SSCS 02: Installment 17 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 17 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
This time Mina did look up, the words ‘oh, grow a bit of fucking stomach’ poised on her lips. But Hedwin wasn’t even looking at her. He was eyeing the tea bucket like he was working up the nerve for something unthinkable, and where his cheeks had been piss yellow before now they showed splotchy bruises of red. That would have thrown Mina off if she’d grown up further inland, but she knew enough sea folk to see when one was nothing short of terrified.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 17: 20.1110
“Shitty-shit shit!” Leaving off with her hand, Mina sprang over to the door to peer out and around and up at the sky. “There’s not some other monster out there, is there?” It was all empty. Just the wind that blew in constant, and the horizon that looked like a grey smear. Maybe a bit of a storm tonight.
But now she was standing next to Hedwin she realized he was still gripping the doorway, or rather he had a hand still on it, with a bit of cloth he was rubbing up and down. And he was still eyeing the tea bucket, only now it was clear he was avoiding looking at Mina. “Hedwin?” she asked. Her hand was throbbing again, and her head was starting to throb in time to it, but something was wrong. Something else.
“I can’t stop,” Hedwin whispered at last. “It’s been over an hour and she still won’t let me stop.” And he shifted a little more outside, reaching higher up with his rag where there might have still been a bit of something crusted.
“Shit.” Hedwin was trapped in a loop.
That meant there were way too many things to do at once, and more things gone wrong today than even Mina had counted. “I’m sorry. You’re going to have to get back to it, Hedwin. I have to get her the tea. And I can’t do that until I’ve sorted my hand. And then the flowers still have to be sieved up proper.” And if the Other One was there when she brought the tea then she might end up caught in her own little loop. “But I’ll come straight back to you as soon as I can, and we’ll sort it out. I promise.”
Hedwin just nodded miserably and then was gone in a rush, no longer able to convince the compulsion that there was pig shit on the doorway that needed scrubbing when there was clearly plenty still to get to everywhere else. And Mina grit her teeth and went back to the sink, scrubbing at the gash in her hand vengefully, letting out some of her anger on herself since it was clear she was going to need all of the calm and proper she could muster once she left this kitchen.
In fact, she went on scrubbing a bit longer than she meant to until she realized that she was angry for Hedwin’s sake also. He was lazy, and most of the time he smelled even more like fish than the rest of the spire, but he never bullied her, not even a little, and she had thought he’d been safe from this. Though he was the older one, it was Mina had been here longer. And they’d both felt gran-Tom’s heart call, probably every other day. But this wasn’t the same. Not even close.
By now the cut on Mina’s hand was a jaggedy patch of pain, but there was most definitely nothing else left in the wound. She smeared a good amount of the medicine goop from the jar over it, and tied it around with a clean cloth, and turned her attention back to the tea bucket.
Oyster bells were thick and sharp smelling. The sharp had probably soaked into the tea oil by now, but definitely not the whole fragrance, not all of the soft, puffy fragrance that was in there. Easiest would be to just grind it all into a paste, but Mina had a vague memory from last time they’d had to use oyster bells – back when Mina was littler and gran-Tom still helped with making the tea – that the old priestess had been finicky about which bits got left in the tincture, and that some bits definitely had to be taken out. Ugh.
Wrinkling her nose, Mina lifted the lid off the bucket and pulled one of the oil soggy blossoms out of it, getting a strong, sharp puff of fragrance in the process that pinched her nose and made her eyes want to itch or water. The petals practically sucked the light right out of the room with their oily blackness, but they parted to show middle-flower bits that now almost glowed a deep magenta. The bits of stem and leaf still attached were still just a raggedy grey. If only Mina could go based on appearance, but that was definitely not the lot when it came to tea making. Actually normally she would have made Hedwin do the tasting, but…well.
Delicately, Mina bit into the fleshy middle bits first. And almost sneezed reflexively. That part definitely tasted the way that oyster bells smelled. Was she going to have to pinch out all of the middles, or could she have the petals too?
At first her teeth slipped trying to bite the petal; it was almost rubbery. But then her teeth sank in and…it tasted suddenly both sour and metallic and… And it tasted like another smell Mina had been assaulted with today. It tasted like kraken shit. Oyster-bell petals tasted like kraken shit smelled. Wasn’t that just something Mina had always wanted to know.
And what were the odds that by the time Mina got all of the stupid middle bits pinched out of the stupid scores of oyster bells she’d picked today, that the kitchen would smell like kraken shit too?
Mina so did not have time for this. But today…today was a day of shit. That was just the way it was.