“Who knows?” Willo would suavely hum over the ultra-modern smartphone that extended out of a burnished mannequin, which was connected to the metallic box that sat at the foot of his chair. “Will scones be present at this li’l checkup?”
As gruff guffaws and mumbles ignited from the other side of the receiver, the rhythmic pitter-patter of buttons from nearby in the kitchen caught Evie’s void attention. She glanced past the dining table to the kitchen’s island, where she was welcomed by the foaming, translucent waterfall that was a water nymph’s—a naiad’s—shoulder-length hair. The nymph in question was fine-tuning settings on the solar microwave, with cerulean lights blinking at each press until the final one elicited an orange flare as the plate inside began spinning.
“I honestly can’t believe we’re wasting lithium battery juice on this,” the naiad puffed out in a bubbly tone over the meteoric chatter of Willo’s call, swivelling on the birch floorboards to face the dining table. “I should start showing more restraint—”
“Mom, let Dad have this one for today,” a young teen’s voice sounded reluctantly across from Evie. “If he’s refused this one on such an occasion, he may just develop some bizarre withdrawal symptoms—”
“I don’t mind this foodie”—the water nymph shuffled over to a cushioned seat near Evie— ”as I’ve had to deal with him for years now—”
“Don’t romanticize his ludicrousness, Mom,” the lanky teen snorted as he swiftly sprung up from his furious scribbling with glee in his scintillating aquamarine eyes, akin to his mother’s. “Hey, Auntie Evie, were those some fancy words I used this time?”
It was a cacophony. Willo bootlicking over the phone, the mewing microwave, the naiad’s unconscious yet tender carolling, and the son’s genetically snarky remarks—a discordant mish-mash that felt just like home. Yet, due to her shutting herself off to the tempo of working, it all felt like a slap in the face, one that didn’t diminish the wrinkles that creased her eyes.
In this spacious apartment complex, she stared into space in remote silence. She felt like she experienced sensory overload again: a new environment, homey smells of polished veneer, and the sight of a familiarly offbeat yet jovial family. It was all comforting.
Though, for a millisecond that didn’t seem to exist, she forgot that time existed. She felt an eternity in all this racket and wanted this moment to persist, where she didn’t have anything she was indebted to at the moment.
Perhaps she was hopeless, trying to escape from the inevitable and the responsibilities she latched onto. Time, once again, felt like nothing.
“Evie?”
The dryad flared to life once more—more than she had expected in a single day. She stirred at the feeling of the water nymph’s palms on her cybernetic arm, caressing the greenery that cloaked it. A peppy beam graced the other nymph’s beige skin.
An indescribable neuron fired in Evie’s brain and most likely in the other nymph’s brain too. The unified, unstated empathy of nymphs; the common interconnectedness of this race regardless of habitat. The water nymph read her.
“I should thank Willo for forcing you to come over this time; you’re exhausted as heck.”
“It’s ok, Rhea. I was just thinking about things.”
“Stop thinking then, hun. Even that’s looking like a tiring task.” Rhea teased, perking up at the celebratory beeping of the microwave. “Beck, it’s—”
“I’ll get the hazmat suit,” the brunette teen whined sardonically as he dropped his pencil and slogged over to the microwave with bated and soon-to-be revolted breath.
Rhea peered over at Willo, who was rocking his chair back and forth with the phone still glued to his ear and chewing his fingernails nonchalantly as he listened intently. She nodded at him, to which he pleasantly responded by raising two fingers and pondering before putting a finger down. Rhea gave him a thumbs up, pink tinting her cheeks before she turned back to Evie.
“You still look beautiful with the eye bags,” Rhea complimented warmly, keeping a hushed tone.
“That’s practically unavoidable, you know,” Evie responded with a light, sour look. “We don’t change much upon growing up anyway. Plus, it’s rude to shame your elder’s face.”
Rhea shrugged and chirped, “No regrets, Eve.”
