I knocked the fifteen times it took for her to reach the door and get the bolt undone and let me in. She had this one room place with a little bathroom attached to it. She had painted all the walls herself into this really scenic setting of like woods and forests on the edge of a lake and had boarded up her window to get the paint on it and finish her panorama. And so Ursula sat down on her little mattress that she had put in the middle of the room and patted it down and around a bit while I finished locking up. So I sat behind the little screen box in the little of the room and started unplugging and replugging in the cables and wires, looking up every so often to look at Ursula. So she was all got up in this sort of gray green teal dark not-sure-what-to-call-it colored wrap around her waist and matching set of wraps that she had put around her torso, going over her shoulders and across her ribs, making a sort of bra. She had this little charm around her neck that looked really exotic and had tanned and furred bracers on her wrists and ankles, see. And so when I finally got the screen working again, I could hear her playing really calming tunes on her pan flute.

“So what all did you miss?”

Pausing her tribal pieces, “All the good nature programming. There was one on foxes around the world that I was really bummed at missing.”

“Well I'm sorry about that.”

She put away her pan flute by putting it on this little mat she had next to her mattress and put her bracers there too. So I took to my bed too, which was properly elevated against the back wall of the place, so I undressed down to my underwear and tucked myself in for the night and she called over to me, “Goodnight Zyolfe. Sleep and dream well.”

“You too, sleep well, you.”

‘N so in the morning, when I got up and got myself dressed in the same sweats as yesterday I put on a fresh black tanker to put over those shoulders yeah. Just that smidge after that, I’d gotten the tea going on the stove and the pan heating itself on the other burner for the eggs. I could make ‘em scrambled, flipped all proper or omelet-style and the sizzling of me tryin’ to decide what way to make ‘em must of woken her up because once she’d put on a new bunch of wraps and a furred jacket and her bracers, she started playing her tribal tunes again, till... “Good morning, Zyolfe.”

“How goes yourself, Yuyu?”

Groggily rolling over to put a blanket over her shoulders, “Pretty well, thanks. How are you?”

Shrugging off a bit of yawn there, “Just fine yeah.”

Ursula stood up to go brush her teeth and do other stuff in the bathroom, but I just kept on frying up the eggs and pouring out glasses of tea. See, I never bothered with all the hygiene things. I took a shower every day or so, sure, but I rarely bothered brushing my teeth. Like, certainly the day before going to the dentist, but whenever I just felt ‘em getting a bit gross I’d just clean up real well with a bit of tongue and spit and drink. No cavities. Never. I’d swim in the river every so other day as a kid, fooling around with Regent all the time and we’re tempered now. Don’t ever get sick cause we taught our bodies to live in toxic waste and shit every time we dipped a hand in that river those years ago. But now if you wanted to be so immune like us you’d have to find some other shitty river ‘cause the plant that Regent works at and some of the other plants around town just don’t do the same stuff and have taken to dumping into someone else’s shitty river, see.

So when Ursula got back and sat down again on her mattress, I brought her that tray with eggs and some bread and then went back to grab the glasses of tea which we’d split every morning. Chai-chai was her taste, see, but I’d always liked straight green best. But to keep her happy when I made it I had it be chai-chai for her.

She was always up and like ‘it’s only right that you serve me breakfast in bed, noting the circumstances’, well, a hell of a lot more polite than how I’d say it, but that’s what she meant. But I always thought, ‘well fuck where else? There’s nowhere else to sit! At least not here’ and so I did it, see. And she always appreciated it, giving me one of her rare mead-less smiles. Well, not that she had much drink anyway, but more that she didn’t like to smile much to begin with. So if you or s’mn gave her something nice she’d smile all nice and pretty, with her thin little face and cheeks, but she’d do it for you anyway if you put some mead in her cup earlier.

“So what all’s up with you work today?”

“Well there was a cat that came in yesterday. She’d swallowed a couple little magnets and quite literally got her stomach in a knot, so we had to surgically get those out yesterday. She’s been recovering all night, so I’ll be checking in on her to start. After that, I think I’ll be helping out with the dogs. We’ve still got a few of them that- Well, actually, Sam’s probably going to be doing that himself. That’d leave me to fill out some prescriptions and take calls then.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“The devil, him, eh?”

“Sam? He’s as nice as anyone I know. You know that.”

