NOVEL NEXT Chapter 9: Breakfast sans bed
Do you ever get tired of your own thoughts and the words in your head?
It’s Thursday, day six of my actual life, the life I’m finally living, and the Kims have opened the shop again. But Jill is hanging out in the lobby, and Nathan is helping the delivery man carry the coffee shipment into the back.
Nathan is a graying, bearded man with a gruff cheerfulness that’s delightful and friendly, and I love him. He’s almost like a human dragon himself, but not a threat to my territory. And, even though he’s nearly six feet tall, he looks like a dwarf in one of the shop aprons, which are all hand sewn by one of the owners. He usually picks a brown and orange one with a floral pattern and black frills. It goes pretty well with his Spanish moss green button down shirt, khaki cargo shorts, and brown Keen Austins today.
Nobody is talking to me. But they are all talking to each other, and that suits me just fine. Though I can’t really hear what’s being said inside the shop. I get snippets of conversation when Nathan or the delivery guy go through the door.
Kimberly’s given me her tablet, and I’m occupied with the now lengthy and tedious task of making it mine.
I can’t remember my cell account information, and I’m not sure this device is compatible with it anyway. In order to try, I’d have to get back into my apartment and look for the original paperwork, which I’m not even sure I can manipulate well enough to keep it legible. Or open the locked door somehow and get someone like Rhoda to do it for me. That means finding my keys.
Doable.
But, in the meantime, I do have the shop’s wifi code. The tablet is already set up with it, but Kimberly gave me a slip of paper and weighted it down with an empty coffee cup, when she delivered my morning joe.
My stomach is full of a couple of awful seagulls, though. I feel like the process of getting them in there should have left me more disturbed by it than I am. They were alive recently, but not when I swallowed them. But I didn’t cook them and I didn’t pluck them. And coffee just doesn’t sound appetizing yet.
I’ve just got the AAC app set up again, and am now examining my deeply singed and questionable purse, when someone vaguely memorable walks up to my table with fists on his hips. There’s an envelope in his right hand, flapping in the morning breeze.
“This isn’t working,” he says to me. “We’ll box up your belongings and deliver them to an address you supply. But you cannot re-enter your apartment. Furthermore, we can’t have you on the premises anymore. [Deadname], you are being evicted.”
I sit up so that my head is slightly above his, and turn my gaze to face him, without saying anything or making a noise. I just study him.
This is Dave. He works with the property management. One of my landlords.
He takes a step back, blinking a couple times, and then holds out the envelope for me to take it somehow.
I look at the envelope, but do nothing else.
“Meghan? Is this man bothering you?” Nathan asks from the other side of my table, where he’s standing now, arms folded across his chest.
“Yes,” I say with my new tablet. Easy and quick. I don’t even change my focus from the envelope.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Nathan says with obviously great relish. “The lady here has expressed she has no business with you.”
Dave blinks at him, appears to stammer without making any noise, and then says, “I’m just doing my job and serving this… individual… an eviction notice as required by law.”
“I think not,” Rhoda says from behind me, well within my peripheral vision.
I did see her coming up, but had only shifted my focus to Dave’s face.
“What?” Dave says.
“If you evict this dragon, Dave,” Rhoda says. “Another will just take her place. And I don’t think you want any of the alternatives. She’s keeping the riffraff out. And I know. I’ve seen one of them.”
Nathan takes a determined step toward Dave, moving to crowd him off the sidewalk, or further down it.
But Dave stands his ground and raises his voice. “This… dragon’s former apartment must be repaired, and that hole properly shored up and patched, or this whole building will be condemned. Including this coffee shop. Do you all want that?”
“You can give her another apartment, or the roof, if she can’t stay in that one while you fix it,” Rhoda says. “I don’t know what law you’re referring to that requires an eviction. She’s not the one that damaged the building.”
Dave addresses her, “With the kind of racket it’s been making, we can’t have it –”
“Sir,” Nathan snaps, stepping up until he’s pushing against Dave’s arm with his crossed forearms.
“What?”
“You will address the lady properly,” Nathan insists. “Her pronoun is she/her.”
Dave glances at me, and I yawn. There may be seagull meat or feathers between my teeth. My breath probably doesn’t smell great. Then I give him a sarcastic cat smile.
“Well,” Dave says, swallowing. “She… cannot reside in that apartment while it’s being repaired. And we do not have any vacancies. And the roof is not a suitable living area. For one, there is no running water there. And… And we cannot have the noise that she is making. There are people trying to sleep at all hours.”
