Carrying On




So, I was just pointing the remote at the TV when there was a knock on the back door.

A tiny knock. I thought of stories Mom used to read to us as I jumped back down to the floor. A tiny little knock, a tiny bit up from the bottom of the tiny door for tiny people to go outside…

I didn’t go to the door, though. There could be anything on the other side of that thing. I went to the sliding glass door a few inches away from the sylph door and tapped on that.

A sylph came over to see me.

He was naked, he looked scared. “Oh, thank God! You have to help me! My mate is in labor! She’s over by the ditch! Do you know anything about babies?”

I looked him over. He was bearded, his hair long and unkempt, and he was covered with scratches. Very convincing. But his ribs didn’t show. And there were no partially healed scratches. And zero scars.

“Who are you?” I asked, mouth against the glass.

“I’m Hunter!” he said. “Please! My mate!”

I shook my head. “Never mind the story, who are you really?”

“Story?”

“You’re pretty well fed for a sylph living in the wild,” I pointed out.

“We’ve been, um, lucky in scavenging…” he tried.

“It’s not just your weight, you’re standing tall, your hair’s full, your eyes are bright… You’re getting all your vitamins. Balanced meals in regular frequency. And why call her your ‘mate?’ Is that your idea or your Master’s?”

“We mated, we have a child. Coming, we have a child coming,” he said. That reminded him of the script. “You have to come help me with the baby!”

“Boy or girl?” I asked quickly.

“Boy!” he replied.

“Nope,” I said. “If you’re in the wild, you have no idea of the coming gender.” Then again, my mother had me in a state-of-the-art hospital and she STILL didn’t know my gender. Then, and to the day she kicked me out.

“And you were born a human,” I said. “So the chances are, you’d call her your wife, not mate. That’s just what you or your owner thinks feral sylphs call each other.”

“I was born a sylph!” he insisted, pounding the glass. “I was born in the wild!”

“You’re circumcised,” I said. He deflated, an outrage balloon popped by a pin. “Look, go get your story straight, come back tomorrow and try again, ‘kay? I have dramas to watch.”

He started to cry. Quite pitiful it was. But he’d been trying to kidnap me, so my sympathy muscle remained relaxed.

Then the dog showed up. A Doberman, a great, big, beautiful thing, gliding gracefully into view like a brown and tan warship. He saw Hunter and focused on the little man. Then he went stiff and started growling.

“Let me in!” Hunter begged. “Let me in, he’ll eat me!”

“Look,” I said. “You probably need to take something back to your Master or Mistress, right?”

“Yeah,” he said, dropping the panic.

“Well, tell them that sylphs can hear the dog whistle.”

I leaned to the glass, locked eyes with him, and said, "Dear diary. Today, a lousy no good lying sylph appeared at the back door, trying to play on my better principles to entice me to come outside and help a distressed sylph. But since he was a lousy no good liar, I have to assume that there's no pregnant sylph, and that he's working for some human who will NOT be giving me candy or taking me away to The Land Of Sylphs. Black market is my guess. That'd actually be the good news option. They could also be Humans Firsters, out to punish us uppity sylphs."

He had the grace to look ashamed. Then I turned around. 'Say Yes To The Dress' reruns were on opposite Supersylph reruns and this was my only chance to watch it without begging. And while there WERE things Ghirardelli would beg for, explaining WHY I wanted to watch SYTTD was not worth it.

I walked to the table. The dog started barking, the liar started pounding the glass. I turned on the TV and upped the volume.

Eventually, the barking and the banging stopped. I settled in for a binge. A bean bag chair the size of a coaster, feet propped up on the remote, poppers in both hands, we were set for some viewing of my kinda porn.

And then there was a scream. If it was a fake, it was a wonderfully rehearsed fake. I stood and looked out back. Hunter was staggering across the patio, holding a bloody hand to his shoulder.

As an artist, I had to admire the let’s-assume-it’s-fake wound. Right in front, nothing lethal, but it would weaken his arm for fighting.

Quite a bit of blood was spread across his chest, I noted. He collapsed a foot or so away from the sylph door. His swoon was pretty authentic looking, too.

Then the blood spurted, arcing across the cement… Fake wounds don’t usually spurt like an artery.

I ran for the TV cabinet, shouting out to God to go find Magic and bless her little heart. We’d had sylph-sized medical accessories in the house since the first day I came here.

