The end of the world came with nineteen boxes of iridescent cake pearls.

"Nineteen," Haven Center West said, with emphasis.

For obvious reasons, she went by Hawk. It was her favorite bird and easier than explaining what happens when fundamentalists-turned-hippies do too much mescaline. The worst part, she thought at times, was that her father had been on a Christianity kick. Heaven Centered, to remind her to always look to Jesus. Her name was just about the only thing her father had contributed to her upbringing. Good riddance. 

It wasn't the religion's fault that her parents were flakes. She didn't really blame the mescaline, either. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Fortunately for Hawk, her parents' religious fever--not to mention relationship--lasted about as long as her mother's other serial hobbies. This year alone, Hawk's mom, April Rayne, had gone through archery (Hawk got the very expensive compound bow, but no arrows) fish (Big, empty fish-tank Hawk promptly turned into a terrarium for her various collections of insects; she did not like fish) and, now, cake decorating. Which was how Hawk became the proud owner of five large cases of cake-mix, two five galleon buckets of white buttercream, four Russian piping tips she couldn't make heads or tails of, a case of food coloring, and nineteen boxes of edible pearls coated in a rather disturbing red/gold shimmer.

Her spouse, Alisdair "Alex" West, looked on in consternation. He was a rather attractive white man, brown hair, sharp blue eyes like somebody had filed color down to a razor point, in his usual work uniform of professionally nice dress pants and a button down shirt with no tie. He kept a clip-on Windsor knot in his glove compartment in case he had to meet a client. He came with the aura of a golden retriever. Hawk thought this wasn’t fair. If the universe had a sense of justice—which it did not—Alex would have struck people like a Mastiff. Brazilian Mastiff at that. Formidable, and with the jaw muscles to make your car a bit concerned. The kind of dog that would eat your problems before you knew about them. But Alex was good at presentation, and about as honest in that department as P.T. Barnham. People just saw the typical under-educated white guy and assumed he was coasting on his Black wife's laurels.

She often let him coast; it made it more fun when she could finally feed the racists to him. She was a Black woman--mixed race, sure, but the white hadn't expressed itself so much as peeked out of Hawk's biology and decided to go back to bed--who was too tall and too interested in odd things to ever fit in. April Rayne, ever the Mommie Dearest, had raised Hawk with a nineteen seventies approach to race relations. Hawk hadn't even learned how to take proper care of her hair until she was nineteen and one of her Black college professors gave her their mamma's phone number. She'd accepted this, the way she accepted the boxes of cake pearls, and reminded herself to call April more often. You must choose your battles in this world, after all. Fighting to make her mother less of a flake? That was a no-hoper. But making a place where her mom could be her mom, no damage done to any party? That, Hawk could do. Sometimes people were worth the extra work of salvage.

"Those are edible?" Alex put down his tablet and grabbed a box of cake pearls. Shaken, some of the shimmer fell from the box's seams and landed on the rich wood of their antique table. It looked old, which it was, and expensive, which was a testament to Hawk and Alex's skill with a belt sander and patience with polyurethane lacquer. They hadn't quite gotten a finish so smooth your breath might mar it, but the wood's natural chatoyance put anything of the edible glitter variety to shame. They'd fished this thing out of a dumpster somewhere. It was worth everything they hadn't paid for it.

"Technically. I'm willing to bet they've never come out of the box." Hawk pulled another four boxes out of the shipment from her mother. April Rayne's candy-coated shipment came with a kind of dustless patina that spoke of many hours of care from some harassed minimum-wage employee, and many months of display without interest. These had moldered beneath their permanent use-by date until April Rayne, deep in the throes of obsession, decided that her world would not be complete without nineteen boxes of red/gold shimmer edible pearls. Hawk glared at the last box, then turned her gaze in horror at Alex as he reached in and ate one.

"Are you out of your mind?" She said.

He grinned. The dust on his lips shimmered. "They taste like chalk. How much...thirty-nine dollars a box?" Silence. The sort that attends a wake. "I know I've asked this before, love, but Is your mom okay?"

"Yes. No. I have no clue. You know Mom," Hawk said, and rolled her eyes. She pulled out an unexpected ball of yarn. "Oh, god." Buried her face in her hand for a minute.

Alex ate another expensive ball of sugared chalk. "Problem?"

"Right. You weren't here for the Yarn Episode." The title came with capital letters. It should have come with sirens. She continued pulling balls of yarn out of the large cardboard box. There were five of them so far. Six. Seven. All of them wool. Not soft. Peach colored, but a bad peach. Ten. Eleven. Maybe burlap would be a better comparison, except it had an uncomfortably red tone. Rusty. Like it was maybe bleeding. Twelve. Thirteen, fourteen...and fifteen skeins, all the same dingy, dirty, rusted, ick of peach.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"The yarn episode?" Alex said.

