“It means you can’t be showing off. The more you try, the harder it is to––”
“LOOK!”
Carlos pointed to the river; his mouth bent in a crooked smile. Ursula took one look and screamed. It was Jerome, though by himself, not overly frightening. I mean, we had gotten used to his less than attractive appearance. What surprised us is what he carried out of the water.
“What the...” Tony put his arm out to ease me back. “Is that what I think it is?”
I pushed his hand down. “I don’t know. Do you think it’s a treklapod?”
“Yes.”
“Then yeah, it’s what you think it is.”
“What’s he doing with it?”
“Why don’t we ask him?” I stepped around Tony and walked up to Jerome, meeting him at the water’s edge. “Hey Peewee.” I nodded at the bug. “Whatcha got there?”
He looked up at me and smiled. “Is treklapod.”
“Yes, I see that. Is he dead?”
He looked at the thirty-pound bug lying upside-down in his arms, its pencil thin legs bent and broken; its rhino horn lobster claw frozen open on top of its head. Jerome held the creature out and shook it, causing its harden-shell body to rattle like dried bamboo sticks. “Is dead. We eat now.”
I laughed. “Eat? Oh, I don’t think so.”
Carlos came up behind us. “Did he say we’re going to eat that thing?”
“Yes! Can you believe it?”
He poked the calcareous creature with his bolo knife. “You know, it does look like a giant crab. I bet you can eat it.”
“Yes!” Jerome said. “Is good eats.” He nodded toward the fire. “I cook now. You see.”
Carlos stepped back and presented an unconstructed path to the pit. “Great. Have at it, mi amigo.”
Jerome waddled back to the fire pit with his toothpick arms stretched around his trophy. Standing at the edge, he twisted his body and heaved it in. It collapsed the wood teepee into a flatbed of burning kindling and began cooking immediately.
Internal juices soon boiled, allowing steam to hiss out through cracks in the bug’s shell. Ursula found the eerie high-pitched screech it made unsettling. I found it disgusting. Carlos found it downright entertaining.
It’s true that when Jerome first pointed to the river and said he was going to get us something to eat, I thought the pigmy pipsqueak was going spear fishing. When he came back with that hideous hairy bug, I thought I might have to yield to the dry heaves. That said, I have to tell you it wasn’t bad.
Carlos suggested the treklapod looked like a crab, and it rather tasted like one, too. Especially the horned claw. The meat inside it was... well, out of this world.
I could tell that Jerome had barbecued one or two of the uncommon delicacies before. His singular expertise in the matter proved it. After the bug’s internal fluids boiled away, Jerome knew to continue basting the shell with water until the meat inside had thoroughly cooked. Barring that, it would have been nothing more than just a mushy pile of muck inside.
He even knew to snap the needle-tipped ends off the bug’s legs and use them as toothpicks. I’m not too proud to say that we all did it.
Later, with our bellies filled, we sat around the fire, talking, some of us leaning against the flat boulders, others sitting on top.
We tried to guess how long we were in the ES, compared to real earth time. Tony put us there two days, Ursula at three. Carlos felt we had been roaming the dark universe for a week or more. I supposed it all depended on how tired one was. I had gone through cycles of exhaustion and exhilaration so many times, I would have agreed with anyone who said it’d been a month.
“You have to count the times we slept,” said Tony. “That’s how you measure relative time. Our bodies know. We bedded down only once before tonight. That’s when Carlos rode that floating rock. Remember?”
Carlos said, “Yes, but that was a week ago.” He was sitting on a purple boulder, picking at it with his bolo knife. “Wish I had that rock now. I could ride it all the way to the Dark Fortress, my feet hurt so badly.”
“A week?” Tony laughed. “Carlos, even by Eighth Sphere standards, it couldn’t have been a week. Before tonight, we had only eaten once. Now I know you can’t go that long between meals.”
“Aye,” Ursula added, “but had we not rested two days at the bridge before crossing?”
