Queen City and Other Dimensions. E.C. Wells
twice, Miss Champagne. Yes, of course the children! Besides, they’re not children. Not really. Never were. Never will be. Throwbacks! Recycled genes. Objects of discordant chaos. Is that possible? Harriet hated me because...well, whatever her reason, misguided as it was, she saw herself fit to drag home from the pit of Hell the Golem and the Golemess! They’re not human. They’re not and that’s the truth! Have you noticed that they don’t age? They’ve been here, what? It feels like they’ve been here forever and they haven’t aged a day. They’re the children of the Lord of the Underworld. And that’s a fact.”
“Really, Max, how you carry on. Tea?”
“Thank you, V, but I must decline. I’m too upset.” Maxfield stood by the doorway looking nervously about. “He isn’t Zeus, you know.”
“Peter?”
“Caligula. He is Caligula convinced he is Zeus.”
“Peter?”
“Lost. Forgot he was playing Caligula when Caligula started playing Zeus. Too much public television, if you ask me. Ah, you should have been there. Nothing like you’ll ever see on PBS, I can tell you that. Drums tom-tomming. The scent of mystery in the steamy night. The sweet taste of conch stew. The sweaty dancers writhing on the soggy soil beneath the banana trees.”
“Soggy soil? Writhing?” V gasped.
“Sweaty dancers? Banana trees?” Lily gasped.
“Public Television?” V and Lily gasped together.
“Ah! The rites of...I need a hat pin!”
“There must be a dozen or more hat pins in the attic in with Cousin Harriet’s old hats,” V offered.
“Yes. Of course. My little miss nasty sister was always big on hats. Maybe she got that from you, or you that from her. Did you know that it was the sizing used to make hats that made the hatters mad? Mercury vapors, an occupational hazard. I suspect Harriet might be the victim of a milliner. Those creatures are locked in the basement; Mad Harriet’s rejects, the children of the damned. They’re not from Earth. You do know that by now, don’t you? I know where they’re from. I’ve been there. I’m from there. Nice place. Except for them.I know you don’t believe me. You don’t happen to have a hat pin, do you?”
“I told you where to find some.”
“I don’t fit on the stairway to the attic, Victoria.”
“You’ve lost everything I’ve let you borrow, Max.” Max scornfully winced, tightened his lips and appeared as if he were holding something back that he badly wanted to say, but couldn’t. “Come and sit down, Max. You’ve been chewing on those roots again, haven’t you? I worry about you, Max. One day you’ll find yourself missing.” V exhaled.
“No. Not at all, Victoria. It’s impossible to find yourself missing. Leaves. Leaves from the Haitian highlands. First you boil them until they make a mush. Then you squeeze it all up into a tight ball. After it’s cool, of course. Then you dig it up after you’ve buried it at least two feet deep for no less than five days, then you unwrap the cheese cloth, pinch off a tiny piece the size of a pea, pop it in your mouth and chew slowly. Those Mexican shrooms don’t come close.”
“One day they’ll come and take you away,” Lily prophesied, while chewing on a candied cherry.
Max sneered, “One day pigs will seed the clouds with excrement and it won’t be right as rain.”
V blindly patted the arm of the Ravenna Bishop’s chair suggesting he sit. Instead, Max continued to stand in the doorway shifting his bearish weight from one foot to the other in a nervous and nerve-racking way. “Zeus refuses.Beelzebub! What I need is a hat pin!”
“Voodoo, Maxfield?”
“Lily, when in Rome carry a cross. In Haiti, a hat pin. Don’t wear one around your neck unless you have it encased. I’ve got to pin down a short-horned migratory locust. There’s a rare hopper for you. They eat everything in sight. Miles and miles of pastures and plains eaten to the bone. Never underestimate the appetite of things that hop.”
Startled, Lily yelped! She hadn’t noticed Max approaching, thinking him still standing in the doorway, when he mistook her finger for a candied cherry as they simultaneously reached for the last one.
“No. You go right ahead, Lily.”
Lily wasted no time and ate the last candy before inquiring, “Maxfield, how many hoppers do you suppose it takes to level a neighbor’s unkempt yard? More than a few hundred?”
“I should say so. Thousands, Lily. There are far worse things than the short-horned migratory locust,” Max magnified his factual, informative, professorial tone, which had the effect of taking his inquisitor aside and into an unuttered sense of commitment to a confidence about to be bestowed, or betrayed; one could never figure which. “Dutch elm disease for one. Caused by a fungus. Devastating. A yellowing of the foliage. Defoliation. Death. I need a hat pin!”
Lily was bothering with something to the side of her chair when she asked, “Must it be a hat pin? Will a long sewing needle do?” Lily was holding a sewing needle extracted from her pink wicker sewing basket given to her by V for Christmas several years earlier. Neither put much stock into Christmas anymore. They celebrated the Winter Solstice for a couple years with two diesel dykes, Peter O’Toole and Billy Butts. And then, traditional commemorations became “too tedious” for V. The sewing basket was a joke gift, but Lily loved it and quickly discovered that she actually did enjoy refurbishing thrift store apparel.
“Of course. Absolutely. Thank you.” Max quickly snatched the needle from Lily, leaving her with V to worry and sort through a quandary of misgivings, not the least of which is how Max disappeared through the bird’s eye maple double doors without disturbing Dionysus.
“One day they will come and take him away. It is inevitable. Mark my words,” V knowingly stated with the benefit of magical thinking and her far-reaching foresight that enabled her to see foregone conclusions.
“Maybe not.”
“Hmm...maybe not. Anyway, where were we?”
Without missing a beat, Lily answered, “Something about your goddamned life and you should know better.”
“Wow,” V exclaimed. “You are good.” Lily smiled. However V pouted, sighed and said, “So much for posterity,” feeling a pity party coming on.
Anxiety, from V’s sense of a wasted life, filled with false starts and half-baked exercises in the profundity of the useless, filled her wasted hours. It must change.
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