The End


It was a year to the day after graduation. I pulled into a driveway and picked up my sylph.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a house on the outer outskirts of Boise,” I said. I kept her close to my right side so she wouldn’t see the For Sale sign next to the walk on my left.

“Is that a For Sale sign I see in the window?” she asked.

I spun around in shock. “Why, so it IS!” She clutched my thumb and thought about barfing from the spinning.

“Is a realtor waiting for us?” she asked after a few deep breaths.

“No, she gave me the key for the weekend,” I said. I showed her the key. And realized it had the realtor’s business name on the key fob. Well, it wasn’t like I was going to fool her for long, anyway.

I opened the door and went in.

I put her down on the ground as soon as I shut the door.

“It’s not big,” I said.

“Sez you,” she shouted, running for the hallway.

I walked through by myself, imagining living here without the realtor babbling in my ear about schools and children and shopping.

There was no dining room, but the kitchen had room for a table. One bedroom was on this floor. And the upstairs-

“Hey!” I looked up. “Did you know there’s a LOFT up here?” The second floor only existed over the kitchen and the downstairs bedroom. The fourth wall didn’t exist, so it looked out over the two-story tall living room.

Electra was standing at the edge of the loft, looking down at me from ten feet off the floor.

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said.

“Would this be the bedroom?” she asked.

I shrugged. “The bedroom’s behind the kitchen. That’s your room.” She squealed and disappeared.

My cousin, Lonny, had taken us in happily, but his dog had never quite figured out what Electra was, or how he felt about her. Her ‘room’ for the two months we’d lived there had been to cower in her carrier most of the time.

In our current apartment, she walked around with a small but sharp axe in case of silverfish.

This would be more room under her control than even the basketball field had been. “COURT!” she shouted from somewhere in the distance.

I smiled and started to design an elevator for the corner, in addition to the stairway off the hallway.

Then she was back at the edge. Okay, FIRST we’d have to install a sylph-sized safety rail. “How can we afford this?”

“It’s special,” I said.

“Murder Suicide?” she guessed. “Headlines in the paper with pictures of the first responder throwing up in the grass?”

“If you look out the window, you can see the cemetary where they used to bury the criminals they hung at the Penitentiary.”

“Oh.” She thought about that while I went up the stairs. By the time I got there she was up on the sill of the only window on that floor. “That it?”

“Yes.”

She shrugged. “Their victims would likely be the ghosts. Those guys saw their deaths coming. Good or bad, it’s not like they’re lost in a confused limbo.”

----

When we moved our few possessions in, she was up on the loft with a little bullhorn to tell me and my cousins and classmates where everything went.

We paid the workers with pizza and beer, and then finally we were all alone in our house.

My name was the only one on the mortgage, of course. But there’d be no TV deal without Electra, so I had no problems considering it ‘ours.’

Anyway, I picked up the boxes and crusts and bottles, then settled onto the fold-away couch that was going to be my bed for a while.

She sat on the edge of her carrier and smiled at me.

“So, are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.

“That we need to do…something… To actually christen this place?”

“To make it ours,” I said.

“To make it home,” she nodded.

I reached out my hand and she took it.

Once more, we played as a team. But by this time, Belly Dancer could hold his own with Electrifer, even in his wooden Dutch klompen.



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Index

69. Graduation