“Two days?” Carlos scoffed at that, though he still did not look up from the oddly colored rock he’d been scratching. “Are you delirious? We weren’t at the bridge ten minutes before we crossed it, though it did take a full day to get to the other side, as I recall.”
Tony came back, “A day! You’re both out of your mind. We crossed it in a half-hour!”
“No,” I said. “It was five hours if it was a minute, maybe six.”
We all fell silent as the reality set in. None of us could say for sure how long we were on that bridge, or how long we were in the ES for that matter. It occurred to me that we had all suffered bouts of static skips in memory throughout our journey.
I looked at Tony and Carlos. Both appeared different somehow, as if marked by separate measures of time. Tony’s stubble, for instance, barely had the makings of a five o`clock shadow. Yet Carlos, who had come to the ES clean-shaven, sported the scruff of a week-old beard.
“Carlos?”
He glanced up at me briefly. “Yeah?”
“Did you have that beard this morning?”
“I don’t know. When was this morning?”
I saw Tony looking as though he was just noticing it for the first time. “Yeah, Carlos. When did you grow a beard?”
Carlos reached up and felt his chin. “I don’t know.” He went back to scratching on the rock. “You know us Cubans. We’re a hairy lot.”
“Methinks not,” said Ursula, wagging her finger at Carlos as if supporting Tony’s assertion. “Thou had but naught on thy chin this late morn. I see thee now and know what time doth pass doth pass thrice for thee.”
I said to Ursula. “You think?”
“Aye.”
“Think what?” said Carlos. “What does she think?”
“She thinks we’re all aging differently. It’s hard to say at what rate, but with you, she believes three days to one.”
“Me? She thinks I’m aging three times faster than the rest of you?”
“Aye.” Ursula smiled. “Thou age doth show by the hair of thy chinny chin-chin.”
“Oh, that’s great. I’m the oldest one here and I’m aging three times faster than the rest of you. That’s just great.”
“Chill,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing’s relative here. We’re in a bizarre parallel universe. It doesn’t stack up the same as on Earth. Today you might age three days to our one. Tomorrow you might only age an hour to our day. It’s quasi physics. Don’t sweat it.”
“Quasi suck ass, you mean. What if I get too old to keep up with you guys? Are you going to leave me here?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Tony promised. “That’s not going to happen.”
Carlos went back to scratching on the boulder. “Sure, you say that now.” He swept his hand over his carving and blew away the dust.
“Hey, what are you doing?” I asked.
He looked up briefly. “I’m carving my name into this boulder.”
“The stone is that soft?”
“Yeah. It’s weird though. It’s hard until I start scratching on it. Then it softens up and––”
At once, the bounder crumbled beneath him, cutting short his words and dumping him on his head in a heap of purple sand.
“Whoa!” said Tony, scrambling over to help. “What the hell?”
I think we all broke out laughing, but only after seeing that Carlos was all right. The expression on his face said it all. He looked positively embarrassed, and rightly so with his robe bunched up around his neck. He rolled off the sand pile and onto his hands and knees, inadvertently mooning us in the process.
Ursula gasped and turned away. Tony and I fell over each other laughing. Jerome, apparently having never seen the hind side of a human before, approached Carlos in a cautious crouch for a closer look. He was still edging forward when Carlos stood and turned around, giving Jerome a fleeting glimpse of yet another side of the human male anatomy he had never before seen.
“What?” said Carlos, pulling his robe down to his knees. “What are you looking at?”
Jerome pointed. “Carlos outtie?”
“Yes, of course I’m an outtie. I’m a man.”
Jerome turned to Tony and pointed. “Outtie?”
Tony laughed. “Oh, most definitely.”
He pointed at me. I cut him off before he could open his mouth. “Noo-hoo-buddy,” I said. “I am definitely an innie, you curious little perv, and so is Ursula. So don’t even go there.”
That seemed to confuse him further. He looked down at his crotch. “Innie.”
I nodded. “Yes, we noticed.”
“Jerome girl?”
