Milk & Croakies

by Sam Cheever

  I watched him carefully, not sure if I was more worried about the shovel-like implement he was using, or the concern he clearly had about the Seer guy.

  I finally decided the unknown and unseen was worse than the shovel, which he seemed only inclined to use to bury my peels. “Who is the Seer and why are you so afraid?”

  He stopped digging and looked at me, his expression filled with astonishment. “You come from space?”

  When I frowned, he pointed toward the sky. “Space?”

  I shook my head. Then I realized I kind of did come from space. “Another dimension, actually. I’m looking for my frie…”

  “Dimension?” He glanced in the direction Slimy and I had come and frowned. “No.”

  Misunderstanding, I hurried to assure him it was true. “No, really. There’s a wrinkle between your dimension and mine. I fell into it and I’m looking for my friends. They also fell through it by accident.”

  He was staring at me as if I’d lost my mind. Clearly, he had no clue about the wrinkle. Which might be good or bad. I tried another tack. “I’m looking for a gray cat. He’d be with a little guy with big ears and big feet. And there’s a goat and a cow too. Have you seen them?”

  He stared at me for another long moment and then turned away, stomping on the dirt he’d covered the peels with. He mopped his brow with a striped cloth he tugged from his back pocket and gave the sky one last look. “Come.” He turned away and started toward the tree line on the far side of the pond.

  “Um…”

  He turned but didn’t stop walking. “Come. I help.”

  He help. Okay. I could live with that. Probably. “I just need to get my frog…” Realizing how that probably sounded, I sighed. My life was a cartoon. And I was the character that the other cartoon characters liked to beat on all the time.

  “Slimy,” I whispered harshly.

  No answer.

  “Slimy, come on. I found somebody to help.”

  Nothing.

  My helper turned around, walking backward as he motioned for me to follow. “Come!”

  I expelled a frustrated breath. “Okay. Stay here. I’m going to check out the lay of the land and come back for you in a little bit.”

  I walked reluctantly away, casting worried glances back toward the pond several times until I stepped into the trees and lost sight of it. Fighting worry, I told myself I was just leaving a frog in a pond. Hardly a dire situation.

  I mean, I wasn’t leaving him in the kitchen of a French restaurant or anything.

  Presumably, his spindly, crooked little legs were safe in the pond.

  As safe as mine were, anyway.

  Following my new friend through the woods, which seemed to be getting darker and creepier by the moment, I considered that Slimy might be the smarter one of the two of us.

  Then the trees suddenly gave way, and the path led out into a vibrantly green strip of open land.

  I looked down on an entire city.

  Two minutes from where I’d spent the night.

  “Don’t tell me I was this close to civilization, and I slept on a bunch of leaves on the ground last night.”

  He grinned. “Welcome to Wilshire Plex.”

  Alrighty then.

  The double suns beat down on us as my new friend and I walked along narrow streets made of sparkling cobblestones in various shades of gray and brown. The streets were spotless as if nobody ever used them, and I saw no vehicles, pack animals, or carrying contrivances of any kind. Which, of course, made me wonder how people got around.

  The buildings were all different heights and shapes, looking like something from outer space. Some tall and rectangular, some short and round, and I even saw one that was like an upside-down triangle. The buildings were all built of stone, but the colors varied from white to orange and even bright green.

  It was a singularly unusual place.

  “My name is Naida,” I told my friend.

  He turned to me in surprise, dropping his glasses low on his nose with a shift of his facial muscles and looking at me over them. “Oh. I’m sorry. Walt.”

  It took me a moment to realize he was giving me his name. “Walt?”

  He nodded and I offered him my hand.

  He stared at it, perplexed.

  After a beat, I pulled it back and wiped it over my jeans with embarrassment. It came away dirtier than before. “Thank you for helping me.” Though I wasn’t sure what exactly he was helping me with. He hadn’t seemed to know anything about Wicked, Hobs, or the farm animals.

