waters. “And who knows? Maybe there won’t be a dozen ads for the midterms coming up,” he offered.
“Those drive me crazy,” Velis said, lighting up a cigarette. “I personally can’t wait until the whole thing’s over, and we can just get back to normal television. Every damn time I’m trying to watch Jeopardy, some talking head pops on screen between rounds to talk about why this one or that one is a bad person, and we should vote for the other person, because aren’t they oh-so-much better, you know?”
“True, true. I mean, by this late in the game, most folks have already made up their minds how they’re gonna vote,” Crick commented, carefully avoiding exposing his own positions.
“Especially if they’ve watched any debates,” she replied with a nod. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think this Jensen guy’s made some good points, but did you watch his thing with Walz? It was painful, just Godawful. Guy’s supposed to be a doctor, you’d think he’d be at least a little smarter than he proved out to be there. Which is perfectly okay with me anyhow; doesn’t matter who’s running, I’d be voting ‘blue’ one way or the other.” Crick flicked his spent butt out his window, silently nodding as he pulled up to the curb fronting her and her sister’s place. “So, the puck drops at five, but you can swing over any time after three. I get off at two like I said, but I want some time to get showered and changed and whatnot,” Velis said, leaning over to give him a quick kiss before hopping out of the car. She waved good-bye to him at the door and disappeared inside, leaving Crick to drive home, his vehicle’s interior silent.
In his own head, however, he fumed. He had been enjoying Velis’s company thus far, but she struck him as fundamentally disengaged on a political level, and moreover, had admitted to operating in what he viewed as one of the most irresponsible ways a person could who had any sense of civic duty. The whole ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ thing made him want to howl, just as did the counter valent of ‘Vote Red or You’re Brain-Dead’. The whole concept of ignoring nuance was, to him, completely crazy-making. He would have preferred she have no opinion at all, because at least then she would be less likely to be inadvertently making things worse societally by her actions at the ballot box.
Still, this is already shaping up to be a pretty good week, he thought as he rode up the elevator in his building to his floor. Bad movie and great sex on Monday, hanging out and catching a game on Tuesday, group meeting on Wednesday. Not a bad hat trick if I say so myself. Even as he thought this, however, another musing came rushing up along its tracks- So when’s the other shoe drop?
**
Sometimes, morning is a wonderful companion, one who gently prods you awake with a soft nudge on the arm, bringing you the subtle, irresistible aroma of freshly brewed coffee in the clock-programmable coffeemaker. It asks how you slept, smiles at you, and makes no mention of what is quite possibly the worst state your breath will be in all day, because it appreciates you and wants you to feel good about being up for the long stretch that will be known as your day.
Other mornings are a derelict transient that bring you awake by hurling you out of your bed thanks to a muscle spasm and proceed to scream obscenities down at you as you try to rub the cramp out, interspersing the cuss words with obscure threats about beating you to death with a fishing rod while it smears expired peanut butter on its bare chest. Such was Tuesday morning for Crick, who tried his level best to dig into the involuntarily tightening muscles in his left calf and thigh while he groaned on his bedroom floor. There was no blissful scent of coffee brewing; he’d forgotten to prep it the night before. As he stood by the kitchen counter, holding down the button on his bean grinder, he thanked whatever God watched over Earth for at least giving him the good sense to not have any pets to have to see to first thing in the day.
These kind of starts to a day tended to be omens, in Crick’s view. His mother and father had both displayed a fair amount of superstitious behavior as he and his brother grew up, and he had inherited a streak of that queer ill-logic himself. With the leg cramp still fresh in mind, he was not at all surprised to find himself accidentally putting too much creamer in his mug a few minutes later. Likewise, when the small plastic bowl in which he kept his sugar for his coffee tipped over, spilling granules all over the black countertop, he just let out a long-suffering sigh, scooping up the small pile and saying a brief blessing in his parents’ native tongue as he tossed it over his left shoulder. Into the narrow pantry he reached, pulling out his broom and dustpan to clean up the spill that he had essentially transferred from counter to floor, scraping out the pan into his garbage.
Taking the full bag down to the back of the building, where three dumpsters were arranged for residents’ usage, he continued to be less-than-shocked when, in mid-throw, the bag ripped on him, spraying his residential refuse all over the front of the container. Hanging his head, he shuffle-walked over to the side of the dumpster, where a bright yellow snow shovel was propped. Using this, he scooped the rest of his spilled garbage up into the side port of the dumpster before heading back up to his apartment.
“Okay, God,” he muttered to himself as he strode back into his apartment. “What’s the next surprise?” After two cups of coffee and a small breakfast, the goblin cook started to relax a little, thinking that perhaps The Big Guy hadn’t heard him, and that he would be free to go about the rest of a decent day. That was, at least, until he hopped in the shower, and the showerhead came rocketing off of its mount to crash into his forehead. “Motherfucker,” he shouted, rubbing his throbbing head as water continued to spray down on him as if from a garden hose, the distribution of the attachment vanished now that it had come undone. Crick did all that he knew to do for the moment, manually turning down the water pressure with the knobs and finishing up a quick cleanse before getting toweled off, dressed, and calling the super.
