Chapter 8
Supply Run
Maisie
Morning light finds me the way it always does: too early, too bright, and aimed directly at my left eye through the gap in the curtains I keep meaning to fix.
I blink against it.
The quilt is tangled around my legs.
And I feel unusually comfortable.
The couch cushion beside me is warm.
I turn my head, and Oz is there.
He’s flattened himself into a low and broad shape across the cushion. His glow has dimmed almost to nothing, and the pulse I fell asleep to has slowed to something glacial, one beat every few seconds.
Asleep. Or whatever slimes do instead of sleeping.
I ease myself upright, and my lower back twinges once, then settles.
That’s new.
Usually it takes me fifteen minutes of stretching and one deeply undignified groan before I can stand fully upright in the morning.
I look at him again.
The warm cushion. The mineral-cool scent of him clinging to the quilt.
“Don’t make it weird,” I whisper to myself, and head to the bathroom.
By the time I come out, teeth brushed and hair twisted into a claw clip, Oz has risen to something closer to sitting.
His form is loosely humanoid from the waist up, still pooled into the couch below that, and those gold-threaded eyes track me as I cross to the kitchen.
“Morning,” I say, filling the kettle.
“Morning.”
His voice is thicker when he first wakes up. Slower, like something surfacing from deep water.
I set the kettle on the burner and lean my hip against the counter.
“I need to run into town. Grab some lye, coconut oil, and labels. Maybe parchment if Crawford’s has any left.” I tick the list off on my fingers. “Should be an hour, hour and a half tops.”
Part of me wishes he could come with me, that I could show him my town.
It’s clear we both know that’s not happening.
“I’ll be here,” he says.
Crawford’s Supply sits on the corner of Main and Pueblo, a flat-roofed cinder block building with a hand-painted sign that’s been sun-bleached into a suggestion of its original colors. The parking lot holds five vehicles, which qualifies as a rush.
I pull in next to Gary’s tan pickup and kill the engine, and I spot my neighbors before I’m out of the truck.
Mrs. Pritchett is standing near the entrance with a shopping cart full of terracotta pots, one hand on the cart handle while the other holds Gary’s phone screen close to her face.
She’s wearing a denim shirt with embroidered cacti on the collar and a sun hat wide enough to qualify as municipal shade infrastructure.
Gary stands beside her in his usual posture, arms crossed loosely, ball cap pulled low, five o’clock shadow that might just be a permanent feature at this point.
“Maisie!” Mrs. Pritchett spots me before I’ve taken three steps.
The woman has peripheral vision that would put a bird of prey to shame.
“Come look at this. Gary’s game camera caught something.”
“Morning, Deborah. Morning, Gary.”
Gary lifts two fingers off his crossed arm in a wave. “Maisie.”
“He claims it’s javelina,” Mrs. Pritchett says, thrusting Gary’s phone toward me.
The screen shows a grainy nighttime image of something low and bristled trundling past a fence post.
“But look at the size of it. The proportions are wrong. The head-to-body ratio.”
“It’s a javelina, Deb,” Gary says.
“Since when do javelinas have a two-foot shoulder span?”
“Since the camera lens warps everything at that distance. You know this. We’ve talked about this.”
“We’ve talked about it, and you’ve been wrong, and I’ve been right, and then you say ‘let’s agree to disagree,’ which is what people say when they’ve lost.” She turns to me with bright, expectant eyes. “Maisie. What do you think? Javelina or cryptid?”
I take the phone and squint at the photo.
It is, beyond any reasonable doubt, a javelina.
A big one, sure, but the desert grows them sturdy.
“That’s a javelina,” I say.
“Traitor,” Mrs. Pritchett says cheerfully. She reclaims Gary’s phone and tucks it back into his shirt pocket with a pat. “Fine. When it turns out to be something else, I’ll accept your apologies in writing.”
Gary catches my eye and gives me the smallest possible smile.
We’ve both been on the receiving end of Mrs. Pritchett’s investigations enough times to know the drill.
“Well, then. What brings you in early?” Mrs. Pritchett asks, turning her full attention to me with the seamless pivot of a woman who treats every conversation as a potential deposition. “You’re usually a weekend shopper.”
The fact that she knows my shopping schedule should alarm me more than it does.
“Ran out of a few things. Big order came in.”
“Oh, business is picking up? That’s great to hear.” Her face lights up, and I remember why I like her despite her keen-eyed scrutiny. “How many units?”
I give them a rough estimate.
Gary whistles, low and quiet. “You’re doing that alone?”
Mrs. Pritchett’s eyes narrow by a fraction.
Just a fraction.
The investigative fraction.
“That’s a lot of production for one person,” she says.
“Sure is,” I laugh awkwardly, trying to think of any way out of her investigation.
