Chapter 5
First Contact
Oz
The fluorescent tube above the worktable buzzes its flat, tuneless note.
Same as it has for the full minute I’ve been standing in this woman’s studio with my form half-solidified and mica powder settling on every surface like rose gold snow.
She is four feet away, crowbar raised, knuckles white around the grip.
Her pulse hammers through the floorboards and into my base where I meet the concrete.
She’s terrified.
Completely, cellularly terrified.
Yet she’s still here.
Still looking at me.
I have been composing the word I would say next for a long, solitary time.
The risk is that she may scream, or swing, or back away and call someone to drag me out of her life.
The reward is she might hear it, and answer it.
I shape the sound carefully, letting it rise through my substrate and out through the place where a mouth would be if I had committed to one.
“Hello.”
It comes out better than I expected, clear and warm.
She rocks back on her heels like it physically hit her.
Then she does something that makes gold bloom across my entire chest without my permission.
She says hello back. Quiet, hesitant, stuttered. “H-hello.”
I feel something old and unused crack open inside me, something I packed away in that storage unit in Tucson and forgot I was carrying.
She asks her questions.
I answer them simply. I tell her I am adaptive, that I’m what she needs.
And I mean it in every sense the words can carry, though she hears it in the narrowest one and that is fine.
That is where we start.
When she tells me about the rosemary-oat bars, about the coffee, about the conversation we are going to have, her voice finds a rhythm that I recognize.
Command.
Competence.
The shelter she builds when she is afraid.
I match my colors to something steady and grounding, deep teal with slow amber undertones, and I say the only thing I know to be exactly right.
“Take your time.”
She turns away from me.
The back of her neck flushes pink above the collar of her shirt.
Her breathing hitches once before she masters it.
I wait.
I’m very good at waiting.
But for the first time in eighty years, I’m waiting for something I believe might actually accept me.
She checks the rosemary-oat bars.
I watch her move across the studio with the careful efficiency of someone whose body has been an instrument for so long she no longer notices the music it’s stopped making.
She favors her right side.
Her left shoulder hitches a quarter-inch higher than the right when she lifts the mold, and the compensation pattern radiates down through her ribs, her hip, the way she plants her feet.
I can read the history of it like rings in a tree: months of stirring with her dominant arm, hauling crates without help, sleeping on the couch because the bed is too soft.
She presses the back of her hand into the surface of a bar and frowns as she assesses the state of the product in progress.
“Still okay. Barely.”
She says this to the soap, to herself, to the room.
I’m learning that she narrates her life aloud, a constant murmured commentary that fills the silence the way a television left on fills an empty house.
The coffee maker is on a shelf near the door, wedged between a bag of sodium hydroxide and a stack of shipping labels.
She fills it with water from the utility sink.
Her wrist shakes on the pour.
Micro-tremor.
Fatigue so embedded in the muscle fibers it’s become structural.
“So,” she says, with her back to me, watching the coffee drip. “You got a name?”
“Amorphozoa.” Not quite a name, but what the scientists labeled me is as close as it gets.
She mulls it over. “I work with Latin plant names every day. Lavandula, Rosmarinus, Calendula. That’s a genus name, isn’t it?”
“Given to me by my discoverers.”
“And you never decided to go by something more… I don’t know, casual?”
“It never occurred to me.”
“Amorphozoa…” She plays with the word, trying to find a nickname in it. “Amy… No, your body and voice are way too masculine. Phoz? No, sounds too much like the Fonz. Oh! Oz. How about Oz?”
“Oz,” I repeat. “Yes, I like it.”
“Good. I’m Maisie, but I assume you already knew that when you wrote the shipping label.”
“It’s a pretty name.”
She turns around to hide her smile, pretending to be busy grabbing two mugs.
Then she looks at me.
Then she looks at the second mug.
Then back at me.
“Do you drink coffee?”
“I can. I don’t need to.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
I consider this honestly.
“I don’t know. No one’s offered it before.”
Something crosses her face, quick and raw.
She sets both mugs on the worktable.
“Well. Consider this your first cup.”
She pushes one toward my side of the table.
“If you hate it, that’s understandable. It’s the cheap stuff.”
I form my hand with more care than usual, paying attention to the fingers, keeping them close to the right number.
I pick up the mug.
The ceramic is warm, and through it I can feel the faint vibration of liquid cooling.
