The Dream World Collective

146. Very Large Scissors

"Eddie!" cried Otto, squeezing through the hole at the top of Eddie's corkscrew stairs. He glanced around with his eyes near floor level. Nothing.

Suddenly, about a foot behind his head, he heard the grating snip of a pair of huge scissors.

"Gah!" he whirled around, banged his head on the center post of the metal staircase, and rebounded. "A pestilence on—"

"Otto," purred Eddie, in a voice as genteel as if he were welcoming Otto into the drawing room. He was holding an immense pair of shears. "So glad you could come."

Otto scurried the rest of the way up the stairs without turning his back on Eddie.

"Yes! Yes. About that." Otto swallowed.

"You haven't been by in a while," cooed Eddie.

"No. Yes. Well. That is—"

"Missed my computer, did you?"

"Well, actually, that's what I—Great Thor!" It suddenly came together in Otto's mind. Huge scissors. Eddie. It could only mean one thing. He swallowed again, but he was determined to be brave. He adopted a suave tone, confident, smooth. Like James Bond, or possibly a panther. "The gig is up, Scissorhands."

"What?" Eddie was momentarily taken aback, and his creepily soft manner dissipated. "I was just having a go at you."

"I see how it is." Otto nodded, looking around. It was all so obvious, now that he understood. It fit. "You've been living alone up here for years, cut off from the world, surrounded by your equipment, trying to craft the hands your maker never gave you. Trying to learn...to love." Otto stretched out his arms, nervous but determined. "I understand, Edward. Even now, when your hands look nearly human, you return to the comfort of huge scissors when you're all alone. We're not so different, you and I."

"What the hell d'you mean, 'nearly human'?" objected Eddie, entirely himself again. "These hands are a hell of a lot more human than those pudge-flaps you've got hanging off your arms, big boy."

Otto cocked an eyebrow as uncertainty brewed in his belly.

"You're not...?"

"Not what?"

"Not Edward Scissorhands?"

"Bloody hell!" Eddie threw up his hands and whirled to stalk behind the cloth screens enclosing the back half of his studio.

"Well, in my defense, they were very large—"

"Just tell me when you're off the computer, eh?" Amid a sudden cacophony of banging and clattering metal Otto could hear Eddie muttering indignantly. He cleared his throat, then cleared it again, more loudly.

"I'm not here for the computer, actually," he half-shouted.

"I said when you're done," shouted Eddie as a clattering machine—perhaps a printing press—clanked to life.

"And I said I need to talk to you!" screamed Otto. "It is about a very important matter!"

As he was speaking the machine fell silent again, and his last three words boomed through the air.

"Right," said Eddie, stepping back into view. "Keep your trousers on. Out with it."

"It's about—" Otto glanced around nervously, suddenly remembering that Sushi was right downstairs. He pointed through the stair-hole and mouthed, "—Sushi."

Eddie's eyebrows raised with new interest.

"I need you to teach me," whispered Otto. "I have to learn to see things, to tell it like it is, to be unusual. And to have power." He gave Eddie a knowing look, desperately hoping Eddie would understand what Sushi's requirements meant. "I think you know what I'm talking about."