Master just assumed there’d be a need some day, and took precautions. Magic insisted that there be first-aid kits stationed all over the house, any place a sylph might want to get a little help without waiting for Conrad to come home and open the medicine locker.

So there was a kit in the living room, only slightly out of my way to the back door.

Grabbing that, I was out the door and over to the fallen sylph in a moment’s time.

I had a fistful of gauze and I went to pack it onto the wound. “What happened?”

“I’m being punished,” he gasped. “For failing to entice you out where my owner could…” He seemed faint.

“Well, your owner’s an asshole,” I muttered.

Then part of my mind was asking, “He went back to Owner, got punished, and then released? Let GO? Wouldn’t he be kept to suffer?”

That’s when Hunter brushed me off and sat up, holding a shard of shattered glass in his fist. I noticed that the part he held was cutting his own hand.

I thought, I swear, on seeing that my first thought was that I had another bandage in the kit for his hand.

“You ARE coming with me!” he hissed. Blood was still pouring out of the wound. I realized he’d cut himself, rather than go back and admit failure to his kidnapping superior.

“Well, if it means that much to you,” I said. “You want me to patch you up, first?” I asked, raising the bloody gauze. He hesitated. I stabbed a finger into the hole, digging as deep as I could, bouncing off a bone in there somewhere. He screamed and dropped the knife.

I spun around to run for the door. I slipped in the mud and saw the cement coming up to say hi.

That was pretty much it for the afternoon….

-----

I woke up, which was probably more than I deserved. I was curled up on my side, my nose hurt and my face tender.

I moved a bit, but nothing else hurt. I sat up, finding that I was in a cage in a garage. There were no garages in the condos where we lived, so I’d been carried…somewhere.

The lights were dim and my eyes were swollen, but I eventually got a look around. I was on a workbench, just like any garage you’ve ever seen. Tools here and there, though everything was at least a foot away from the cage. Nothing in reach.

There were car cleaning products and lawn care and a bike and tools and a chainsaw and recycling bins and garbage…

And at the other end of the workbench, Hunter sat in another cage. He just sat there, staring through the bars.

A shelf behind him held a bunch of sylph cages. They looked empty.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Are you okay?” He looked surprised.

“Why do you care?” he called back.

“I went out to patch you up, did you get some of the bandages? Did someone stop the bleeding?” I asked.

“Yeah, Young Master did,” Hunter said. He stood up and grabbed the bars. “Why do you care?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” I snarled. “YOU were the one that got me outside by playing on my sympathy. I’m still sympathetic. No sylph should die if it can be helped.”

I might kick his spleen up into his nasal cavity, given half a chance, but he shouldn’t bleed to death. Amelia would be disappointed.

And you’ve ever met her, you know why I don’t want her disappointed.

If you haven’t met her, or disappointed her, consider yourself lucky and hold tight to your ignorance.

Anyway, I was looking around the room. “Are we the only sylphs here, Hunter?”

“Yes,” he said. “Everyone else has been sold.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “Who are they going to sell me to?”

He shrugged. “Depends on who’s offering.”

“More wonderful,” I muttered. I didn’t ask any further. I could imagine the possible markets. I was much too small for blood sports, but I might be useful as a training dummy.

And guys that fed sylphs to their pets wanted small and weak, they didn’t want you to have a chance to hurt their precious Diablo or Terminator.

And the companies that wanted sylphs to test their new truffle flavors weren’t using black-market traffickers to fill the tasty, pampered billets.

Things did not look good for little Delli. Dammit, I had JUST about gotten life to where I wanted it.

Electra was right about perfect; Cher needed only a bit more tweaking on whispering sweet nothings; Conrad was joking less and dancing more, so we’d call that progress towards.

And if Magic would stop making my heart stop, it’d be the perfect, perfect life. At least, perfect for a sylph. I mean, if I had to sylph, I could have had a much worse life.

And now, I looked around the room I was in. Well, now I was going to get one of those worse lives. For as long as it would last.

Damn, but this sort of thing made Master’s atheism understandable. Not any more satisfying, but understandable.

I gave a brief prayer, pointing that out. I wasn’t threatening to withhold my faith, you understand. I know HE did. I was just pointing out, this would be a REALLY good time to reward the faith. Because I couldn’t worship Him if I was dead.

That’s when I realized this was an attached garage. A door opened, and I glimpsed a kitchen. Two men were coming out.