Both Nathan and Rhoda open their mouths as I raise a knuckle to my new hand-me-down tablet, but Dave raises a finger and clears his throat.
“It’s out of my
hands, anyway,” he says firmly. “It’s not my decision. I’m just the messenger.”My knuckle hits the tablet screen, “No.”
Completely flustered, Dave asks, “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I believe she means that you can’t make her,” Nathan explains.
“Well, normally she’d have thirty days to vacate the premises, but construction must start today,” Dave replies. “She cannot be allowed to return to her apartment. Otherwise, management’s next step is to call animal control.”
Oh, there it is.
I laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh, and it sounds like a WWF wrestler banging a couple of wooden blocks together as hard as possible.
Then I start bobbing my head, punctuating it occasionally with an upward head jerk.
Eyes wide, Dave backs off, leaning forward only to toss the eviction envelope onto the table, and then hurries back down the street toward the apartments’ lobby door. Slows down halfway there and straightens himself out, huffing and stomping his feet as he goes, working his shoulders and trying to take up as much space as possible. But he does not look back.
Oh, I want to chase him down so bad.
But, I am a civilized dragon, and I do not.
I do one more head bob as Nathan and Rhoda watch me, then I turn to my tablet and type something out, while they wait patiently.
“This not work,” I say. “None of it work.”
Dammit, this app doesn’t work on the cloud and I need to rebuild my saved phrases. Not that I had that many.
Rhoda heaves a big sigh and moves around the table to sit opposite me, while Nathan relaxes his arms and steps back out of her way. Then, while she’s sitting down, he goes to get his own chair to come over and sit in it.
I’m already typing out more to say, but Rhoda speaks before I’m done.
“Chapman and I spent a lot of time in the library yesterday, and I think we may have found some good candidate lairs for you, Meg,” she says. “I know you don’t want to move from here. I can tell. But –”
“I am not leaving,” I say. “This building is mine.” Then I look pointedly at her, then knuckle in two more words to remind her. “You say.”
She said it herself to Dave.
She leans back in her chair and exhales through her nose.
Nathan makes a humming noise, as if he’s about to say something, then leans forward a little and looks like he’s chewing on his words while he squints at the eviction envelope. There’s presumably a letter in there.
“I’ve done property management,” he says, after a bit. “Unfortunately, they are legally within their rights to serve this to you. I don’t like it, but it is a fact. I don’t think we can fight it legally.”
“I do wonder if you can hang out on the roof anyway. Are you an animal in the eyes of the law or a person?” Rhoda asks. “But your stuff needs a home.”
“I worry they’ll declare her an unsanitary infestation,” Nathan says. “But, I’ve got a garage we can put her stuff in.” He looks at me, “Animal or person, you’re family.”
I have emotions. They’re all in me. And the two of them wait for me to say my piece.
“I fight dragons and win,” I say. “I mark my space. If I leave, other dragons fight here. Things get worse. You are family. I protect you.” Then I huff and try my cool coffee. It’s getting to be a hot day, and coffee that’s not exactly hot seems fine.
I can’t exactly feel the heat of the day, but I see it. I think it needs to get a lot hotter before my body notices in a way I’ll recognize it. But my mouth is more sensitive, despite what it can do, and cooler liquid is desirable right now.
“There’s a… Meg,” Rhoda says. “There’s a… right…”
“I’ve got it,” Nathan says, and leans forward and plucks a small seagull feather out from the corner of my mouth, and then turns it in his fingers to examine it in the sun. “Did you eat a seagull?”
I stop drinking just long enough to hit the numeral, “Two.”
“That must have been some breakfast.”
“I’m glad I didn’t see, or hear, you do that,” Rhoda says.
And then we spend the next half hour or so of the morning just enjoying each other’s presence and maybe thinking about things. Except me. I’m doing my best to not think.
I’m not great at not thinking, but I find that if I focus on the fact that this is my coffee and these are my friends, my mind doesn’t bother wandering over much else.
“So, Meg,” Nathan says, after a bit. “I haven’t seen you since before, you know. Kimmy told me your name and pronouns, even. What’s it like?”
I consider this question. I want to tell everyone all about it, really. There’s so much to say.
“Hard to talk,” I say. “Many thinking. AAC not easy. Slow.”
