Survivors

Chapter Five - Dinner with a Stranger

Chapter Five: Dinner with a stranger

Elizabeth

I was stuck with her. The girl with the frog perched on her shoulder like it was a pretty parrot. More like a deranged parrot with a very bad feather condition. It was an ugly thing, with bulging eyes that I believed were glaring at me. I had been thankful on the occasions when her dark hair covered the sickly green, lumpy body of the creature. You’d think if given a choice, she would have a different travelling companion.

A feeling of dread fell like an enormous sack of concrete bricks upon my shoulders, heavy, abrupt and completely unexpected. Well who watches out for bags of bricks? What if she believes that I was her new “friend”? She even said so herself, though I had been accustomed to sarcasm earlier on in life and knew that it was laced with the implications, I couldn’t help to see a forewarning of some sort. That I wasn’t going to lose her any time soon.

She really can’t expect me to be her friend though! She swooped in and tried to take the last can of soup, which was and is rightfully mine, threatened me with a dagger, laughed at my slingshot (really, I don’t see what is so funny about it, it can be deadly, has she not heard the story of David and Goliath?), and then laughed further when I slipped on the jam, which was now all over me and it really smelt horrible.

Yet, the way her eyes had glimmered lead me to think that maybe her level of sanity was low enough to believe that we are ‘friends’. Normally, I would have interpreted it as a cheeky, lively glint, but with the circumstances and the fact that I had no idea who she was, it came across as psychotic.

The only way I had managed to get her to allow me to leave was by agreeing with her ‘proposition’, which was completely unfair and was only going to benefit her.

And now she was standing behind me, waiting. Waiting for me to lose the can of precious soup so she could get her mitts on it. It wasn’t going to happen any time soon, I planned on keeping this soup and tucked it safely into my front jean pockets.

Since it was only evening and the sun had possibly an hour or more left to torture the world, I turned to look at her. “So shall we walk a bit before we…share…the soup?” I asked, the word ‘share’ I had to force through my mouth but thankfully the rest of my words were also hoarse so it was too obvious.

“What do you think Flynn?” she asked the frog, glancing at it. I raised my eyebrows at her, though she wasn’t paying attention to me, too busy consulting her frog. The blob of green glared at me and then let out a low sound. I couldn’t hear it but it was among the lines of a croak and honestly I didn’t care what it meant.

However the girl began to argue with it in a hushed tone but I heard every word. “She has the soup and she only has a slingshot, Flynn, it’ll be fine…”

“Croak.”

“I know but come on she couldn’t beat up a fly….”

“Croak!”

“Fine, I’ll be careful…” the chameleon licked its eye and the conversation finished. “Sure,” she responded, “we’ll head further in?”

I was too shocked and freaked out to come up with a reasonable excuse not to and muttered an okay. She walked past me, knocking me slightly in the shoulder so I was forced to watch her begin walking off in complete and utter confusion.

However I had now come to conclude that her mental state was able to pair me up to the word friend.

After a minute, she turned to look back at me. A hand was soon placed on her hip as she waited for me to follow; I glanced back at the dilapidated before walking over to join her. Another glance just increased the hollowness in my chest.