In an office in the tavern, Finkler was finishing up. He had spent the whole day tidying up the accounts, placing orders, updating files and smoothing out every hiccups pertaining to the business. He was almost done when Nury came in.

“You’ve been here the whole day. Do we have a big problem?” she asked, with rather sympathetic eyes.

Finkler peered at her over the top of his oval glasses in a fatherly manner and replied a simple no. He did not like talking very much. Therefore, when he opened his mouth, he usually meant every word.

“Then, why are you in here? I haven’t seen you since breakfast. You had lunch brought in and your snacks and your tea too.”

“I’m rather busy,” he replied softly. A vague smile appeared on his lips. “Who’s at the bar? You should be at the bar.”

“It’s Bulldoze’s turn. And you haven’t tell me why you locked yourself up the whole day,” she said while walking towards his table, slowly and silently, like a pussy cat walking towards her master. “You even ordered dinner to be brought in. I cancelled it for you. Come on, let’s go out and have it somewhere else.” She sat on the table. Her two rounded butts shown through her tight leather pants like two lamps at night. She turned towards Finkler, placing her thigh on the table and twisting her thin waist, showing her best features in profile. She looked absolutely adorable. Now, she looked down upon Finkler with her timid face that always seemed to need some sort of endearment.

Finkler’s smile widened. “Not today.” He thought for a while. Maybe it’s better to tell her now. “I have to go away for a while.”

“But you have never left.”

“Yes, … I haven’t. So it’s time that I go and ...”

Finkler saw that tears began to well in her big eyes. She had been particularly attached to Finkler ever since he bought her from an old trader seventy years ago. She was still a child and in a cage. The sight of her pitiful face and tearful eyes behind the steel bars of the cage brought back some fond old memories. Not that long ago, perhaps a few of hundred years ago, he was behind bars as well. He smiled at her mildly and told the trader to sell her to him. The trader was reluctant, not because of the money offered but because they knew each other too well. It was not good to sell unclarified, potentially hazardous product to a long-time associate and friend. He told Finkler that he did not know the origin of the child. She could be very dangerous and she could grow up to be something very different. He said that she had harassed them several times and attacked and wounded a few of his guards before they trapped her and caged her. “You must not be fooled by her eyes. There’re ghosts in them,” the older said with such convictions that only old people were capable of. He continued talking, with one finger pointing at the sky like he was teaching Finkler a lesson, like he had always done, “They get to you, they make you feel sorry, and they get to you, they fill you with sympathy …” Finkler still remembered his words and he thought that this was exactly what she was doing now.

“Stop the eyes.”

“I’m not doing the eyes. Take me with you. You need me. Please.”

For seventy years, they had been together, seeing each other every day. And for seventy years, she had attended to Finkler. She brought him food, did his laundry, ironed his clothes, made his bed, tidied his room. Finkler was very particular about the order of things in his life. Clothes must be folded in a certain way and each type must be placed exactly at that particular spot in that particular cupboard. All his personal items, his shoes, his watches, his cufflinks, his glasses, all of them had their own place and must be placed exactly in their orientation. And let’s not go into how his foods must be done. Such particularity carried on to the business as well. The staffs had a hard time following them at first, but after so many years, they acclimatised. For example, the tables and chairs were arranged exactly at that spot, perfectly measured. The tablecloths, the napkins, the spoons and forks and knives had their own arrangement and placement. Most of the guests never noticed them since most of them were brutes. But the refined ones, the masterminds, the top notch bosses, the gamemaker, the brainy cons, they would appreciate it very much.

Nury knew them all by heart. Finkler was totally depended on her to manage his daily necessity. In the last twenty years, she had also helped him to manage first the bar, and then, the kitchen, and then, the taverns, and then, the patrons, and then, the whole complex, and lastly, the business. She was Finkler’s right-hand girl.

“The tavern needs you.”

“Bulldoze can take care of it. He knows the deals.”

“Yes, but he’s still a boy.”

“He’s a young adult now. He’d already fucked a few of the servants and patrons too.”

“What! What will happen if you’re not here? He’s still mischievous.”

“Just give him a list of commands. He listens to you, not me. And he’s capable. Face it, you need me,” she said softly with a lascivious smile painted over her thin lips on an oval face with big round eyes, a delicate nose and short curvy black hair.

