Call Me Ishmael

Chapter 14

Author's Note: Let your cupboard doors open and faucets drip when it is cold outside. You can buy this book at Amazon, B&N, and at Smashwords for any other device.

I’m sure that in the history of fantastic literature, there have been odder groups than the three of us who set out to save the multiverse that day.  After all, if my father’s theories were right, and I had every reason to believe that they could be, some of those literary heroes wound up existing after all, and really did save Middle-Earth, or Ur, or the whales.  And what they had done, I could do, because I was real and they were only figments of someone’s imagination.  Unless, of course, there was a dimension where I only existed in the mind of an author.

No one was talking to me while we waited for the gears of the universe to mesh, and interdimensional bus to roll around, so I sat and thought.  I took stock of myself, my life, and the last few hours. 

I was thirty-three years, four months old.  I was stuck in a dead-end, thankless job in a small bank owned by a Saudi prince.   Lately, he started requiring the female tellers to wear veils.  At first I had protested, but quickly realized that for some of them it was a distinct improvement.  Things were fine, and life as good as ever, until about two weeks prior to meeting Finnie.  A young woman wearing a veil entered the bank and requested money.  Thinking she was one of the tellers, I emptied my drawer for her.  I was as surprised as everyone was else when she darted from the building, waving the moneybag over her head and laughing.  I was not only reprimanded, I was threatened.  No one likes to hear the words ‘aide and abet,’ so I was in the process of quitting the bank and finding something new.  The economy was sour, and my previous heroics at the convenience store did not help my resume building, either.  The police had questioned me more times than I was comfortable with, and some of their jibes about confessing weren't funny anymore. 

Now, Splice and Bety and I stood on the front porch of a false house in an entirely different universe, and the threat of prison seemed very far away.  Maybe the change I needed could be deeper than just a new place to draw a paycheck.  I leaned on the banister next to Bety. 

He shrugged his shoulders and clapped me on the arm.  “I’m stiffening up something fierce, like a wombat up a clay pipe.  Let’s get some action going.”

Splice sniffed.  “Like what?  Bety, you’re always wanting action, whatever that is.  I’ve never seen you do anything but scratch yourself and wave that ax around.  You're just a braggart.”

“Girl, you need to watch your mouth.  Why, if I didn't have to get home to eat my wife's rabbits tonight, I’d teach you a thing or three about manners, you mouthy pink-headed techie!”

Splice smirked.  “I don’t think you even have a wife.  I’ve never seen her.”

“No wife!  No wife!”  Bety’s voice roared.  “Girl, what do you know of wives and who has one and who doesn’t?  How could you?  She’s the ugliest one from a bunch seven sisters, and the worst cook, but  loves me with all of her heart.  Be thankful you've never seen her; she'd blister your eyes.  So there!”

I ignored them, and watched the horizon. 

I smelled a memory.  The odor was like diesel fumes from an out-of-tune engine.  After my father’s disappearance, I had started kindergarten in a nearby town.  Every morning I trudged to the bottom of a rocky, rutted lane that led to the plywood shack and nowhere else.  The school bus didn’t even try to get up our lane; the first trip cost the school two tires and they gave up.  So  I walked to the road, and unless the leaves were off the trees, I could smell the bus long before I could see it.  Once on the vehicle, the odor was thick enough to touch.  It was a soft, burnt-dinosaur sort of smell that was oddly comforting; riding to school on the bones and melted tallow fat of tyrannosaurus rex.  I guess we mammals showed them who was the boss of this planet.