“Speaking of managing things alone,” I say, turning to Gary, “how’re Gram’s boys doing?
I keep meaning to drive out and check on them myself, but last time Basil spat on my good flannel and I’m still holding a grudge. ”
Gary’s mouth twitches as he imagines the scene: Me, vastly outnumbered and outgunned against Gram’s three alpacas.
“Basil’s fine,” he reports. “Got out twice last week. Barnaby brought him back both times.”
“Barnaby’s a saint.”
“Bartholomew watched from the hill and did nothing.”
“That tracks.”
For a moment, I think I’m in the clear, but then Mrs. Pritchett slides back into our conversation like she had never left it. “But you’re doing all that work by yourself?”
The woman has a homing instinct for unanswered questions.
“That’s a lot of lifting, honey. A lot of stirring. Are your hands holding up?”
“I’m managing,” I say, and smile, and change the subject with the practiced ease of someone who’s been deflecting Deborah Pritchett’s curiosity for four years. “Those pots for the barrel cactus starts?”
This time, she allows the change in topics. Her face shifts into vendor mode, and she launches into a detailed account of her propagation timeline and the new gravel mix she’s testing.
Gary takes the opportunity to excuse himself with a nod.
“Tell the boys I said hi,” I call after him.
He raises a hand without turning around. “Will do.”
Mrs. Pritchett finishes her gravel monologue, squeezes my arm, and tells me to eat more, which is her standard farewell.
I watch her wheel her cart toward her truck, terracotta pots rattling, sun hat blazing in the morning light.
Then I push through Crawford’s front door into the familiar smell of concrete dust and machine oil.
The supply list is folded in my back pocket. Lye, coconut oil, labels, parchment.
Fifteen minutes, in and out.
I grab a basket and head for the back aisle, already running the production math.
Four batches before noon, labels by three.
My fingers brush the edge of a shelf display as I pass, and I think about Oz’s hands.
The way his surface gives and firms.
The way he held a pizza slice like an artifact.
I wonder if he’d like the hardware store.
All these textures, all these materials.
Eighty years in a cave and a storage unit…
The lye is where it always is, bottom shelf, behind the drain cleaner.
I grab two containers and check the expiration dates out of habit.
Coconut oil is one aisle over, and Crawford’s only carries the bulk tubs, which is fine because I’ll burn through five pounds this week alone.
I wedge the tub into the basket and feel the handle creak under the weight.
Labels take longer.
They’ve rearranged the paper goods section again, which in a store this size means someone moved one shelf unit three feet to the left and threw off my entire spatial memory.
I find the blank label sheets behind a display of binder clips and grab two packs.
Parchment paper, mercifully, is right where it should be.
I’m done.
Everything on the list, fifteen minutes flat.
I should go to the register, pay, drive home, and start the first batch while the morning’s still cool enough to work with the studio door open.
Instead I drift.
Crawford’s has a miscellaneous section near the front, a rotating wire rack and two shelves of whatever Jim Crawford thought might sell that quarter.
Bird feeders, flashlights, a truly ambitious selection of drawer handles.
There’s a basket of river stones on the bottom shelf, smooth and palm-sized, sold as doorstops or paperweights or whatever excuse people need to buy a nice rock.
I pick one up.
It’s gray with a vein of white quartz running through the center, cool and heavy in my hand, worn silk-smooth by water that hasn’t touched it in years.
I turn it over.
The quartz catches the fluorescent light and throws a faint prismatic line across my thumb.
I wonder how he’d like holding this? Would it be presumptuous or offensive for me to think a creature from a cave would enjoy a nice rock?
I grab five of them, each one a different texture and color.
At the register, Jim Crawford rings me up with the efficient silence of a man who has never once asked a customer why they’re buying what they’re buying.
I appreciate Jim Crawford more than he will ever know.
He bags the lye and oil separately, stacks the labels and parchment, and bags the rocks without a single question.
I pay cash because the card reader has been “temporarily out of service” since February, and Jim shows no signs of urgency about the situation.
I carry my bags out into the morning heat, which has already climbed past comfortable and is working its way toward punishing.
The parking lot shimmers.
Gary’s truck is gone.
Mrs. Pritchett’s golf cart is nowhere to be seen.
A yellow dog I don’t recognize is sleeping in the shade of the building’s overhang, one ear twitching at flies.
I load the bags into the truck bed, wedging the coconut oil tub against the wheel well so it won’t slide.
The river stones sit in their own bag on the passenger seat, and I look at them for a second too long before I start the engine.
I’m bringing him gifts.
I’ve only known him for a day, yet I want him to feel welcomed and appreciated.
I pull out of the lot and point the truck toward home, windows down, dry air rushing through the cab and lifting the hair off the back of my neck.
The road stretches out ahead of me, familiar and empty, and I drive a little faster than I need to.