I bring it to where my mouth approximates and let the coffee pass through my surface membrane.
The flavor arrives everywhere at once.
Bitter, rich, slightly burnt, with an undertone of mineral from her tap water.
It’s the best thing I have ever tasted, because she made it especially for me.
“Good?” she asks, and there’s a tentative quality in the question that has nothing to do with coffee.
“Very good.”
She wraps both hands around her own mug and sits on the stool by her worktable. The exhale she lets out sounds like it’s been waiting inside her ribcage for a week.
“Okay, Oz. Cards on the table.”
She takes a sip.
“You’re a slime.”
“Yes.”
“A sentient, conscious slime who mailed himself to my studio in a crate.”
“Also yes.”
“And you can feel things about my body just from touching me for two seconds.”
“Your body is very loud,” I say, and immediately wish I’d phrased it differently.
But she snorts into her coffee and the sound sends gold threading through my chest so fast it probably looks like a light show.
“Loud,” she repeats. “Yeah, that sounds about right. My body’s loud. So what did it tell you?”
I could give her the clinical version.
The litany of tension patterns and cortisol spikes and compensatory misalignments.
But she lives inside that body every day; she knows what it’s saying.
She’s asking whether I heard it.
“That you’ve been alone with it for a long time,” I say. “And that it’s been asking for help you haven’t let yourself accept.”
The mug stops halfway to her lips.
She holds very still.
I watch the flush climb the back of her neck again, slower this time, spreading to her ears.
For a long moment the only sound is the coffee maker clicking as it finishes its cycle and the fluorescent tubes buzzing their flat, indifferent song.
“You got all that from two seconds,” she says quietly.
“Slimes have powerful senses.”
“Apparently.”
Maisie sets the mug down.
Her jaw works, and I can see her cycling through responses, discarding the ones that would require her to feel something, selecting the one that keeps her standing.
“Well, for the record, I’m fine. The shoulder thing is just repetitive motion. The sleep thing is temporary. And the—”
She gestures vaguely at her whole torso.
“The everything-else thing is just what running a business solo looks like.”
“Of course,” I say, and I keep my voice gentle and my colors steady. I don’t argue, because she’ll figure out that I can tell the difference between fine and what she actually is, and she’ll figure it out in her own time.
She studies me over the rim of her mug.
Her eyes are sharp, assessing, the eyes of someone who has learned to evaluate everything for what it will cost her.
“You said you were what I needed. On your listing, and again just now. What does that mean, specifically? Because ‘adaptive deep-tissue relaxation’ covers a pretty wide range, and I’d like to know which end of that range we’re talking about.”
“Whichever end you want.”
“That’s a politician’s answer.”
“I adapt. That’s what I do. If you need a massage, I’m a massage. If you need someone to help you work and haul heavy materials, I can do that too. If you need—” I pause, choosing carefully. “Anything else. I can be that.”
Her cheeks color.
She knows what anything else means, and I know she knows, and the space between us fills with the particular electricity of two people who are both aware of something neither is willing to acknowledge yet.
“Right now,” she says, very firmly, “what I need is to understand the logistics. You’re alive. You’re in my house. You’re pretty big and look hard to hide.”
“I’m used to hiding,” I say.
She shakes her head. “All it takes is one glimpse from the wrong person. I live in a town of four hundred people who are very, very bored.”
I hesitate to ask, “Just how bored?”
“Well, last week an emergency town hall meeting was called because someone thought the local diner’s ‘famous’ pie recipe had altered, and we had to do a whole taste-test tribunal and everything.
People around here really don’t like change, and if anyone finds out I’ve got an eight-foot slime in my studio, the Ladies’ Auxiliary will have me excommunicated by next week. ”
“I can be smaller,” I offer.
Her eyebrows rise. “How much smaller?”
I let my form condense, pulling my mass inward and downward.
My height drops from eight feet to six, to four, until I’m practically a puddle on the floor. I imagine if I had lungs, this would be how it’d feel like to exhale.
She stares. “Huh.”
I offer as I pull back up into my standing form, “I’ve squeezed into cracks and crawl spaces for much of my life. Hiding is easy.”
She hears something in that sentence.
I watch it land, watch the way her expression shifts from logistics to something softer, something that furrows the space between her eyebrows.
She opens her mouth, closes it, then takes another sip of coffee instead of asking whatever she almost asked.