She put both her hands on the table, lowered herself so that her breasts, big and round, resplendent and wholesome, dropped down and almost got out of her low cut shirt. Slowly, she got up on all fours and crawled towards Finkler, who leaned back in his big armchair, anticipating. Their noses touched.

“What do you want?” she said. Finkler, still maintaining his calm composure, as if nothing that could ever happen would disturb him, just tittered a little. The only person who could disturb him was her.

She licked his lips and said, “I want to come with you. What will you do without me?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Can you?”

Pressing Finkler back, she kissed him. She thrust her serpent tongue deep into his mouth. Her slender legs climbed down from the table, one by one, the impossibility of her flexibility, almost boneless and placed them between his legs. “No one else in all the lands knows how to do you but me.”

******

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Darius continued, “You’re four hundred years old and now you’re still a little girl. So how long would you live? Do we start counting again from now since, you’re a child again, you know, like a restart? Then your curse could possibly be a blessing. You get to relive your life again. I’d give everything for that.”

The girl squinted at him and walked off leaving him behind. “Don’t talk about my curse like it’s something good.”

“But it is good,” said Darius chasing after her. “Can you at least tell me who did it to you? I might want to look him or her up when I’m old and I can get a restart.”

“Shut up! You stupid fish. You don’t know how terrible this is.” Elena ran forward leaving behind the elf in bewilderment. He could not understand why Elena was angry. This is positively a good thing. Why doesn’t someone want a restart? Who doesn’t want to prolong life? One curse and you can double your life, isn’t that a great deal, he thought. But what do you need to do to get cursed like that. Hmmm…

By the time, the elf caught up with her, she was sitting on a fallen decomposing tree trunk. When she saw that Darius was approaching, she shouted, “Don’t ever talk about my curse again. It makes me sad.”

Darius saw the tear stains on her cheeks and on her dress. She must have sobbed quite violently. He became sad too, looking at the miserable girl right now. Really, he did not mean it. “Alright. Alright. Please don’t cry. I was just … curious. That’s all. Since you’ve never told me anything. I get curious.”

“It’s late. Make camp. Oldbark isn’t here to protect us.”

“Alright. But at least tell me this. You’re so sad, is it because you’re in this child-form? You will grow up and be beautiful. Or that, you’re forever stuck in this child-form?”

His question hit the spot again. But this time, after crying her heart out, she had softened up and relented to the fact. She said, “I do grow up like normal children, but there’s a glitch in the curse. It’s like a loop, a circular run. When it happens, it brings me back to this particular age, over and over again.”

“Now, that’s a bummer. But …”

“Don’t … ask anymore. Please make camp and the fire.” She was not in the mood for talking. She kept quiet, looking down at the rotting leaves, not speaking. When Darius asked her whether she would like to have some berries or some water, she just shook her head. She was in a sorrowful mood.

After Darius finished with the campfire logs, he asked Elena whether she could light it up. She seemed to be very far from where she was sitting drifting in and out of old reveries. Absentmindedly, she performed her Candle Magic. The fire gradually lit up casting dancing shadows on the trees and Elena’s face. The heat lifted up her spirit a little spearing through the dark clouds.

Next, Darius prepared a hammock. It was also a part of the camper package: the Elf’s Essential Toolkit for Campers. Everything You Need In One Small Case. The Jungle Won’t Be a Bungle. He thought that Elena could sleep in the hammock while he on one of the big branches. After all, he was a forest elf. He would not fall during sleep.

He took out a flat metal case, the colour of silver, from his trousers pocket. From it, he drew out a piece of thin fabric neatly folded into a small rectangle. The elf opened it up and it turned into a hammock, eight feet in length, complete with Spidersilk threads for hanging and a flexible top flap that once closed would seal the sleeper within from the environment turning the hammock into a cocoon. When properly set-up, the hammock would hang in mid-air, many feet away from the would-be-incidents of the ground.

