Neighbors

[wolfs_daughter]

Spring was here. The change in temperature had happened, and while there were no shade trees to sprout green leaves, there was a sparse offering of grass in some places. Even in the desert, things could grow.

Echo had gotten the job at the daycare center. She'd lucked out and they hadn't wanted someone with a teaching certificate, just someone who was good with children and could drive the communal van to take them on the occasional outing. The job wasn't going to make her rich, but she enjoyed it and it got her out of the house.

She'd finished dinner, and was now contemplating a run out in the desert. She'd kept up with the practicing, and shifting didn't hurt anymore. Searchlight was so quiet at night that she no longer worried about being spotted. One of the benefits of living around so many retirees was that they all seemed to go to bed before it got dark.

There were two lawn chairs on the trailer's front yard, and a plastic table for drinks and sometimes sandwiches. Echo didn't really have visitors, but sometimes one of her close neighbors would stop by to talk.

Life was pretty good.

Comments

[dori_bell]

A fly was trapped in the web.

Dori inched closer and inspected the buzzing insect, her eyes widening as its wings flapped in the silken strands. Zzzt. Zzzt. The spider was nowhere to be seen, but its future meal couldn’t escape its sticky bonds. If she’d had a pencil, Dori might have poked and prodded the bug, or released it if the mood struck. However, on a night’s walk all she carried was her house key on a chain around her neck.

The breeze picked up. A strand of her hair wafted into the web. She slipped it free.

This scene took place in front of a trailer – not hers – in the space between a mailbox and a light pole, where the web had been strung. When she was done looking, Dori took a step back and kicked a rock across the asphalt. The noise echoed in the quiet street.

She lived alone in Searchlight; big brother had taken to the city in the way of an extrovert, craving people, craving activity and movement. She preferred minimalism. Here, people did not notice the buzzards that sometimes circled her trailer roof, attracted to the sense of death rather than a smell of rotting flesh. Here, it was understandable for plants to wilt and brown in her sandy yard. Neighbors considered her a peculiar but harmless girl, pretty when she smiled, and she kept her proclivities to a dull roar.

Now moving again, she noticed a young woman in her yard. Dori lifted a hand in a soft wave.

[wolfs_daughter]

The wave caused Echo to lift her hand as a reflex action, and she considered getting closer. She was slowly becoming more adept at interacting with people, and while her shell hadn't fallen completely away, it was cracked in more than a few places. Besides, she thought she recognized the blonde.

The hybrid's shoes made gritting noises as she crossed the yard, and when she reached the mailbox she checked it out of habit. Empty. There was the faintest scent of flowers on the breeze.

"You must have just moved in," she said as she studied the other woman. "This place is so tiny I think I've run int everyone who lives here at least twice."

[dori_bell]

Dori brought her clasped hands to rest in front of her skirt. “No. I’ve been here longer than you,” she said in a gentle rejoinder. “You just didn’t see me. It isn’t your fault. I’m reclusive. See?”

She pointed at a trailer down the sun-weathered street. It was clean and well-kept, but without anything to recommend it except a wind chime made of softly clacking wood. Dori turned watery eyes on the freckled face of her neighbor. “I remember when you moved in. You brought everything in your van. You have a friend who rides a motorcycle. It’s loud,” she added, an afterthought.

[wolfs_daughter]

"Yeah, I've been here for about a year now. Looks like it's gonna be getting hot again soon."

The van the other woman had mentioned had just been washed that afternoon, and the last of the sun's rays cast long shadows across the yard where it sat. Echo looked at the blonde's eyes, and her head tilted slightly to the left.

"I like the wind chime," she said. "Did you make it yourself?"

[dori_bell]

“Yes.” Dori gave no other details about the crafting process; she likened the sound of the sticks to dry bones clicking together. She knew that wood would be better received than bleached skeletons dangling from bits of twine… a far less creepy alternative. “I could make you one,” she offered. “Metal chimes don’t take the elements well out here.” She looked at the sky and thought about the summertime. Her first summer in Nevada was only two years prior so she remembered the surprise of the heat. That kind of temperature had to be experienced to be believed.

