Chapter Five
The next morning at breakfast I was in a much less morose mood. I had slept well, and since Ma Bichette had been expecting me she had more palatable foodstuffs in the house. She made me a pan of sausages and eggs, rolling her eyes at my indulgences as I dug in while she demurely picked at her dry toast.
“Maybe you wouldn’t be such a sourpuss in the morning if you ate something you like,” I commented, while stirring sugar into my coffee.
“I would be quite the sourpuss if I got heavy,” she answered sharply.
“Oh, I think it would be a quite nice change of pace. Perhaps then other men wouldn’t turn their heads to you and I could have you all to myself,” I answered jovially.
She grinned. “Maybe in another hundred years if I ever get tired of looking amazing.”
“Do it now, turn into a pretty little pork stuffed cabbage,” I teased her and cut her off a slice of my breakfast sausage, and then set it on her toast. Ideal lady figures have changed rapidly over the years, but Ma Bichette has always tried to maintain her petite figure. I should say that’s because it makes her much less harmful looking to potential prey, but it’s mostly because she’s terribly vain. Sometimes I wonder how badly she would have dealt with natural aging.
She ate the little slice on toast while staring out the window at her followers as they dredged towards to vineyard. “I have lost control of them,” Ma Bichette said after she finished eating. “What’s the point of having mindless drones if they have their own minds?”
“What happened?”
“I never saw your note. Things don’t just disappear, one of them must have took it.”
I chuckled. “Oh, ma bichette, I don’t think they fear you. That’s no way to treat a goddess. I suppose they didn’t tell you that I had told them to tell you I was going to Kansas either, huh?”
She sighed in irritation. “Nope.”
“Ha. Well then, are you going to bring down the wrath of an angry god upon them?”
“They don’t respect me, they just want to lie with me. Not only that, they can’t even deal with you competing with them for my attention. They are like a bunch of idiot children,” she shortly said. “I should kill all them, that would teach them a lesson.”
“Of course they want to lie with you, ma bichette, I could have told you that. All that Sumerian and Ninsutu claptrap is just window dressing. You probably could have just told them if they work on your plantation they’d have a ten percent chance at you, and they’d accept that as well. They may actually believe you to be divine, but not omniscient, otherwise they wouldn’t have stolen the note now, would they?” How brutally unfair being a woman is, because no matter what you do or say you are usually judged on your fitness as a sexual object.
“I wanted them to think that I was omniscient,” she moaned and tapped her fingers against the table.
I shrugged. “You’re not. I wouldn’t suggest killing all of them though, I don’t think we are likely to get away with that,” I said while peeling an orange with a knife. You wouldn’t believe how dexterous I am with a knife.
“Who did you speak to before you left?” Ma Bichette asked me. “I suppose he’s the one who disposed of the note.”
“How the hell should I know? It’s not like they signed my dance card. There was two of them, actually. They both had beards,” I offered as a vague description.
“They’ve all got beards,” she answered with distaste. Ma Bichette doesn’t care for facial hair on men (I don’t know her opinion on it for women, however) as she says it isn’t pleasant to kiss a man with facial hair. “Could you pick them out if I got you to look at them?”
“Probably.”
She poured herself another cup of coffee. “I am sick of this. Being a goddess or whatever is much more work than I thought it would be. And all for so little reward.”
I smiled to myself. My opportunity to draw her back into my web of mercilessly unconditional love was dawning. “Do you really want to kill them all? Because if you really want to, I’m sure we could arrange something.”
“That will not be necessary. We just need the one for now. Even though they might be total morons, I think even they would wise up if we started butchering them one by one on a strict schedule.”
The day after next was the earliest day we could harvest. Sure, having to take life to continue my own is the worst part of this whole arrangement, but the timing is easily the most annoying. Within three days of the new moon sounds like a generous window of time, but selecting the right victim and then having to harvest in that time frame is…well, it used to be stressful, now it’s just annoying, much like I suppose a woman views her menstrual cycle.
“I will call them to the house in a bit,” Ma Bichette said while gazing out the window at her herd. “You say which one, and we’ll do it in a few days. Until then, let’s do something fun. I hate hanging around this dump and having to babysit.”
I smiled at her lazily. She had something in mind, I could tell. Even though she denied it, her reveal last night had taken a noticeable burden from her. Odd that something so silly culminated in making her so happy. “What do you want to do?”
“Have you ever gone skiing?”
I shook my head. “You?”
“Yes, a few times, in New York and Vermont.” She leaned towards me and kissed me. “See, mon canard, there are still new and fun things to do. You needn’t be so gloomy all the time.”
“I’m not gloomy all the time,” I refuted. “I’m not now.” I kissed her back. “And,” I said after yet another kiss, “you are better at frivolity than I am. I need you to lead me to it.”
“You’ll like skiing,” she promised me.
My Wholly Heartbreaking Heretic Page 8