One was talking. “And I got her from that house you’ve had your eyes on, the condo on Castle Hill!”

“Really?” the other man asked, his excitement clear. “You got Electra? Is she hurt? Is she marked? We can sell pictures of her naked before we sell her to - Aw, shit.”

He was less excited when he saw me. “That’s not Electra!”

“It’s not?”

“Nope!” I shouted.

Two yokels were looking down on me. They both wore Western shirts, which I like, and gigantic belt buckles, which I associate with developmental problems.

They had buzz cuts and weathered faces. The one who’d thought I might be Electra looked a teensy bit more retarded than the other, but it was close.

The one who hadn’t been involved in my capture punched the workbench with his fist.

“Man, you’ve really fucked up, Tommy,” he spat.

“What? It’s not like I let Electra get away?”

“It’s EXACTLY like that, Tommy!” Not Tommy slapped my cage, sliding me a few inches across the workbench. I grabbed the bars to keep standing.

“Now, Electra’s owner is going to be more careful about his tinies! Better security, and no leaving them alone, and probably bricking over their back door!”

Well, not that. The sylph door is part of an insert in the sliding door. So they had some idea, but not intimate knowledge of our house.

But, okay, if my sacrifice made Electra safer, I was okay with that. Thumbs up to God for that one.

“Damn,” Tommy apologized.

“GOOD!” I shouted.

“You shut up!” Not Tommy shouted to me.

“Or what, you’ll take me away from my home, sell me to a guy with a pet snake?”

Not got a wicked smile and reached for the cage door. “There’s a lot we can do before you end up in the feeding cage,” he said. “You know, you don’t have to be able to run for guys like Vinny to be amused. As long as you can scream.”

I tried to avoid his hand. It wasn’t possible, and it wasn’t a rational reaction. I just really, really didn’t want him to grasp me right then.

But there was nowhere to go.

And this asshole had handled a lot of sylphs. I was pinned to the bars, then in his tight grasp, without ever having a chance to bite him.

I kicked and screamed, but he probably just liked that.

There was a vice on the end of the workbench. He held me over it while he opened it up.

“Say, we crush each of your little feet, you mouthy bitch,” he whispered. “Will you shut up, then? Aside from the screaming, that is?”

“Good one, Wallace,” Tommy laughed.

“Or,” Wallace mused. “We could just put her head in the vice and listen to her beg us to save her.”

“That’ be funny!”

So, knowing my mouth, I could see I was going to die in that garage, probably that evening.

And you know the worst bit?

The pain wasn’t what tripped me off line. I’ve been in pain before. Beatings and surgery and miscalculations on medication and being disinherited.

But… What I was thinking, as he cranked on the vice, was faces. Faces of the family. My family. My REAL family, of the last seventeen years.

They’d think I ran off when I had the chance. Cher would feel abandoned. Or worry that even after six hours of discussion, I still resented his wanting porn.

Electra wouldn’t know what she’d done wrong, but she’d take it personally. It’d be, in her eyes, somehow her fault for failing me.

Magic would swear off that death-defying leap from shelf to shelf, thinking I’d finally made good on my threats to stop her…somehow.

And Master… Conrad would just be confused. That was just too easy to achieve. He’d be rethinking every day, trying to figure out what he’d said, or failed to say, or done.

So, no.

No, this was intolerable. Four faces floated in front of me, all sad. And all wrong. They’d never know I was abducted, that I hadn’t run away.

So if there was a God, then goddamn it! NOW was a good time for Him to come rescue the people I’d prayed for night after night!

I worked one hand free of asshole’s fist and slapped him.

He laughed, of course, it’d hurt more if he dropped a fountain pen on his hand. The laughter made me see red, though.

So I slapped him again.

And there was this… Light. Red light. Like a bright flash of fire.

And the hand holding me disappeared. I mean, just poof! I fell about, I dunno, six or nine inches to the floor. Felt like that, anyway.

I landed on my feet and stood there.

“What the fuck!?” Tommy screamed. I looked up at him. He wasn’t nearly as tall as I thought he was. Or anyway, he didn’t loom as big. Maybe it was my anger.

I just pointed my hands at him, like Iron Man firing his repulsors. The red light flashed and Tommy disappeared.

His clothes folded down onto the floor.

And then I heard screaming… High pitched screaming. Tiny little screaming…



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Index

22. Doting On

24. Hanging On