“Before, I lived in Chicago with my brother. He doesn’t like it here, I can tell. He lies to save my feelings.”

[wolfs_daughter]

"I had the lady from Peddler's Rest make me a dream-catcher," Echo replied, waving vaguely in the direction of her small bedroom, where she'd hung the object in the sole window. "Well, she really had a friend make it, but I couldn't have done it myself."

Was she babbling? She didn't have enough practice with casual chit chat to know when to stop, so she was careful about looking for social cues. "I came down from Seattle. I like this climate better. Do you live with your brother?"

[dori_bell]

“No, he’s in Las Vegas,” she replied. “He mixes music for a night club. I’ve never been to one. I don’t know if he’s any good.” Of course she had heard tapes he made, but Dori didn’t trust her judgment on his talents because his tastes ran counter to hers. Although once, James made her a special cassette and called it: ‘You Put the Fun in Funeral Dirge’. It led with a track called Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child sung by Jimmy Scott. Dori had kissed his cheek, the most affection she had known how to give.

“I’d like to go to a night club,” she said wistfully and scratched her arm, a slow-motion gesture inside her sleeve. Her eye contact was unblinking. “I’ve heard all sorts of characters turn up there.”

[wolfs_daughter]

"I like music, but clubs aren't really my thing. I usually end up hugging the wall all night and wasting the money I spent on the cover charge."

Now that Echo was really looking at the blonde, something seemed amiss, but she couldn't put her finger on what. The smell of flowers lingered, and she wondered if the blonde was wearing some sort of perfume. Maybe it was the eyes, the directness of her gaze.

Wait. Brother. A brother who worked at a club. The hybrid's expression brightened.

"Are you James' sister?"

[dori_bell]

Dori nodded. It was common for others to know James better than Dorothy, or before her, considering his lust for good company. When they lived in the same house, all the neighbors liked him while they treated her as a strange growth protruding from his body: best to politely ignore. Now came the inevitable questions as to why he was black and she was white. She headed it off with a simple, “We were adopted.”

As she stood there, she found herself looking the girl over, searching for signs of sickness, badness. There was nothing but health, a good thing considering the last time Dori had taken one of James’s friends, a girl named Meka who hadn’t been sick at all, only very, very present. Always. Later she had trouble explaining the flash of jealousy that had come over her; she was thirteen and her brother, whom she hated half the time, had forgotten about her, and that was unacceptable.

Nowadays Dori kept her hands to herself unless death was imminent, or someone was rude, or she was being paid to do it.

She tilted her head. “Do you want to sleep with him?”

[wolfs_daughter]

Echo simultaneously blushed and scowled. Why did random people ask her if she wanted to have sex with some guy or other? Did she need to get 'Not interested' stamped on her forehead?

"No," she said politely but firmly, shifting her posture as she tried not to hunch her shoulders defensively. "He was nice to me, that was all. I offered to buy him a sandwich because I felt bad abut eating in front of him, but he said no. He mentioned you, actually."

The difference in skin color didn't really faze her. After inheriting Papa's Wolf genes, Echo would have felt like a complete hypocrite if she'd pointed it out. Family was what you made for yourself, it wasn't limited to DNA.

"Do you work here in Searchlight?" she asked. "I don't think I've seen you in the grocery store or anything."

[dori_bell]

“Sorry,” Dori offered blandly. “You just looked so pleasant when you realized I knew him.” The innocence of her voice battled with the thing she had implied and the glaze on her eyes. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “I can never tell when people are interested in that until it’s too late. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

She let the moment pass, although she had a powerful urge to step forward and lay cold hands on the backs of Echo’s cheeks, to sap their heat.

“I work at the community center,” she said. It was a lie; she volunteered there on some weekends during elder events, breathing in the general age and repose of the place. “You wouldn’t see me unless you played Bridge or Bingo.”

Then, awkwardly late, "What did he say about me?"

[wolfs_daughter]

"He said you liked the quiet."

Now the weird thing was even more present. Echo was too shy to be off-putting, and that might have been part of it, but the blonde seemed almost alien. "And I don't get to the community center much, not since I got a job in Las Vegas. It seems like a good place t spend a hot afternoon, though. Lots of air condtioning."