I do know that. Sam is a very nice man, but he isn’t so down to earth as say, Regent. See, I don’t know if Ursula knows, but Sam does more than mead over the weekends when he’s off, and I’ve never really approved of that kind of behavior, at least, not to the extent that Sam goes off to do it. I mean, we live in the perfect little town for it, all smoky and industrial already, really dark with plenty of woods surrounding it, see. Plenty of places for those exchanges to go down and plenty of places to do the smoking. You could be an addict easily without having anyone know that about you, at least, you could around here.

I inquire all politely, “When do you have to go in for that?”

“Oh, soon enough. What time is it anyway?”

Myself, not being very good with the time, never having a watch or a phone, you’d see, that I had to walk all the way over to the other side of the room to find Ursula’s phone that she had stashed away in a heap of wraps of hers, all smelly and ready for a wash. “It’s just about eight after the same hour.”

“I have to be there at nine… should probably pick up some things on the way there, or I could just wait and get them on the way back. Eh…”

“I’ll go with you. You could let me take the spare key and I’d take the stuff back here while you head out to work.”

“That sounds like a plan.”

So while she was getting up and really getting ready to go, doing stuff like pulling on her sandals and brushing her teeth again, I was getting on my hood and sleeves and my proper shoes and going to the door. See, there was this little ledge right above the top of the door where there was some molding to sort of outline the doorway and make it look fancier than it really was, but ours was all old and chipped real bad. But it still worked just fine for what we needed it for, which was holding the keys, so I grabbed both of ‘em and tossed the shinier one to Ursula. She liked the shiny one more because it was the one she used the most, all shiny from being used every day, not gathering dust and rust up like the other one.

So we got down to the little shop on the far side of the river between the park and her veterinary clinic and knocked on the door real nice so we could get Roderick to open up early for us. See, just about everything opened at nine around here, so if you wanted to do anything before work, you had to know some people, and Ursula’s mother’s sister’s granddaughter’s father-in-law or something like that was Roderick here, so she knew him alright. He undid the metal shutters and let us in, lighting up all the bright white lights that looked like really fat star-streaks. You know which ones: the kind that give you a headache from looking at for too long and the kind that you could take and really give a guy a good beating over the head with, yeah, that kind, see. But you could only give him the beating once and you’d only get one good swing because then it’d break and all that gas on the inside would come out and it wouldn’t work anymore.

And we walked around, chatting it up about the latest news we had about our friends. Ursula asked me how the job-hunt was going and I told her the whole ‘yeah it’s going slow. See, I’m waiting to hear back from some people still’ and that’s really true. It doesn’t sound true at all, but it really is, see. I might not be to responsible or anything, but I’m a good observer. I see stuff well, so I started looking for jobs at the library but they don’t pay and then at the printing press and bookstore but they were getting rid of people, so I figured that they’d just get rid of me too. But that meant that I’d have to go back to my second best skill, which is cooking. See, there’s a ton of quaint little shops and outlets around here, but at least a little teahouse or food joint per. So there’s this really small but classy soup and bakery place, where they make soup and serve it with handmade bread that I’m waiting to hear back from. But above all, there’s this other place that serves noodles and rice, all with vegetables, meat and egg that I’m also waiting on. But there, they’ve also got sushi. I mean, I don’t know how to make sushi, but I think it’d be really cool to hang around a place and be able to learn in whatever lulls there’d be.

So I asked Ursula about more of her friends and how they’ve been getting on, which she was always very happy to share with you. And then we both asked Roderick the same things at the counter, asking him about his family and friends and what all he had planned for the week, and he answered us really nice, checking us out real fast. So I took the bags and brought them back to the place, almost slipping up on the steps back up to the third floor and getting my face in a pile of gum, but I was fast and got my balance back all good and didn’t step in any of that shit.

And I put away all the groceries in the fridge and cabinet, practically overflowing the place where she kept the wafers and pork spreads with surplus. Anyway, as a nice treat for her, I got the stove going and made a pot of hot chocolate, adding all sorts of good things to make it better than just packeted shit, yeah. Some nutmeg, a dash of cinnamon, and a few spoonful’s of honey. Then I turned down the heat to really low so that it couldn’t boil over or anything, and grabbed my blanket of pistachios and put it in my backpack. It was a hard-shelled backpack, see, made of plated scales over a mesh so it looked like the back of an exotic animal. In there was a lot of paper and pencils for my drawing and also my books, my knife and box of matches, because you never, never know when you might need ‘em, right. So I turned off the lights, used the restroom, grabbed my pack and headed on out to the park.