The concept of the ‘small, tight-knit community’ is one that, outside of the more rural expanses throughout the country, seems to have faded almost into obscurity. We see atavistic depictions of such places in some popular films and television, to be sure, but thanks to the postmodern tendency toward irony, derision and subtle insult, these displays usually end up serving as a strange kind of meta commentary that such places should be shunned, scorned, or left to rot on the vine outside of modern society and culture. Plenty of smaller townships and suburban areas of the state of Minnesota see depictions in shows like “How I Met Your Mother” as such quaint, cozy kind of ‘everybody knows everybody’ kind of places.
But this isn’t really how it is, not exactly. There’s a general sense of what some towns are like, the sort of cultural makeup of any given area’s residents. One of the things that this sort of general patina allows, however, is for locals to recognize with a kind of sixth sense when someone from outside of their community is present, and to view them with a certain amount of caution. Often mistaken for or characterized as xenophobia of some sort, it is often pointed out by evolutionary biologists as part of a collective survival instinct, one that has been with us since mankind dwelled in the wilds of the world in small tribes. Of the very few universal elements shared among all of the sentient, Earth-born or Caldea-born denizens of the world, this defensive awareness was perhaps the most potent. It’s also the one that ended up keeping a minor situation from turning into an outright travesty on that Sunday afternoon, as the state saw its first snow flurries falling, hailing the end of autumn and beginning of winter proper.
Crick sat on a small step stool off to one side of the kitchen, peeling potatoes to be prepped for the next morning’s home fries, his shift only an hour old now, the Vikings-Lions game playing quietly on Cody’s cell phone, propped up on the nearby food prep station. Crick casually listened to the game while performing this simple task, no order tickets coming in to disrupt him. Cody leaned on the station, eyes glued to his tiny screen. “Game shouldn’t be this tight; it’s the friggin’ Lions,” the young man commented.
“There’s always gonna be those one or two games that they shouldn’t lose, but they’ll lose ‘em anyway,” the goblin replied with a grin. “It’s sort of one of those given assumptions, you know? Like the other day, I go into Wal-Mart to pick up a few things, and there’s already aisles of Christmas decorations on the shelves. Now, mind you, we still got six days to Halloween from right now, but they’ve already got this stuff out. And I’m stood there thinking, is our economy so tied to Kris Kringle’s ass that any time old Beardy McSleighBells farts, I gotta smell eggnog and candy canes before we’ve even got through the spooky season? It’s nonsense.”
“Well sure, but, it’s the Lions,” was all Cody could respond with. The two cooks heard the familiar buzz of the door alarm, alerting them that they finally had customers in, and they headed over to the order window. Once again, they spotted the trio of tattooed minotaurs, who had sort of become regulars of theirs. Despite their obvious attitude toward Crick, or maybe just goblins in general, they had been good tippers, and hadn’t caused any trouble for anybody in the café directly. Better still by the goblin cook’s standards, they always got the same thing, meaning that he and Cody were able to set to work preparing their orders before they even had a ticket printed up. A couple of minutes later, and sure enough, the same exact ticket they had seen for this trio printed up once more, and Crick’s world made sense.
In the midst of preparing the minotaurs’ food, however, another short buzz sounded, and he found himself peering over the order window to see a pair of unfamiliar gentlemen, humes of about middle age, dressed in simple jeans and heavy winter coats, cold weather face masks covering their heads and countenances. But such attire rarely covered a person’s eyes, and sometimes, when one is prepared for the first sign of trouble, much can be read in another man’s eyes- these two folks were not here to be prospective customers. They were there to cause a problem.
Even as the first of them started to lift his coat slightly, Crick caught sight of the glint of metal in the man’s waistband, and he reacted out of sheer instinct, shouting “GUN!”, and throwing himself on top of Cody, bearing them both toward the kitchen floor. He heard a woman’s scream (Sasha, the only hostess/server on for most Sunday second shifts), the clattering of furniture, some shouting, and then what was unmistakably the battle roars of minotaurs. He felt Cody’s knee strike him in the gut as the younger hume rolled onto his side and curled up in a protective ball, arms cradling his own head as he lay next to Crick, eyes squeezed tight against whatever was about to happen. The sounds of shouts and things being broken out in the dining area echoed overhead, and in far less time than one usually associates with a melee, there was a queer quiet that settled over the diner.