The hybrid heard the crunch of wheels over gravel, and when she looked in that direction, one of the park's other residents was returning home. The sun was almost completely down. It made the other woman look strangely menacing.

"My name's Echo, by the way."

[dori_bell]

“I’m Dori.”

She extended her hand and wondered if Echo would recoil, the way some people did. In private Dori wondered if she could blend into people if she tried harder, if she wanted to the way that James did. Back in school she had been called autistic once by a psychologist, a wrong diagnosis but one her guardians had embraced for lack of a better explanation.

“I won’t hurt you.” Her pale hand hung in the space between them. “I promise.”

[wolfs_daughter]

Inside Echo's skull, the Wolf made a noise, and as she looked at the hand her dark eyes flashed briefly gold. Her hands were callused from the sculpting she'd done in the past, and her fingers made contact with Dori's a little tentatively. The blonde's hand was cold.

"Hi. It's nice to meet you."

Shy was not the same thing as afraid. It might be a thin line, but it was there. The hybrid's stern and occasionally sour mouth lifted slightly at the corners.

[dori_bell]

The eyes were curious and Dori watched them with great interest, unsure if the flicker had been internal or caused by the setting sun. She squeezed the rough hand and let go with no harm done. The girl was wary of her and so be it; she took no pleasure from it. She supposed that all people experienced her this way, except perhaps the vampires.

“Shall I let you go, Echo?” Dori wrapped her arms around her chest. “You seem bothered.”

If the dream catcher was authentic, she thought, it might work overtime tonight.

[wolfs_daughter]

"I don't know if bothered is the right word," Echo answered thoughtfully. "You're...different. I'm not sure how, though. You're out in the sun, so that's one thing."

One shoulder lifted, a shrug that said 'I have no idea', and she said, "Maybe I will ask you to make me a wind-chime later. My hands are too beat-up to work with wire and stuff. Somebody with smaller fingers could manage it, though."

She was wondering about the potential for dreams too, and had decided to take that run after all. To see if she could exhaust herself. Dreamless sleep might be a good thing.

[dori_bell]

Dori could not explain herself to Echo, or to anyone else for that matter. Meeting Whistler in the library had been a singularly refreshing experience; he recognized her. ‘Custodi me a morte personam’, he had said, as if she couldn’t have simply stolen his life if that was her intention. It had been a rush, though, to toy with his life force, to snap it like a rubber band.

“I see things that others don’t,” she said instead. “It makes me different. What a person sees marks them. It clings to them, like a smell… like lilies.”

She blinked.

“I’ll hang the chimes from your box when they’re finished,” she said, abruptly changing course. “I think you’ll like them.”

[wolfs_daughter]

"You're right about the metal ones," the hybrid said, still pondering Dori's Otherness. "Metal on metal sets my teeth on edge. Besides, trailers have enough problems possibly getting blown away by tornadoes. I wouldn't want to attract random lightning bolts on top of that."

Her mouth quirked again, and she looked at those strange eyes for a moment before re-directing her gaze towards the mailbox. She wondered if the blonde came off as weird to the people at the community center too. When you were as used to the strange as she was, to say nothing of being descended from the strange, maybe it was all relative.

"I'll put some money in your mailbox after you bring the chimes over," she said. "To pay you for your time."

[dori_bell]

"But they're a gift."

Dori's fingers twirled in the fabric of her long-sleeve shirt, which was much too warm for the weather.

"Well I should go," she said. "It's almost dark and I haven't finished my walk. I'm pleased to meet you, Echo." She gave a faint smile and started walking in the direction of town proper, where most of the shops had closed for the evening.

[wolfs_daughter]

Echo had been about to say something to say something when Dori mentioned continuing her walk, and then she closed her mouth again. Maybe it was best not to try figuring it out. Even if it was a little like having a haint walk up to you and start a conversation.

"Yeah, it was nice to meet you too," she said to the blonde's retreating back. She wasn't sure Dori heard her.

The hybrid started back across her yard, avoiding the hulking shape of her van where it lurked in the shadows. She would change into sweats, then go in the opposite direction to the edge of town so that she could shift.

To have a run of her own.