There was a variety of ways to hang the hammock; from the most intricate labour intensive spider-web-style to the easiest plumb-bob-style. Darius decided that since doing a spiderweb which was the most comfortable and most secure, was too much work for one person, he would hang the hammock from a high branch like a plumb bob. It was the least secure and the least comfortable because the hammock could well end up a pendulum, especially when winds were blowing. So he also used some Spidersilk from the Toolkit to secure the hammock by tying it to three pegs on the ground, which he made from the leftover dry woods he collected for the fire.

“There, it’s done. You can sleep in the hammock and I’ll sleep on that branch up there. It shouldn’t swing. So, don’t worry.”

Elena was impressed and touched. It had been quite a while, like a century or so, that anyone had paid any attention to her, done things for her or treated her like a lady that she was. She felt warm from the inside out. Someone still cared. Oldbark was loving but he was like a guardian and he was not physical. He was not there to touch you or hold you. She could not hear his voice or smell his odour. It was not the same. And there were also friends but she was too depressed to think about their friendship when she was a child. They were no longer peers.

“You shouldn’t have. I could sleep on the branch too.”

“No, no. You sleep in the hammock. It’s very comfortable. This fabric is made from Spidersilk. Soft and tough. Impenetrable. The insects can’t bite. And it’s safe. You won’t fall. If there are more of us, I can make the spiderweb. That’s ultra cool. But I can’t do it alone. Back home, when we go camping, we always make the spiderwebs, and we would …”

The elf stopped there, in mid-sentence, thinking that it wouldn’t be appropriate to say such a thing in front of a little girl. He had forgotten yet again that she was not a child.

“Sleep together and copulate,” said Elena finishing for him.

“Yup…, anyway, in your original age, and please don’t cry, are you still a child, or are you a grand-old-person, or … what?” asked Darius. He wanted to ask her the question ever since he knew that she was four hundred years old. “I… I really don’t know how to behave in front of you. What I should talk about? I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry. I have grown up. So, it’s not something new or something I had no experience with. Before the curse, I looked very much like the girls in your memory. Maybe not that sexually active. Now, in this child-form, the body and the mind and the feeling, they work differently. It doesn’t feel the same, it’s strange, distant,” she explained looking at Darius. Her eyes were soft, misty, almost to tears. “But the memories and the experiences are still there, haunting.”

“I don’t really don’t know how you feel. Maybe you’re like the eunuchs, with their dicks cut off. Is that it? Is it like that? I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what is appropriate. But it still feels weird, if I were to say those things in front of a child.”

Elena had brightened up. In a way, she was pretty easy going. Storms passed quickly and it was another fair day.

“I don’t know how an eunuch would feel because I’ve never been an eunuch. I feel like how a child would feel. It’s like you know this place and you want to be there but you haven’t even begun the journey or made preparation for the journey.”

“You told me that you’re a dryad,” said Darius trying to change the subject. It would not do her any good dwelling on things that she had lost. He did not want her to cry again. “What is a dryad?” he asked. But he also thought that it was a good idea to keep talking. It would drive the bad memories away.

“Yes, I’m a dryad. There’re not many of us left. We are very different from all of you.”

“I know, I know. You’re magical.”

“Nope, not just that. We are actually not organic and we don’t die. We don’t age, we don’t get old. Once we reach maturity, we stay that way. Forever.”

Here was another thunderous fact that was very unacceptable. Someone that doesn’t die, the elf thought. Are you serious? So, what’s next? There are spirits and ghosts and gods. What? But he had already gotten used to bizarre facts being put to his face. After the all, these past few days were not really his normal every day kind of days. He was bombarded with strange facts.

“Wouldn’t die, huh. That sounds like a really long time. I’m not sure I want to live that long.”

There was a moment of silence. Each trying to work out, what’s next.

“So, how do you get in?” asked Elena looking the hanging hammock.

“Well, I lower it down. There’s a pulley, kind of, up on the branch and you hop in and close the flap. Then, I’ll pull you up. You should sleep like fifteen feet from the ground to avoid all those nasty crawlies and beasts. Tomorrow, I’ll lower you down again,” said the elf looking at the beautiful Elena. Somehow, after such a conversation, he felt closer to the girl. He felt attached. He wanted to keep her safe. His heart was beating strangely. What’s going on? She’s a little girl. And she’s four hundred years old, at the same time. It’s complicated. “So, here we go.”

That night, both of them slept soundly. The surprise came the next morning.