  Walt nodded briskly. “The Seer will know about your friends,” he told me.

  “The Seer? I thought we were afraid of him?”

  Walt snorted out a laugh.

  We stopped in front of a tall, narrow building made of some kind of purple stone or brick. Like everything else I’d seen in the current dimension, the stone sparkled slightly, giving off a magical energy that I felt against my skin.

  Walt opened a rounded door with a single narrow window that ran from the top of the door to the bottom. The glass in the door perfectly reflected the nearly cloudless sky, giving nothing away of the building we were about to enter.

  He stepped aside, motioning for me to enter.

  The smell was the first thing to hit me as my eyes slowly adjusted to the dimmer light inside the building. It smelled like mountain streams, green things, and snow. It also smelled like tacos, though I thought that last was probably a figment of my hungry imagination.

  The door closed behind me, shutting off the light, and I blinked. We were still outside. Though it was a far different outside from the one we’d just left.

  We stood on an uneven, rocky surface covered in scrub bushes and bent, stunted trees that hung crookedly as if gravity had taken hold of them at a young age and kept a constant downward pull on them as they matured. The air was cool, sweet, and fresh, and in the distance, which was far more distant than I’d have expected given the size of the building, mountain peaks were painted a pure, unblemished white.

  “What just happened?” I asked my new friend.

  Walt laughed. “The Seer is slightly eccentric. He enjoys living outdoors but prefers to be able to control his environment.”

  “The ultimate control freak, huh?” I stared around in amazement. “It must take a lot of power to do this.”

  Walt shrugged. “Seers are powerful creatures.”

  He moved past me and started along a pathway that wound through the uneven topography of the ground where we walked. I quickly noticed it tracked steadily upward too, the effort of climbing taking its toll on my breathing.

  I really needed to do something about getting in shape. Artifact wrangling was surprisingly more physical than I would have expected. “Where are we going?” I asked Walt.

  He turned and gave me a quick smile but didn’t respond. I noticed he’d taken the funny glasses off, and his eyes were very bright in the low light.

  It seemed like an hour later when I smelled smoke. “Something’s burning.”

  Walt nodded. “The Seer is working. Don’t worry. We’re almost there.”

  He must have heard me panting like a water buffalo in the desert. “Oh really,” I said. “I was just starting to enjoy the walk.”

  Walt chuckled. Apparently, he wasn’t gullible.

  Whistling warthogs! I’d really been hoping to slide that one past him.

  We rounded a large outcropping of rock, coming upon a campfire and a tiny, wizened man sitting cross-legged beside it. He wore black robes with wide sleeves that hung down over his hands and puddled around his crossed legs. The hood covered most of his hair and painted shadows across the bulk of his face.

  In the glow of the fire, I saw part of what looked like a tarnished watch hanging from a leather tie around his neck, the metal stained dark with soot from the fire.

  He didn’t look up as we approached, but sat rocking to a beat inside his head, one hand occasionally flinging some kind of dust into the fire. The dust m
ade the fire flare in a variety of colors, and each time it flared, the Seer would stop rocking, focus his gaze carefully on the smoky bloom of color, and then begin rocking again.

  Walt motioned me toward the fire. He walked alongside me, so close his arm occasionally bumped against mine. We stopped a couple of feet from the fire and waited.

  I had no idea what we were waiting for, but I figured Walt knew. He was the one driving the LaLaLand bus. I was just a tired and filthy passenger.

  Finally, the Seer looked up and I jumped. His eyes were black under a fringe of hair too dark for his heavily lined face. The black encompassed not just the iris’s, but the entire surface of his eyes. “You have come far, young one. You are lost.”

  I certainly couldn’t argue with any of that. “I’m looking for my friends.”

  He nodded. “I have seen them.” The wrinkled old man cocked his head. “The one with pointed ears is chaos personified.”

  Hobs. Relief flared through me “He is. Do you know where they are?”

  “Across the magic land, beneath the dual sky, between your hopes and expectations, and above the fear of their loss.”

