Annie CVI: Toys

(Chronological index: Dating)



Denise called ahead and Ray met her at Baptist hospital. It was a follow-up to the surgery that had been necessary on their first not-date.

Ray was hazy on the details, but he showed up where he was commanded to be. Denise's specialist wouldn't let Pet in the room during the examination so his presence gave her and Annie a chance to visit.

Ray sat calmly in the OB-GYN waiting room, reading his paperback and pretending he wasn't the only man in the room.

Denise smiled and held the sylphs, waiting for her name to be called.

Pet and Annie talked. Mostly Pet. She was describing Denise's recovery and Annie listened. "And she was napping quite a bit at first, from the pain killers, though she didn't become addicted because they kept switching the prescription every week and while the old drugs were still in her and the new ones hit it was anybody's guess how she'd act and I talked her out of a having ice cream for dinner on one day."

"Did she get mad later?" Annie asked.

"No," Denise replied. " I thought it was a pretty good idea, that day."

All three women were aware of their audience. Ray was behind his invisible shield of manliness, but many of the women there had children. All of them were staring at the sylphs on Denise's lap.

Pet ran out of things to talk about and they started looking around the room. Annie saw a child's toy that drew her attention.

"Pet, did you ever play on one of those?" Pet looked. Then tilted her head. Then shook it.

"Come on!" Annie jumped to Ray's knee and slid down the leg of his pants. Pet followed. The toy by the window was a set of wires in primary colors, curving and twisting over a wooden base. And each wire had colorful blocks that slid along it, like chubby beads of a variety of shapes.

At the moment, some orderly individual had moved all the blocks to stack on one side of their respective wires.

"What do you do?" Pet asked.

"You push them up there," Annie explained, "then watch them slide down the other side."

She dropped her voice. "And those staring kids keep quiet a little longer. Mothers will sing our praises."

"Oh." Pet touched a block. It spun freely. She knelt to try to lift the entire string and raised them slowly.

Annie took a running leap and grabbed a different wire. She spun around like a gymnast, wires bending as she swung into position. Two feet on a spiral and one hand on a loop, she had one hand free to lift the blocks further along. She slid them one at a time until the entire stack was past her reach.

Pet giggled and swung up further along. Pushing the blocks through a loop-de-loop was slower, but she managed it. A little shove at the other side slid them all through a slow spiral to the base again.

By the time Denise went in to her appointment, a semicircle of children surrounded the wire toy and the acrobats upon it.

One wire spiraled crazily up into the air, above any possible supports. Annie got the string of blocks a few inches higher than her head, then couldn't lift any more. Pet couldn't find a place to stand and relay any of them. They stood and stared, trying to figure the solution.

A little girl got up and ran to her mother, overcome by the suspense. She hugged a familiar leg and looked back over her shoulder with wide eyes.

Annie lowered the blocks and stretched, not incidentally looking over towards Ray. He didn't appear to look up from his paperback. But his forefinger stretched away from the cover.

She wasn't sure if he was pointing or counting. One? The overhead light?

Then he flicked his finger, in the exact manner of one snapping popcorn kernels across the table, trying to hit a defenseless little sylph with them.

"Ahhhh," she muttered. She continued stretching, moving back away from the wires. "Pet? Move over onto that zig-zag."

"Okay, Annie," the blonde said, moving obediently. "But I can't reach from here, I mean I can barely reach the outer spiral but-"

Annie didn't listen closely. She was carefully climbing the blocks themselves. Feet on the highest cube, back to the yellow wire, she bent knees and grabbed the top bead. It was a green oval, kinda like a watermelon in her hands.

She rose and hefted, hefting the oval straight up as fast as she could. The children cheered as it shot up, popped over the hump and spun around the inner spiral. Pet grabbed the wire over her head and leaned over, slapping it as it slowed down. Then she slapped it again as it passed her.

It went through some wiggles and dropped to the base. "Cool!" Pet shouted.

"Ready for another one!" Annie shouted. "Fire in the hole!" They worked their way down the stack, to the shouts and giggles of the audience.

When all the blocks were on the far side, Pet swung down and offered a high five to her partner. They then walked slowly over to Ray's foot. He reached down and lifted them up to his lap. They flopped down, exhausted.

"That was fun. And you are SO smart," Pet told Annie.

"She is," Ray agreed. He put his book down and started rubbing backs.

Annie purred. She thought about credit where due. But she really was smart. She'd have figured it out eventually. And Ray had probably been thinking about the tall wire while they were getting the other ones out of the way.

So she accepted Pet's accolade graciously. "And you were like a circus performer, Pet."

"Really?"

"Really. Up, down, over, across, flipping and catching and sliding and climbing..."

"And," Ray said, "you figured out what Annie wanted without her needing to explain it much."

"Oooh, that's right," Annie said. She held up a hand and they slapped fives again.

Ray worked down their backs to the butts and thighs. They stopped congratulating each other and just moaned.

He was still at it when Denise came back out. "They look happy," she said.

"Annie has me well trained at sylph rubs," he said.

"Oh. How are you at larger scale efforts?"

"Out of practice but willing to learn," he said. He slid a limp rag doll into Denise's hands and lowered the other sylph into his shirt.

"Hey!" Pet protested from his pocket.

"Whoops," he said, rising and taking Denise's arm. Kids waved as they walked out.





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