I turned to Ursula. She was squinting hard at his mid-section, unable, as was I, to make that determination conclusively. I said to Jerome, “Can you have babies?”
He seemed perplexed by the question.
I tried again. “How do you procreate? Do you... you know.” I demonstrated the universal finger poke through the circle gesture with my hands. “Do you have intercourse?”
“What intercourse?”
“Do you make love?”
“Love?”
“Do you make whoopee, roll in the hay, bang boots, screw, lay, fornicate, make nookie, do the wild thing?”
“Jerome not understand.”
“Doth thou fuck?” said Ursula.
“Fuck! Yes. Jerome fuck. All the time fuck. I show you.”
He waddled toward me. I put my hand out and palmed his forehead, knocking his scrawny green ass to the ground.
“DON’T you ever...” I said, pointing my finger like a dagger, “... do that again. You got me, buster?”
He bounced back to his feet as if nothing had happened. “Jerome show you.” He turned to Carlos. “I show friend?”
“Fuck no! What the hell, dude? I’m a dude.”
“Jerome?” He looked up at me. “When you do it, are you generally giving or receiving?”
“Do both,” he said, without hesitating.
“No, I don’t think you understand. See, it can’t be both. If you’re an outtie, you give. If you’re an innie, you receive. You get it?”
“Yes. Jerome get. All the time get it.”
“So which is it?”
“Both.”
“You’re still not listening. What I mean is––”
“Lilith?” Tony held his finger up to stop me.
“What?”
He came over and whispered in my ear. I reeled back, stunned, though I admit now I should have guessed it. “Hermaphrodite? Really?”
He shrugged. “It makes sense.”
“Yeah, I suppose it does.”
“Wait,” said Carlos. “Are you telling me that this little freak is a she-male?”
“This isn’t our world. We’re not here to judge. Besides, there are stranger things to deal with than––”
“Look!” said Ursula, blinking up at flakes of gray dust floated down from the sky like dirty snow. “`Tis that strange dust again.”
“Yeah,” I said, catching some of it in my hand and working it between my finger and thumb. “It’s the same stuff we saw earlier.”
“I still say it’s volcano ash,” said Carlos. “It’s the right consistency.”
Tony scoffed. “No. There’s no silica, and no sulfur smell. This ash is organic.”
Carlos shook his head. “It’s volcanic.”
“No. Organic.”
“Guys! Please.” I turned to Jerome. “All right, munchkin. What is it?”
“Someone go boom,”
“What?”
“Someone step on kumoru. Go boom.”
I looked at Tony. “You’re right. It’s organic.”
“Hold it.” Carlos said, “Is he saying that someone stepped on a kamikaze plant and got blown up?”
“It’s kumoru, and yes. That’s what he’s saying.”
“Vaporized? All that’s left is ash?”
“That’s right.”
I smiled surreptitiously as Carlos, Ursula and even Tony began searching the ground by their feet for the elusive and volatile kumoru plant. I didn’t remind them what Jerome told us earlier about the plant always taking root by a Snitch tree. I didn’t know what a Snitch tree looked like, but that not a single tree of any sort grew on the beach should have told them something.
Later, as the fire died and the drone of falling water wrapped us in its lullaby, the five of us nestled our heads within folded arms and slowly drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Eleven
The following morning, I awoke on the cool sand with Tony lying next to me, his warm body sheltering me from a subtle breeze whispering off the water. I could almost detect a smattering of light, as if the new day actually brought with it a hint of sunrise. Even the air had a crispness about it, the kind only an early dawn could bring.
I rolled over and gazed across the smoldering embers in the fire pit. Tony rolled over onto his other side, bookending me. I might have closed my eyes again and grabbed a few more winks, if I hadn’t noticed Jerome hop-scotching about the campsite. He moved from Carlos to Ursula and then to Tony, patting them down, apparently looking for something.
When he came to me, I closed my eyes and pretended I was still sleeping. I felt his feathered touch along my butt, his wiry little fingers slipping into my back pocket. Finding nothing there, he withdrew his hand and placed it over my belly.