  I stared at him for a long moment.

  Walt nodded, seeming to think the old man had actually given us something. “Thank you, great Seer.”

  The tiny, wrinkled man stared at Walt for an extended beat, and then pointed his scary black eyes back down to the fire, throwing a handful of dust into the flames.

  Walt grabbed my arm and led me away, back down the path we’d climbed to see the…erm…Seer.

  “What did that mean?” I asked him.

  Walt shrugged. “I have no idea. Nobody ever understands what the Seer says.”

  Frustration twisted in my chest. I clenched my jaw as anger swept through me. “Then why did we come all the way here?”

  Walt favored me with a quick glance, his gaze sparking with something that might have been humor. “Because every journey starts with the Seer.”

  I bit back an angry response. I’d never been good at riddles. And this one, in particular, didn’t seem to make any sense at all. But I would have to solve it if I had any hope at all of finding my friends.

  Behind me, a soft rumble vibrated the air and I recognized it as laughter.

  Apparently, the Seer was a practical jokester.

  Dang his wrinkled soul.

  It was dark when we came out of the Seer’s home. I couldn’t believe we’d been gone that long, so I asked Walt.

  He glanced up at the sky. “Mid-day aphotic. Come. I’ll get you food.”

  Food! My stomach rumbled hopefully. Then I had a terrible thought. “This isn’t going to be pretend food, is it? Because I’m not sure I can take another practical joke like the Seer and keep from strangling somebody.”

  Walt stopped dead in his tracks and looked at me, wide-eyed and horrified. “Violence? There will be no violence in Plex.”

  I swallowed hard. Oops! “It was just a figure of speech. I wouldn’t really strangle anybody.”

  A woman passing by on the street gasped, her hand rising to her mouth as she gave a little scream and took off running.

  “What?” I yelled after her. “I said I wouldn’t strangle anybody.”

  Several more screams blared through the darkness around me. Walt grabbed my arm, firmly shoving me ahead of him down the street. “Stop talking before you cause a riot,” he whispered harshly.

  Man, Plexians were sensitive souls. I clamped my mouth closed and let him herd me down the street, my mind racing. I was going to have to strike out on my own. Coming with Walt had proven to be a waste of time and energy. I was pretty sure at least one of my two days had passed and I was no closer to finding my friends. My situation was quickly coming down to one of two outcomes, neither one palatable. Either Madeline would run out of time and have to close the wrinkle with me in it, dooming me, Mr. Wicked, Hobs, Bessy, and Adelaide to a lifetime in the strange dimension that housed the Seer and green-haired green-eyed Walt, or I’d have to figure out how to stop the wrinkle so I’d have more time to find my friends.

  Either way, I couldn’t waste any more time in Wilshire Plex. I turned to tell Walt I was leaving. He opened a door and the succulent scent of cooking meat wafted out to tantalize my senses.

  “Come. We will eat. And then you will tell me why you are in Plex.”

  My stomach grumbled violently, and I realized I could wait a tiny bit longer to head out on my own.

  10

  Across the magic land…

  There were just so many of them.

  Walts. Waltettas. Waltines. Walteds. Walterinas. Waltys. Of course, those weren’t really their names, but they looked so much alike it was weird.

  I lost track of the smiles and faces, the helpful hands pushing food at me. I took the food and shoved it in my face, feeling guilty that Mr. Slimy was stuck at that pond, eating bugs and bathing in the sun that I could see through the windows had returned.

  Wait…Okay, no guilt for that.

  Shaking off the silly thought, I tried to understand the conversation swirling around me.

  I gathered from the startling resemblance between them…green hair, dark green eyes, and matching noses and facial structure…that they were all family. There was an older couple, nearly as wizened as the Seer had been. I figured those were Walt’s grandparents. The slightly younger couple was undoubtedly his parents.

  And the dozen or so female and male Walts of assorted sizes, even down to a tiny baby sleeping in a rocking crib near the table, were no doubt his brothers and sisters.

