Chapter 11
Domestic Creature
Maisie
We got through the batch. I don’t know how we did it, but we did. Oz’s touch… Well, magical is one way to put it. I feel like my body’s ten years younger, and with this newfound lack of pain and his extra hands, the Verdance order feels like it might actually be possible to fulfill now.
It’s early next morning, Oz is lying dormant on the couch, and I’m staring at my coffee maker unsure what to think about what’s developing between us.
Between me and Oz. Not the coffee maker.
He’s such a sensual creature. And me?
I thought I had lost all sensuality years ago.
The coffee maker starts with a gurgle when I hit the button, and I stand there in my oversized shirt, watching with unfocused eyes as the carafe begins to fill.
Through the kitchen window, the ridge is just starting to separate from the sky.
A thin line of paler dark along the top, the sage and creosote below still flattened into silhouette.
And there’s Gary.
He’s up on the ridge trail again, his outline sharp against the brightening east.
I can see his binoculars catching the first light, two small flares where his face should be.
He’s been doing this three, four mornings a week now.
Facing the valley.
Scanning the terrain the way you’d read a newspaper, methodical, left to right, back again.
I pour my coffee and lean against the counter.
Watch him watch.
Gary’s missing cat poster is still stapled to the mailbox cluster at the end of the road. One of his rescues, a gray-and-white shorthair named Captain, has been gone three months now.
The man has five cats.
Had five.
Losing one of them to something he can’t explain is the kind of wound Gary would fold up neatly and store somewhere behind his ribs, right next to whatever else he brought home from the service.
So that’s what he’s doing up there every morning.
He’s not the type to make a production out of grief.
He’s the type to set an alarm and climb a ridge.
I take a long drink of coffee.
It’s too hot but I do it anyway.
I understand his loneliness. If I lost Oz now, I’d be out there day and night searching until somebody forcibly stopped me.
I finish my coffee standing at the window.
The golf cart announces itself before I see it.
A high, whining motor sound that carries across the flat like a mosquito with ambitions, and I know exactly who it is because there’s only one person in Coyote Springs who drives a golf cart on a public road and considers it reasonable transportation.
“Oz,” I say as I quickly finish pouring my latest batch into molds.
He looks up from the pot he’s stirring.
“Oz, you need to hide. Right now.”
He straightens to his full height, which puts his head about six inches from the ceiling.
“What is it?”
“Mrs. Pritchett. She’s coming up the drive. She has a casserole.”
“How do you know she has a casserole?”
“Because she always has a casserole. Go. Living room, bedroom, I don’t care, just get away from the windows.”
He flows toward the hallway with a speed and silence that should be impossible for something his size.
I hear the soft, liquid sound of him rearranging himself somewhere deeper in the house, and then I’m wiping coconut oil off my hands with a dish towel, pulling my hair back into something that could pass for intentional, and heading for the front door.
I make it to the porch just as the golf cart crests the slight rise in my driveway.
Mrs. Pritchett is behind the wheel in a sun hat so wide it creates its own microclimate.
She’s wearing a floral blouse and khaki capris and an expression of determined neighborliness.
There is, predictably, a casserole dish balanced on the passenger seat, covered in foil.
“Maisie!” She waves with one hand while steering with the other, and the golf cart wobbles slightly on the gravel. “I was in the neighborhood.”
Of course she was.
She lives a quarter mile away.
She’s always in the neighborhood.
She is the neighborhood.
“Morning, Mrs. Pritchett.” I position myself at the top of the porch steps, which is the sweet spot between welcoming and barricade. “What brings you by?”
“Green chile chicken.” She hefts the casserole dish with both hands as she climbs out of the cart.
“I made a double batch and Harold can’t eat it anymore because of his reflux, and I thought, well, Maisie’s over there working herself to the bone on that big order, she’s probably living on crackers and coffee. ”
She’s mostly right.
“That’s so kind.” I come down two steps, which lets me intercept the casserole at arm’s length. “You really didn’t have to.”
“Nonsense. You need to eat more. Your grandmother would kill me if she saw the state you’re in. I need to fatten you up well before she gets back.”
Mrs. Pritchett hands over the dish and immediately cranes her neck to look past me at the front door, which I left open.
“Are you managing okay in there?”
“Getting through it. Ahead of schedule, actually.”
“All by yourself?”
The question is warm and loaded, delivered with the precise casualness of a seasoned interrogator.
I cough to try to cover up my initial hesitation. “Yeah. I mean, who else would be helping me?”
“Well, that’s what I told Gary. I said, that girl is going to work herself into the ground, and nobody’s checking on her.” She adjusts her hat and peers at the house again. “I thought I saw something move in there. Through your studio window. When I was coming up the drive.”
My fingers tighten on the casserole dish.
The foil crinkles.
“Drying rack,” I say. “I set one up by the window. The bars shift when they’re curing, and the rack wobbles. I’ve been meaning to shim the legs.”
