anniversary
Katie
knew what she had to do: the red spoon was dirty -- again. Several
gobbets of flesh had escaped their notice. As she scrubbed, a thin,
white hand crept out of the hole in the baseboard. Reaching up, it
make a secret mark on the back of her right calf and withdrew as
silently as it had come. She did not precisely feel this
intrusion, but Katie knew something was wrong. Later she said: "I
felt that the cabinet door was not entirely shut"
Before
everything changed she might have watched a little television. She
knew better, though, and donned her outdoor gear--its bulk obscuring
her worn features moments after she disrobed.
The
stairs were difficult despite the bannister's disappearance the
previous winter but outside the suit hampered her but little as she
cleaned the goblins from the intake ducts. Not the goblins of fairy
tale and Hollywood, perhaps, but the lumpy creatures resembled the
repulsive creatures of legend far more than they did their own
parents.
"Always
trying to get back in," she thought. "It comes of lax
discipline," she added firmly.
The
mark must have been apprehended somehow through the impervious fabric
of the suit. A small creature burst out of the undergrowth where
the hedge had been. She had never seen a live goblin when the sun
was up, and they scarcely ever approached people, despite their
incessant efforts to enter buildings. Flames curled from its ears as
it crumpled at her feet, gabbling at her for a few seconds and pawing
at her feet.
"I
couldn't make out what it was saying," she mused wistfully, "But
I almost thought it called to me."
"Nonsense.
They don't speak. They can't." Willard hoisted himself out of
the hammock and began to lurch back and forth, scissoring his tusks.
"Next time, carry a stick to keep them off." He ruffled
his dorsal plates. "And stop that hole!"
That
night, Katie left a saucer of milk out on the kitchen floor, but
Willard found it and dumped it out before he went to bed with the
others.
Results
of a preliminary investigation of the electrochemical properties of
some organic matrices , Eraserhead Press, 1999
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