Despite her weariness, Evie mustered a mellow smile that grew wider as the two women watched Beck trudge to the dining table with a hot plate of gruel-like cuisine in hand and his ballooned cheeks and neutral face covered by a large, frothy water bubble he made, like that of an astronaut’s helmet. Willo acknowledged this silently and grinned like a toddler, rolling his eyes at the nauseated look of disappointment that his son also added to the attire.
“Your control over your water powers has improved,” Evie complimented in awe, clapping lightly with Rhea as the unfortunate Beck slid the plate over to the peckish Willo’s side of the table.
“If only I could use them more productively. I feel guilty for serving a man this crap,” Beck gurgled grumpily, fizzy bubbles boiling to the top of his self-made helmet.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
He was clearly averse to the dish; however, there was no neuronal activation when talking to Beck. Evie presumed that if she were able to connect with the hybrid teen on such a level, she would suffocate from internal barrages of sickening feedback.
“Didn’t you go through much worse when you helped take care of Willo?” Rhea asked, taking a glimpse at Evie’s puzzled look at the sardines, noodles, and sausage amalgamation on the plate.
“Well, as a kid, I remember him asking for much more—”
“Alright, see you, sir!” Willo exclaimed a bit too loudly, tapping the glowing red icon on the smartphone to hang up the call. “Puppet, retract!”
The Puppet’s robotic arm—with an appearance similar to Evie’s—sheathed back into its chest, the phone disappearing into the metallic body. Then, the blank-faced mannequin sank itself back into the Puppet Backpack’s entrance, the whirring of the closing sequence coming to a steel halt as the box shut, having contained the robot entirely.
“Who was that, dear?” Rhea asked curiously, lifting her palm upwards towards Willo’s glass. “You were sucking up more than usual—”
“If buttering up pays the bills, then it’s fine,” Beck blurted out, twitching inside his bubble as his embarrassed father stabbed some messy grub and shovelled it into his gluttonous mouth. “Not something I’ll tell my friends, though; I’ll… sugarcoat the job title—”
“Like what, huh?” Willo murmured with squirrel cheeks, chewing like a ravenous beast as sparkling, cold water poured perfectly into his cup from Rhea’s palm. “Thanks, dear!—”
“Shoe Quality Assurance Manager, tonguing all of your superior’s boots with maximum efficiency!” Beck glorified, causing Rhea to giggle uncontrollably and Evie to grin cheekily at the sight of the water nymph’s infectious laughter. “Easy big bucks, even inspiring me to take up such a job—”
“Anyways, to not admit to any of that, I should tell you that that was one of the Swiss Puppet Corps’ shareholders, situated here in Florida,” Willo said confidently, swallowing down his food. “Zamir Goldmann is his name. I’ll be meeting with him in 2 days just to see if he’s happy with how our Miami branch is holding up. Nothing big.”
Evie turned to meet Willo’s forward gaze.
“Do I need to be—”
“Evie, you have a flight to India early that morning. You doofus,” Willo chuckled alongside Rhea, Evie noticeably rubbing an annoyed hand against her forehead at her forgetting. “Remember, you’ll be overseeing the Kenyan seed bomb Puppet work and seeing a land you haven’t been to in almost…a hundred or so years? Catch some z’s tomorrow here before then; that’s an order.”
Evie opened her mouth to protest but found she had more innate energy to dwell on what he had just said, simply nodding.
One hundred years felt like nothing.
“Dad, I have school tomorrow; can we get the celebratory thingie out of the way?” Beck asked, yawning as he absentmindedly flipped through the pages of his notebook.
“Of course!” Willo raised his glass. “Glasses up to the 500th anniversary of a resolution to a 122-year war! May humans, nymphs, and hybrids face another century of increasing prosperity!”
Four of their water glasses tapped together.
“Cheers!”
----------------------------------------
Just like that, midnight dawned, and the ruckus died down.
Once again, Evie was left with both serene silence and her thoughts.