There had not been a single gunshot. Seconds after lifting his head off the floor, Crick heard one of the minotaurs speaking to Sasha. “You’re gonna want to call the cops, miss. And Brutus? Clint? I think we’re gonna need to call a lawyer.”
**
Crick sat with Sasha on an empty black plastic milk crate out in back of the diner, both of them chain-smoking while chef Taylor, Cody, Shawna and a couple of local volunteers proceeded with cleaning up the dining area. The hostess/waitress had already relayed her account of the incident to both the responding police and the goblin cook, and what he took away from it boiled down to this; the humes had come in, ready to attack everybody in the diner, and when the minotaurs had been audibly alerted to the sight of a weapon from the kitchen, they had all three stood up and thrown their table at the intruders/would-be assailants. From there, things had gotten fuzzy for her, because Sasha had ducked down behind the front counter area after seeing one of those big horned fellows stomp over to a groggily recovering human and punch him in the face with the force of a sledgehammer. She had seen at least two teeth and a goodly amount of blood fly from the fallen hume’s mouth before she ducked for cover.
“They were just so goddamned fast about it,” she said, shaking her head.
“I thought I heard you shout,” Crick commented.
“Yeah, when the table landed on those guys,” she said, exhaling a stream of smoke. She pitched her cigarette and stood up from her own crate/seat, hands on her hips. “I just don’t get it. People don’t hold up little places like this, not on a random Sunday.” Crick didn’t think the humes had been trying to rob the place, himself, but for the moment, he kept his suspicions to himself, mutely nodding.
“I’ll come in to help when I’m done here,” he said, watching her head back in through the rear door just off the kitchen. As he was getting up, his cell phone started buzzing, and he saw on the ID that it was Velis calling him from her personal cell. He picked up and said, “Hey, what’s up?”
“What’s up? Jesus, Crick, I just read a text from Sally at dispatch that there was some kind of dust-up at your work,” she half-snarled at him over the line. “Are you okay? Was anybody hurt?”
“Yeah, the two guys who came in here looking to make trouble. Their timing was pretty bad, some of our regulars took them out with a table.”
“What?”
“Minotaurs. They threw their table at these guys. But everybody else here is just fine, I was about to head back in and help with finishing clean-up. We’re probably gonna end up closing early here because of all of this. You want me to give you a call or text when I get home?”
“Yeah, just text me when you get in all right,” she replied.
“Okay. Well, gotta let you go for now,” he said, hanging up and heading inside. Most of the damage had already been cleaned up, and chef Taylor told Crick and Cody to go ahead and just head home, that he’d talk to the owner about getting them a full day’s pay despite closing up shop early. Crick thanked the elven chef for the favor, and started for his car out in the parking lot. On the drive home, he kept playing the incident over in his mind, wondering what might have happened if those minotaurs had reacted even a couple of seconds slower than they did.
He realized, when he got into his apartment, that he would prefer not to consider that possibility.
**
He had just set his coffee cup down on the kitchen table when the knock came at his front door. “Who in the hell, at this hour,” he muttered to himself, shuffling to the door and undoing the security chain. He blinked mutely at Velis as she stood there, her eyes full of worry despite a fiercely clenched jaw.
“You didn’t text me,” she harumphed, pushing him inside gruffly and slamming his door shut behind herself. “I’m not trying to be that woman here, okay? But I was seriously worried if you were okay,” she said, wrapping him up in an embrace before he could even yet fully process having been shoved stumbling into his own apartment. He put his arms around her, patting her back to reassure her.
“Hey, I’m here, okay? I’m all right, as you can plainly see,” he said. “Just a bit of a scare is all I got.”
“Good,” she said, disengaging but taking hold of his left hand. “That’s good. It’s also a pretty solid reminder that life can be pretty unpredictable, so, let’s make good use of it while we’ve got it,” she added, guiding him back toward his bedroom in a ‘There will be no questions’ manner. When they were done, she draped herself in one of his baggier hooded sweatshirts and a pair of his sweatpants, joining him at the table for coffee and cigarettes. Though she was smiling, she couldn’t seem to help herself from opening conversation with, “You still should have texted me.”
“I should imagine we’re past that now. I am entirely here, in the flesh, all parts and pieces accounted for.”
“Well, except the liquid bits still dripping out of me,” she replied, which got a shocked snicker out of him.
“Jesus, you kiss your mother with that mouth,” he asked, still chuckling.
