SSCS 02: Installment 18 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 18 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…
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.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 18: 20.1202
By the time Mina was done pinching apart oyster-bell blossoms the kitchen certainly smelled like something. Mixed with the smell of smoke from the hearth-fire it wasn’t quite so bad, and the sour notes were apparently just in the taste. Still. That taste hadn’t quite gone off Mina’s tongue yet. She kept wanting to stick it out and wipe it off on something, but there was nothing in the kitchen safe enough to try that on, certainly not her sleeves, which where the easiest things to reach with her hands otherwise occupied. She was still dusted down with kraken shit herself after all.
At least oyster-bell petals weren’t too tenacious. Mina’d dumped out the oily, black-glistening contents of the copper bucket, and plucked-and-tossed as fast as she could, not letting herself stop, even when the tip of her nose started to feel drippy and her mouth filled with a little bit too much icky saliva that she had nowhere convenient to spit. She kept going until it was all done. Then she scooped the mound of black, foul petals back into the copper bucket and marched straight out the door with it, and didn’t let herself stop and spit, either, until she’d flung it all out and over the cliff edge.
It wasn’t the best choice. If she ended up sent back down to gather more oyster bells, she’d probably run into them again, probably end up accidentally putting her hand down in a big goopy clump of them after they’d had the chance to start rotting on the rocks for a few days. But she couldn’t bring herself to throw them on the midden either. The pigs definitely wouldn’t mind, would gobble them up along with every other foul thing the midden offered, but just today…no. She needed them gone. She needed something gone.
Because the Other One certainly wouldn’t be gone, would it?
Grinding her teeth, Mina strode back into the kitchen, ground up the oyster-bell middle bits into a thick paste, quick as a trice, and wrapped up a healthy glop of the tincture into a linen for the tea. All that was left was to pour over the hot water from the kettle, and then set out to find gran-Tom.
This was not as straight-forward as it usually was, because it was no longer truly morning. A good two hours at least had passed from when Mina usually brought gran-Tom her tea, and her stomach was feeling pinched from not having had breakfast yet. It pinched into an even more viscous knot when she passed Hedwin and saw him standing on a rickety stool under one of the apple trees, trying to reach up to get at some pig shit spattered much, much higher than pig shit was ever meant to go. His cheeks weren’t showing any color now, but he wobbled as he reached, and Mina looked away before she could see whether or how soon weariness was going to make him come crashing down. This day was going to go on Mina’s list of really bad days, and until now she’d only actually had two. Those had been really, really bad days.
Gran-Tom was not in the library, where she would have been two hours ago, but she was in the observatory, where she usually went after. When Mina peaked her head through the doorway – just an arch without any actual door – she saw the old priestess leaned back in her favorite chair, apparently staring up through the glass at the empty, grey expanse of sky overhead. For a moment it reminded Mina of when she was little. She’d just come to the spire, and she’d asked gran-Tom why she stared at the empty sky for hours on end. Gran-Tom had reached out with gentle tentacles and her smooth-knuckled grey-green hand and tugged Mina over to her. I’m looking at the stars, she’d said, and for an instant, just that one time, Mina had been able to see what she meant, as though the grey layer of clouds was but the finest of gossamer veils and did little to obscure the golden brilliance of the stars peeking through it.
This time, though, when gran-Tom reached out her tentacles, they wrapped around Mina’s wrist, hard and cold, and the warped voice that hissed from her shell-thin lips made a shudder of dread crawl over Mina’s flesh. “Why are you late, Mina-precious, Mina-the-contrary-and-naughty-one?”