  All I knew for sure was that the food was the best I’d ever eaten and that the conversation was like nothing I’d ever heard before.

  Smiling shyly, Walt handed me the platter filled with skewers of moist, spicy meat.

  “Thanks,” I told him. “Your family is nice. What is that language they’re speaking?”

  He gave me a strange look. “It is our language.”

  “How is it that you speak English?”

  “English?” He shrugged. “I speak what I hear.”

  “But,” I started to say.

  “Would you like some more conchka?” A gentle female voice asked from over my shoulder.

  I looked up in surprise, finding Walt’s mother offering me a plate of the flavorful spherical objects that looked and tasted like potatoes. I nodded eagerly. “I’d love some. They’re delicious.”

  After I’d helped myself to the offered food, I thanked her. I suddenly realized I could understand everyone around the table.

  Walt must have seen the expression on my face because he laughed. “Plexians are hearing learned.”

  When I still didn’t understand, he clarified. “If we hear a language spoken, we can immediately adopt that language. The more we hear it, the better our speech in that language becomes. It’s a useful gift.”

  It would be a very useful gift. “Do you get a lot of different languages passing through Plex?”

  He laughed. “You’d be surprised. Now, please, tell us how you came to be here and what you are looking for.”

  I quickly outlined the wrinkle issue and told them about losing my friends through the shifting barrier. Other than some meaningful glances shared between the elders of the group, they stayed silent, listening to me with rapt attention.

  When I’d finished, I looked at Walt, hoping he’d somehow present a magical fix for my problem.

  He looked at his parents and grandparents. A lively discussion in a language I didn’t recognize ensued. Finally, Walt nodded.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “What are they saying?”

  But Walt wasn’t the one who answered me. It was his grandfather, who truly looked exactly like his grandson, except that his face was covered in deeply etched lines, and his green hair was thinner and peppered with gray. “We have heard of this dimensional shift before.” He frowned, leaning over the table and resting his age-speckled forearms on it. “It is our heritage, I’m afraid. Plex was
created as a buffer between dimensions. It is our lot to manage such a shift.”

  Hope flared in my chest. “Then you know how to fix it?”

  He sighed. “We did, once upon a time. But the Seers who once foretold of the shifts have long since left. We are helpless against them now. We’ve lost many miles and hundreds of good people to the treachery of the dimensions.”

  My heart broke for the people sitting around that long table. They’d lost people. Lots of people to wrinkles like the one I’d come through. My problems suddenly seemed small compared to theirs. “We need to fix this then,” I told them. “We need to find a way.”

  The elder Walts shared looks that told me they’d given up hope. With a sinking feeling in my belly, I realized I was on my own.

  I shoved to my feet. “I need to go. Thank you for the meal. It was wonderful.”

  Walt stood with me, glancing at his parents. They nodded. He reached out and touched my hand. “Wait for me. I’m coming with you. I have an idea of something we can try.”

  Slimy was sunbathing on a flat rock when we arrived back at the pond. He had no explanation for his silence before and I couldn’t help feeling as if he just hadn’t wanted to leave. “The nights are short here,” the frog said, sliding a bulging gaze toward Walt. “There’s more sunlight. I like it.”

  Walt didn’t seem the least surprised by a talking frog. “Sorry to disappoint, but that was just mid-day dark. Darkness falls for full night in about four hours.”

  I could almost hear Slimy’s gears turning. “So, there’s more darkness here?”

  Walt nodded.

  Slimy leaped into the pond and swam toward the edge. “Let’s blow this kickstand.”

  “Um…” I said, giving Walt a rueful grin. “Yeah. Let’s blow the kickstand.”

  Walt didn’t know enough about Earthly colloquialisms to know how badly Slimy had “blown” that one. He simply turned and started walking. “We’ll need to move fast. The border is several hours away by foot. If we hurry, we might make it before fulldark.”