“Not for a long time, honey. Besides, I have much more entertaining uses for my mouth, as you can attest,” she said, raising her mug to him in a salut. He tapped his own to hers and nodded, striking up another cigarette. “So, any plans for the day?”
“I was thinking I might check in with Libras over at Sam’s, see how he’s coming on studying for his citizenship exam.” When Velis cocked her head to one side at him, Crick launched into a brief explanation of the golem’s curious circumstances. When he was finished, she sat there rubbing her chin, musing silently on the details. “Any initial thoughts?”
“Just one, and it’s not related,” she replied. She got up from the table, once more took his hand, and guided him out of the kitchen. “I seem to have a one-track mind right now,” she said, whipping him around toward the bed and shedding her clothes once again.”
**
“That is a most curious perspective to take, Ms. Ashlock,” the golem said, sitting across the small living room from the goblin couple seated on Sam’s sofa. The golem himself sat in the lizardman’s usual seat, a cozy if brazenly ugly old armchair that had been rescued from a flea market. Sam himself was at the shop, working on a favor-job for another of the support group’s members on his own. Velis had just finished going over her own perspective of Libras’s situation, that it reminded her a little of what she had learned back in high school regarding the freeing of slaves after the American Civil War. Until the conclusion of that war, per her understanding, an entire ethnic bloc of people had been considered property, as less than fully human. When all was said and done, and it was recognized that people could no longer legally be defined as belonging as property to another human being, those freed persons were to be recognized as fully legitimate citizens. “Of course, from what I understand, having read a great deal regarding the history of this nation, it was quite some time until the full implementation of civil rights for those persons was attained. Until the arrival of folks like ourselves, from Caldea, it still was commonplace for humans of differing ethnic and national backgrounds to view one another with derision and scorn,” said the golem.
“Nobody said it was all rainbows and unicorn farts, Libras,” Crick replied. “Besides, plenty of humes still do that to one another. But Velis makes a solid point; there’s precedent, in a way.”
“There is one vital distinction, Mr. Solomon,” Libras said, the front face of his glass-like pyramid head shifting to a dull blue color. “Those persons were human all along, and should never have been considered property. I was constructed specifically to be used as a servant; I only attained full self-awareness and agency after the demise of my creator.” Crick and Velis looked to one another for a moment then, wordlessly consulting with one another.
“So, do you remember much about your, uh, ‘life’, from before your master died,” Crick asked.
“Oh, yes. I remember everything. But I do not attach any emotional impact to my recollections. Emotions are still somewhat new for me, generally speaking.”
“So, if you think back, do you remember your master saying anything about what would happen to you in the event he passed away?”
“Oh, yes. The master was quite clear on this point; on the day of his demise, I was to transfer to the ownership of his eldest child, should he have one. In the event he had no offspring, I was to become my own person, per his instruction and wishes,” said the golem. “In hindsight, I am quite glad that he did this. Would either of you like a refill of your beverage?” Velis was just setting her own empty glass down on the coffee table between the armchair and couch, likely prompting this inquiry, but she just shook her head in the negative. “Very well, then. I must say, I am thankful that you’ve come to inquire after me. Aside from Mr. Coffet, I have yet to make many acquaintances or friends.”
“Well, that seems like something we can rectify,” said Crick. “Matter of fact, we don’t really have much in the way of plans today. Did you maybe want to go see a movie with us later,” he asked.
“Yeah, maybe an evening show,” Velis added quickly.
“This would be most appreciated, yes! I am not certain what is presently in theaters, but I have access to Mr. Coffet’s laptop computer, and can do some research into what is available for viewing. I also have this prepaid phone that Mr. Coffet got me,” he added, pulling a cheap little prepaid phone from the pocket of his trousers, waggling it. He exchanged phone numbers with the goblins briefly, adding that he would message one of them when he had decided what film they should all go see later on in the day. As Crick and Velis got back into his car a few minutes later, the goblin cook looked to his dispatcher girlfriend and cocked an eyebrow at her.
“I assume you wanted to dip out so we could grab lunch,” he said.
“Yeah, sure, but I’m thinking we should work up an appetite first,” she said with a sly little smile.
“You’re really in a mood for it today, aren’t you?”
“Are you complaining?”
“No ma’am,” he said, almost breaking the speed limit for the second time in a week to get to where he was going.