I let out a sigh and I rolled onto my back. His hand stayed there on my belly. After a few seconds, it began moving again. He traced a path up my blouse all the way to the neckline and then proceeded to undo the buttons.
I thought I’d wait for him to grope me so that I could justify grabbing his hand, snapping his fingers off like dried twigs and shoving them up his ass. But the little perv was not into sexual deviance, at least not with humans. He seemed more interested in only one thing: the witch’s key.
I felt him lift the key off my chest and cradle it gently while easing the chain up over my chin. To remove it completely, I knew he would have to lean over me further. Then, just when I felt his foul breath on my face, I opened my eyes.
He froze. Our noses nearly touched. Our eyes locked. I thinned my lips to a serpent’s grin and said, “Good morning, Jerome.”
He swallowed back a lump in his throat. “Hello.”
“Jerome. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t kill you this instant?”
His brow lines formed a perfect arch. “Lilith like Jerome?”
I shook my head. “No, Jerome. At this moment, I do not like you.”
He set the key back down on my chest, gave it a pat and tried easing away. I reached up, grabbed his scrawny neck and squeezed. He couldn’t yell, but managed to let out a high-pitched squeal sufficient to wake Tony.
“What! What is it?” He scrambled to his feet to help me, but I was already standing, holding Jerome up on his tiptoes, his suction cup pads barely making contact with the ground.
“He tried to steal my witch’s key,” I said, still squeezing the little shrimp’s neck.
Carlos and Ursula awoke with a start. They clambered to their feet, and with Tony, formed a semi-circle around Jerome and me.
“Did I hear you say he tried to steal your key?” Carlos asked.
“Yeah. The fucker ran his grimy fingers through my pockets, unbuttoned my shirt and then tried to lift the key from my neck.”
“Well, well. He might have an innie, but he has balls the size of boulders to fuck with you.”
I looked to Carlos and saw him holding back a smile. Apparently, he thought it was a whole lot funnier than I did.
“
And not just me,” I snapped. “He searched you guys, too.”
“All of us?”
“Yes! I saw him.”
“Ooh.” Carlos gathered the folds of his robe at his chest. “I feel so violated.”
“Okay, let’s not overreact,” said Tony. “Lilith, you better put him down. He’s turning blue.”
“That’s nothing, he’s gonna turn dead in a minute.”
“Lilith, please. Let’s hear his side of it.”
“Yeah, Lilith,” said Carlos. “Let’s hear his side of it. Then we’ll kill him.”
I lowered Jerome until all his weight rested on the ground.
Tony put his hand on my arm. “Let go of his neck.”
I relaxed my grip, but did not release him completely.
“Lilith?”
“Tony, the little fucker will run.”
“So he runs. Good. We’ll be rid of him.”
“Fine.”
I let him go. Jerome fell to his knees, reached for his throat and began a coughing fit designed to convince everyone how I had nearly choked him to death.
Of course, I realized his act was a complete put on, played up entirely for the sympathy factor. Carlos wasn’t buying it either. He closed ranks on the spiny-tailed weasel and crowded behind him to prevent any attempts of escaping.
Ursula was another story, however. I could see the anguish on her face, as Jerome continued his ridiculous display of distress. She kept raking her hair back behind her ears and tugging on her earlobes. I grabbed both her wrists and pulled them down.
“Stop it! He’s all right. I didn’t choke him that hard.” I turned to Jerome and slapped him upside the head. “And you stop it, too! Look what you’re doing. You’re frightening the poor girl.”
Jerome stood up and looked at me, though still cowering in a defensive posture designed to convey vulnerability. “Jerome sorry.”
“Sorry for what, scaring Ursula or trying to steal my witch’s key?”
“Jerome sorry both.” He straightened his back, turned to Ursula and extended his hand. “I no choke. Forgive?”
Ursula reached down and accepted it. “Aye, I forgive thee, but this time only. If thou must cry wolf again, be thee warned thy cries shall fall upon deaf ears.”
8 Gone is the Witch Page 14