“That’s a hell of a goonie you’re gonna have,” the super said to him as he applied plumber’s putty around the joint half an hour later, indicating the swollen mark on Crick’s forehead. “This is the fourth one of these calls I’ve had this week, you know. Ever since we had the central pipes all cleaned out, pressure’s been really high, which is good, but has its drawbacks, as you’ve now felt first-hand.” Crick thanked the super for coming to fix the problem so quickly, then saw the man out and headed to his living room, pulling up his laptop and opening up the official website of the National Hockey League. He didn’t want to be too far out of his element at Velis’s that afternoon/evening, and he thought that maybe getting brushed up on league news might help keep him at least marginally capable of hanging in any conversation that might come up.
As he read up about trades and prognostications about how the season would go for various teams and why, Crick hoped that he would be able to at least retain some small amount of all of this otherwise useless information.
**
“That might be going a step too far,” Crick muttered to himself, putting the Minnesota Wild jersey-style shirt back on the rack, then pushing his cart along the tiled floor. Target didn’t have, for him, the same impulse-buy draw that he found himself falling victim to so frequently whenever he went to Wal-Mart over in Shakopee. He had come here to pick up a few essentials for home, and nothing more; indulging in unnecessary purchases was not his way, and this momentary consideration had been born more out of a desire to further ingratiate himself with Velis than any genuine support or rah-rah for the local pro hockey team. He possessed enough self-awareness to not only recognize this, but to write off the impulse as a bad idea. Velis would likely see through it, and that wouldn’t be marked in his favor.
Rolling along, Crick made his way to the department store’s kitchen and cleaning supply aisles, grabbing himself a fresh pack of dish scrubbies and dishwasher pods, tossing them into the cart without much thought. The latest episode of “From Other Lands” played in his earbud, a podcast hosted by a quartet of unlikely friends- a minotaur, an elf, a hobgoblin and a lizardman, all natives of Caldea who had once been members of some sort of guild back in their homeworld. Their show centered on comparing and contrasting their civilian lives since arriving on Earth from their world, and how much different things seemed to be even now than when they had first been ripped from that realm. Every now and then, they would bring on a guest or two from the native-born offspring of their generation, and ask myriad questions about their own life experiences, and how they differed from the hosts’ own.
Crick had been introduced to the show by Eddie at group, and was now a regular listener. He usually liked to have full access to his environmental perceptions, but when out running simple errands like this, he didn’t mind the loss of some of his ‘in the moment’ hearing to listen to the show. As he made his way back toward the other end of the store, ducking into the aisle hosting light bulbs to pick up a small pack of replacements, he paused to listen to a point that much intrigued him. The elven host, Sinet Tomarak, had snorted derisively at some remark made by Puk Honar, their young half-elf guest on the episode, and himself a highly regarded political commentator and writer for the Star Tribune. Puk had just finished observing that the current state of the American economy could be traced all the way back to the nation’s move off of the ‘Gold Standard’.
“Do you disagree, Sinet,” Honar asked.
“Well, not in principle, I suppose, no,” the older elf gentleman replied, taking a moment to clear his throat. “I just find the whole human fascination with gold to be absurd. It’s always been absurd to me, at least. I mean, I remember, back when I was maybe a hundred, hundred-and-five, somewhere in that range, when the Kingdom of Endemere had to start shipping that stuff out of their country in wagonloads after Lake Bontras was magically transmogrified from pure water into tons and tons of gold nuggets. It crashed the value of the metal throughout almost every realm! With maybe the exception of Krenthorn, but greenskins have seldom been ostentatious folk, so their lack of interest in free gold didn’t really surprise anybody.”
“Now wait a minute, that’s sort of a sweeping generalization,” Honar sputtered. “You can’t really say things like that nowadays.”
“Why not? It’s true,” replied Grum Goffah, the hobgoblin on the show’s panel of native Caldeans. “Goblins, kobolds, orcs, my people, we’ve none of us ever been flashy people. Gold is pretty, sure, but it is not steel. Steel is good. Steel is sharp,” he grunted, his voice rumbling in Crick’s ear. In a strange way, he felt a sort of kinship with the older hobgoblin.
“Speaking of steel, perhaps, Honar, you could tell us a little about the current rate hike on steel imports from China, and how that’s presently affecting the market,” put in Mankesh, the show’s minotaur contributor. The hosts and their guest went back and forth on this for a little while, and as Crick wheeled his purchases out to his car in the gray, dour late autumn morning, he wondered how it was that a native-born Earthling like himself could get so wrapped up in the stories and conversations of people who had come before him from another world altogether.
Perhaps because there’s a natural pull toward one’s heritage, he mused as he headed back to his place.