“Hm.” Mrs. Pritchett processes this with the expression of someone filing information for future cross-reference. “Looked tall.”
“It’s a big rack. Four-tier.”
“Well, you’d know.”
She smiles with her whole face, warm and searching and approximately as subtle as a searchlight. “You look different. Something about your color.”
“Probably the mica powder. I’ve been working with a new shimmer line.”
“Hm,” she says again, and the syllable contains multitudes.
I walk Mrs. Pritchett back to the golf cart with the casserole braced against my hip, answering three more questions about the Verdance order and deflecting two about whether I’ve “thought about getting some help around the place.”
When the golf cart finally whines back down the drive and Mrs. Pritchett’s hat disappears below the rise, I stand in the yard holding a nine-by-thirteen dish of green chile chicken and breathe for what feels like the first time in four minutes.
Inside, I close the front door and lock it, set the casserole on the kitchen counter, and look around.
“Oz?”
Silence.
The living room is empty.
The couch holds nothing but my grandmother’s quilt and a stack of invoices.
The hallway is clear.
I look up.
He’s pressed flat against the ceiling, spread thin and wide like a second layer of plaster, his color shifted to match the off-white paint so precisely that I can only find him by the faint pulse of light traveling through his edges.
He covers most of the living room ceiling.
“That’s new,” I say.
He peels away from the ceiling in sections, like paint in reverse, flowing down the wall and reassembling into his humanoid shape by the time he reaches the floor.
“She has remarkable peripheral vision,” Oz says.
His surface is still cycling through residual camouflage tones, patches of off-white and ceiling-beige fading back to his usual teal.
“I could feel her attention pattern through the wall. She scans in a grid.”
“Yeah, she missed her calling at the NSA.”
A ripple of gold moves through his chest, amusement or relief or both.
I’m still amazed. “You matched my ceiling perfectly.”
“I can match most surfaces if I have a few seconds to sample the light. The texture is harder. Your ceiling has a stipple pattern from a roller, and I had to—”
“Oz.”
He stops.
“Thank you. For hiding. I know it’s—” I gesture vaguely at the space between us, the locked door, the casserole, the entirety of the situation. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”
“It’s very little to ask. The storage unit in Tucson had a wasp nest and a broken fluorescent light. This is much better.”
I laugh, and it comes out a little ragged.
Then I look at him standing there in my living room, eight feet of iridescent slime arranged into the shape of a person because that’s the shape he thinks I need him to be, and something clicks into place with the dull, obvious weight of a thing I should have noticed days ago.
He hasn’t really been outside since his shipping crate was moved from the delivery truck to my studio.
He’s been inside my house for days, moving between the studio and the kitchen and the living room couch, pressing himself against ceilings and rearranging my shelves, and I haven’t once thought about what that means for someone who spent decades in a cave and three years in a storage unit.
I brought him river stones like a souvenir from a world twelve feet past my front door.
“Oz. When was the last time you were properly outside?”
He considers the question with his whole body, a slow undulation moving from his feet upward.
“When I was being shipped, I suppose.”
“I don’t mean in the box. I mean outside. Sky above you, ground under you.”
The pause stretches.
His colors shift to something quieter, a muted indigo.
“Oh… It’s been some time. A few years, I think. After the Unveiling, I did go places. The mixers. Libraries. A few community panels. I walked through town sometimes.”
He says it carefully, like he’s measuring each word for accuracy.
“But after the woman at the mixer said what she said… that I look like a walking oil spill… I stopped going anywhere at all. That was three years ago.”
“Three years in the storage unit.”
“Yes.”
“And before all of that? Before the Unveiling, before the researchers?”
Something in him goes very still, and then very soft.
“The cave that was my home had an opening. A fissure, really. About fourteen inches wide at the broadest point. I could extend part of myself through it. Feel the air. The temperature difference between inside and outside. Rain, when it came. Twice a year, sometimes three times.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“I could feel the stars.”
“You can feel stars?”
“Yes. The radiant energy. The differential between a clear sky and a clouded one.”
I put the casserole in the fridge because I need something to do with my hands, and because if I stand here looking at him while he describes feeling stars through a fourteen-inch crack in limestone, I’m going to probably start ugly crying.
“Okay,” I say to the inside of the refrigerator. “Tonight. After dark, when Mrs. Pritchett’s inside and Gary’s done with his ridge patrol. I’m taking you outside.”
The silence behind me has a quality to it.
A density.
I close the fridge and turn around, and Oz is standing exactly where I left him, perfectly still in the way he goes still when he’s offering space for something, his surface lit from within by slow, rolling waves of gold so saturated they throw faint light onto the kitchen cabinets.
“You don’t have to,” he says.
“We’re going outside, Oz.”
He straightens at the seriousness in my tone, then, a moment later, softens.
“Okay. I’d like that.”