Beck had hit the hay for the night, and Willo was snoring obnoxiously on the dining table, drooling, and tossing in his chair. He uttered senseless nothings in his sleep, with Rhea fastening a silky duvet over her husband’s shoulders. She ruffled his hair affectionately before she took a seat in the opposite seat from Evie.
“You aren’t tired?” Rhea questioned, her curious royal blue eyes staring into Evie’s, who was tapping her fingers against the shrubbery on her robotic arm.
“I suppose I’m used to tireless nights.”
“You’re a broken record, Eve,” the naiad joked, smirking at Evie’s hefty exhale.
“I think it helps; in my opinion, I get more done.”
“I think you’re wiser than that; it’s not healthy.”
There was some silence between them, letting the white noise of snoring, air conditioning, and the outside horns of cars pass by.
“What motivates you to go to work so hard anyway?”
“Hmm?”
“Well,” Rhea started, furrowing a brow yet chortling lightly at the dryad’s confusion. “It’s as I said. I know it’s been your job for years now, but what’s your motivation?”
Evie straightened herself, a genuine look of doubt adorning her face at the question. This was a question she knew the answer to, and Rhea and Willo most likely knew half of it. The motive had been the engine for her life those years back when she was convinced that she could piece together efforts that would compensate for over a century of the havoc she helped untether. She knew what she wanted to say, but she always feared the backlash; it was the repercussions she would shy away from.
“You know about my involvement in the war; my age is an obvious marker,” Evie answered solemnly. “Everything I do now and everything I have done up until now is to make up for what I’ve done.”
Rhea glanced down at the table, nibbling her thumb and trying to compose her thoughts. The neurons kept firing for both of them.
“I’m sure my husband has told you many times that you’ve done enough. You don’t have to feel like you need to overwork yourself.”
“I’m aware, but I… I’m just devoted to it, I guess.”
She stumbled there. Rhea’s glance told her that she knew there was more deeply rooted in the drive than just the surface-level redemption that any human or nymph beyond the war’s resolution wished to accomplish. What made her motivation so persistent and heavy on her? Why did it ache more for her than not only for the humans but also the nymphs she was always supposed to be in tune with? Wasn’t she supposed to always be in sync with them?
Is she and the nymph sitting opposite her that different?
“Rhea Swoboda,” the water nymph said bashfully.
Silence ensued further.
“What?”
Seconds ticked by.
“That’s my motivation. Rhea Swoboda.”
“But that’s just your name. How can that be a motivation, if I may ask?”
Rhea eyed the plethora of family photos that ornamented the apartment’s walls, a wave of sentimentality washing over her. She fiddled with her hands and peered to the side, where she was greeted with more photos, trinkets, and memories.
“I know I’m still very young, to the point that I can count my age up to 42.”
Evie laughed and responded wittily, “I’m about 500-600, give or take; I wish I had a calendar back then so I could actually eat a birthday cake that’s mine—”
She paused. A certain neuron fired.
Unexpectedly, for the first time in forever, Evie picked up a sense of melancholy from Rhea. She tensed.
Rhea forced a smile that held curiosity behind it.
Younger or older never made a difference for nymphs; it was the same throughout one’s lifetime. The only notable breach in this similarity was the experiences.
Evie always hated the responsibility of giving wisdom; she never liked being the example.
“Eve?”
“Hmm…?”
“This may sound so, so dumb,” Rhea stumbled, twiddling her thumbs as if she were asking the most damaging question that one could pronounce.
Evie patted the naiad’s hands with her stiff prosthetic and gave her a reassuring nod.
Rhea asked earnestly, “How does it feel… to outlive someone?”
Then, contrary to the tolling seconds, she felt over 600 years of living replay loudly as her eyes widened.
Seconds. Minutes. Weeks. Months. Years. Decades. Centuries. Potential millennia if she was kept alive.
All felt inferior in this great flow of her life. The same worries that lingered over each crumb of memory made her take time for granted.
Her life. Her memories. Even the prevailing beauty—supernatural and unchanging—amongst every nymph that ever lived
All these things are timeless.