**
“Oh, good, you remembered,” Velis said as she took the bags of chips out of Crick’s hands, then motioned for him to follow her into the house. She was, herself, wearing an old-fashioned Minnesota North Stars hoodie, and he once again thanked his self-control for not purchasing the jersey shirt while at Target earlier, and instead opting for a simple pair of jeans and a plain dark blue sweater. He caught just a hint of some sort of fruity perfume on her, a pleasant and subtle aroma, and he halted as she stopped and pointed to the left side of the front entryway, where shoes had been gathered in a haphazard pile. “My sister’s a little neurotic about shoes in the house.”
Crick kicked off his shoes with no complaint, though he took a moment to look at the assorted footwear. There appeared to be more pairs than people that he was expecting to be around for this evening’s gathering. The entryway opened only a couple of feet later out into a wide-open den area, dominated along one wall by an enormous 75” television, which was already tuned to the pre-game show, and two sectional couches arranged around a large circular glass-topped coffee table. Immediately he spotted Velis’s sister and brother-in-law on one couch, and on the other, a pair of human gentlemen whom he didn’t know at all.
Both humes were still wearing their Scott County Sherriff’s Department uniforms, and they looked back at him and gave silent nods and raised their beers in salutations. “Buddies of yours from work,” Crick asked her, returning their nods.
“Yeah, Dale and Chuck,” Velis said, leading him on forward and slightly to the right, into an open kitchen area that had a bright tile flooring and a visible chaos that put the orderly cook in Crick’s head into a near-panic. She headed to the fridge, grabbed a couple of beers, and then turned and handed them right to him, along with a peck on his cheek. “Come on, puck’s gonna drop any time now,” she said. Crick followed her, glad to have the sight of the kitchen counters’ general disarray out of sight, and they took up the remainder of the couch her coworkers sat on, with Velis squeezing herself comfortably between one of the humes and the goblin cook. She handed Crick one of the two bottles she had plucked from the fridge, and as he popped it open, the roar of the Wild home crowd filled the room from two large speakers arranged on mounts in the corners of the room. The ref dropped the puck, and the game was on in earnest.
They were a few minutes into the game when Crick asked Velis where the bathroom was. “Right down at the end of the hall,” she replied, pointing off to the far end of the living room. Crick worked his way to his feet and headed down that way, slow-walking past what he assumed was her room, taking a chance to glance inside. Though he didn’t get much of a look, he took some mild comfort from spotting a tall gray laundry hamper beside her narrow bed, which, though looking pretty full, at least spoke to a sense of order that he appreciated. Moreover, the goblin woman’s bed was made, nice and tidy. The look of it fostered an idea of orderliness that he found assuring.
Flicking on the bathroom light switch and shutting the door behind him, however, brought him face-to-face with the fact that Velis shared this house with two other people. A veritable hill of discarded articles of clothing lay in a heap beside the tub, and the sink, dead ahead of him, looked like someone had assembled a pile of tubes of toothpaste, mouthwash and shaving cream on the porcelain, and proceeded to whack them with a mallet. The air smelled minty fresh, sure, but the look of streaks of what he hoped was flotsam from wetting the brushes stood out along both sink and nearby wall as a grim accounting of what went on in here.
As he used the facilities, the gift of peripheral vision exposed its capacity for being a curse as well, as Crick caught sight of a used condom sitting in the small round trash can wedged between toilet and sink. He cringed, finished up, washed his hands, and darted out of the washroom in a daze. When he got back to the living room, either Chuck or Dale had moved over to the other couch with Gelta and Telok, thus giving Crick and Velis more room to sit together properly. She patted the seat next to herself, and when Crick settled back in beside her, she handed him back his beer.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Not a problem. Sweetie, you wanna grab me those Doritos,” she asked. Crick leaned forward and grabbed the bag, handing them to her. Though the game was far more frenetic than the sport he usually indulged in (football), Crick actually caught himself getting swept up in the atmosphere of the game. There were even a couple of moments where he and Telok ended up sucking air between clenched teeth at the same time on near-goal shots.
During the first intermission between the first and second periods of the game, Velis guided Crick up off the couch and gave her sister Gelta a quick nod. “You mind if I give him the abbreviated tour,” she asked.
“Sure. And hey, grab us a couple more beers on the way back through,” Gelta said, not bothering to look up. Dale scooted by Crick and Velis on his way back toward the bathroom, quickly clapping himself in and audibly locking the door behind himself. Velis led Crick back to her bedroom doorway, stepping through and to the right.
“I know, it’s a little on the ‘empty’ side, décor-wise,” she said as he stepped in. Now that he was properly in the room in full, rather than glancing as he walked by, Crick recognized the bottle of lotion on the stout dresser against the left wall, the source of the scent he’d caught on her earlier. “But, it serves its purpose,” she added, and Crick heard the unmistakable ‘click’ of another lock being engaged. He turned around just in time for her to use both hands to shove him back toward her bed, which he flopped onto thanks to the backs of his knees connecting with the edge of the mattress.
Though taken aback, he didn’t argue matters as she slid his pants off. Why argue when something excellent is happening?