“Ah, I imagine so,” he says. “Take your time. I’m off shift now.”
I take my time with my next sentence, spelling it out, “No, this is part of it.”
“Ah, yeah.”
“You’re getting pretty good with those knuckles there, though,” Rhoda observes. “I wonder what you could do with an oversized keyboard on a laptop.” She looks at Nathan, “Do they make those?”
“It wouldn’t help much here. Kind of clunky,” he says. “But let me do a search.” And he leans further forward to fish his phone out of his back pocket, so he can do some screen shopping. He gets results pretty quick. “Oh, here’s one! And it’s called a Redragon. Woah, it’s expensive, though. Gaming keyboard. Twenty-eight inches across, though. That’s about this big.” He holds his hands apart, his phone in one of them, displaying an image of the keyboard.
“Let’s get her that,” Rhoda says. “She really does need to write up her experiences. All of them, if possible. The world needs to hear from the dragons, I think. It’s early in all this, but I can tell. It’s going to be critical.”
“Hmm,” Nathan considers it. “I’ll talk to the bosses. I think she could use the backroom as an office when they’re not doing management stuff there. And I’ve got an old desktop that can do LibreOffice and probably run this keyboard.”
“That, I think, would be perfect,” Rhoda says.
I begin typing again, and they wait.
“My brain is home now,” I say. “My body is home now. I have friends now. Seagulls taste like shit.”
Both of them laugh, and Nathan says, “Then don’t eat them!”
I patiently say, “Then eat what? Hungry for seagulls.”
“Well,” Nathan suggests. “If you’re not going to pay rent anymore, what if you use all your money on steaks?”
I tilt my head.
“Here. I’ll do the math,” he says. “You get, what, something like $640 a month, I imagine?”
I lift my head in affirmative. It’s close enough.
“Alright. If you’re eating seagulls, and you just want as many calories as possible, let’s go with the cheapest steak from the most reputable store. Don’t want to get sick,” he says as he types into his phone, looks at the screen for a bit, and then switches apps again. “Well, OK, with ground chuck, you could buy about 95 pounds of meat a month. And that’s…” he scowls at his phone. “3.1 pounds of meat a day.” He looks at me. “A hamburger is a quarter to a third a pound of meat, usually. Though I make half pounders sometimes. I honestly don’t know if that’s enough for you though. Or if you need variety.”
I consider this.
“But it’s gotta be more efficient and easier to eat than hunting down seagulls,” he says.
“I want hunt,” I reply, after another moment of thought.
He quirks an eyebrow and smirks, saying, “I could tie a steak to the back of my truck and drive down the street for you.”
I give a light knocking noise and bob my head a couple of times, then tilt my head sideways away from him.
“It’s amazing,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “You are at once totally different now, but also really just more you. I recognize you, Meg. I see you. And if you don’t mind me saying, you are beautiful. I don’t know if I understand all of your expressions and gestures, but I feel comfortable and calm around you, more so than ever before.”
“And that is what I think everyone should know,” Rhoda says.
“I agree,” Nathan concurs.
“Let’s get that keyboard.”
“Yeah.”
We spend the rest of the morning talking about lighter things, with me taking time to program my AAC with useful phrases while listening to them share stories about neighbors and tenants, or customers at the coffee shop. And for a little bit, I demonstrate my ability to imitate various sounds, and try to learn a couple new ones. I can do a really good seagull and a crow. And then that gets me on to the subject of my neighboring dragons. And I share the names I’ve made up for them:
Loreena
Waits
Poink
Theremin
Chickadee
Godzilla
Wilhelm the Screamer
Weedle
Turbolaser
Lumberjack
Cricket
and
Caterwaul
All names that describe the sounds that they make, to me. I know they’ve actually got their own names, and maybe if they start updating their own blogs I might learn them. I don’t think we’ll be having face to face conversations, though.
I do wonder what they all call me.
And it’s right about that point, just after noon, that Chapman comes walking down the street on hir lunch break, and Kim gets off her shift and comes outside.
The sight of Chapman reminds me of something I don’t think I’ve told anybody yet. Maybe I told Rhoda, but I don’t remember, and I feel like bragging to Chapman.
When the other two join us, standing briefly in the empty-ish spots around the table, I say, “I can breathe fire.”
“What,” Kim says.
Chapman lights up.
Nathan raises his eyebrows.
And Rhoda says, “I think I’ve gotta check the news again.”