"It was before your time," she said, thought for  a second, and added, "It's the reason why I triple check the weather-proofing in the attic, and why Mom isn't allowed to donate anything to Goodwill or the Salvation Army anymore."

"Is that your rule?" Alex said.

She shook her head. Both organizations’ regional directors had been very clear about things.

The yarn sat in the middle of the table, a hirsute Martian edifice with too many ends. Hawk liked cool blues, the color of a good head wind. She didn't fly. Heights were tricky. But she liked the color, and she liked the dream of flight. She wanted to feel free when she had free time. The yarn on the table with its awkward color and reaching, dangling ends, were the opposite. Strangling things, reaching fingers and warmth gone sticky. No wonder April bought it.

"Does April pick these colors, you think?" her husband said. He brushed the tangled curls of his upper mop away from his eyes. "Like, does she wander through a craft store and think really gross color wheel thoughts?"

"Demented Tinkerbell?" Hawk shrugged. That was actually a really good description of her mother. "I think it's a kind of sixth sense thing. Either that, or she's trying to color match my M. Depilis."

"I know jack shit about those ants, Hawk, and I could tell you she missed."

Hawk was an entomologist working out of Sedona, with an emphasis on micro-ecology and various species of Myrmecocystus, which some people recognized as the honeypot ant, but most people wouldn't recognize if they sat on it. Hawk didn't mind having her own obscure obsession. It gave her an excuse to go out into the few wild places the world still had, to stand under a wide blue sky in a field of desert flowers, the air still tense with petrichor, ground damp with rain's sweet memory. Some people need an excuse for beauty; Hawk's was anting season. Anting Season, Alex would say, and he'd roll his eyes, dig out his good hiking boots and help assemble the ant kit. And he'd get her back later, when they'd go on a walking tour someplace famous for buildings. Alex was a Private Investigator, but his big hobby was architecture. His doodles when talking on the telephone all involved brutalism and lines. She assumed it was like her ant things, and bought books on houses she thought were neat, that would sit beside the six stuffed ant-eaters he'd brought home from varying zoos. She didn't get buildings. He didn't get ants. They got each other, though, and You love me sometimes looks like an earnest miss, a sigh, and a whispered, wow, you really tried this time. She could find the joy, even when it came in the wrong shape, because marriage isn't about highs or lows or passion. It's about effort.

Anyway, her newest colony of ants, a pair of myrmecocystus depilis queens that showed an enticing amount of promise, were a rich garnet color fading to dark brown. Red heads. Bellies, when swollen, would be colored by the liquids they held. Nothing at all like this burlap-rust-peach mess, unless you found an ant just recently eclosed. Callows, newly hatched from pupa, still fragile and pale, were somehow more terrifying than any adult soldier because the fate of its colony sat in its unhardened mandibles...or maybe dead callows. She'd lost more than one pet ant colony to various causes, but all were ultimately heralded by small, pale bodies curled and discarded in a corner, the ultimate sign that this group had no future. Yes. That was the perfect way to describe this awful color: This was the color the future turned when it died.

"Do you want to make socks out of it?" Alex said. Hawk did know how to knit her own socks. Largely because of the Yarn Incident. Forget boxes of pearls, lets go with boxes of yarn, the large Uhaul boxes you're supposed to put dishes or blankets in, filled with yarn. Hawk hadn't even asked. Or unpacked it. That set of boxes had gone straight to the thrift store.

Which was when they found the raccoons.

Plural.

"I want to set it on fire, but wool stinks when it burns," Hawk said.

"Wool is supposed to be fire-proof," Alex was grinning.

"It's fire resistant. But when your mother decides that she's the reincarnation of Mother Pleasant and wants to do voodoo and figures that she can substitute her daughter's pashmina wool scarf for the required cotton hanky..." Hawk trailed off, and Alex patted her hand, as one would offer comfort after a cancer diagnosis.

Being April Rayne’s daughter should have come with an award. April was the kind of person who, upon entering a store, twigged the "sucker" detector for every salesman on the floor. Visits to the mall always became a parade of eager kiosk salesmen offering perfumes, skin creams and remote-control toy sharks. A great deal of her obsessive purchases—like, Hawk suspected, the pile of cake pearls her husband was steadily munching chalkily through—came about when April doubled down after a hard-sale left her holding the bag. April never admitted that she was more gullible than a drunk carny, which meant the seventy-seventh salesman offering her a remote control helium balloon would have exactly the same effect on her as the previous seventy-six. If she was buying a car, the salesmen would know he'd finally found a home for that lemon on the back lot.

But the bonus was that Hawk got really good at spotting a con. She had to be. She'd been her mother's only defense since she turned twelve, and a minor protecting an adult? She'd had to be good. The word parentification might blink on and off like neon, but she didn't mind the after-effects. It was how she'd met Alex.

He was a con-man, after all.