[Wk51] Grays
Dawnya’s parents put Captain Booger in the backyard, where he howled miserably behind the locked back door. Dawnya stared sadly at the eight month old shepherd mix through the kitchen window and asked her folks,
“Why?”
“Because either he begs for our dinner while we eat or he stays outside,” They said.
Dawnya listened to her crying pup and shook her head. “Why can’t he just stay inside? Making him cry all night isn’t helping anyone.”
‘How else will he learn, Dawnya?”
Dawnya glowered through the meal, but managed to convince her parents to let Captain Booger back inside after dinner. She stroked his thick fur as she lay sleepless on her side in her bed. Captain Booger, his evening of howls forgotten, curled in a bushy ball against her chest. He inhaled recklessly loud snores while his tail thumped out his dreams. Dawnya wondered if her parents’ annoyance at her dog’s begging was truly more burdensome than her dog’s weeping all night long in the unlit weeds of their backyard.
Dawnya awoke the next morning marginally rested and let Captain Booger bound around the back yard while she helped her dad make waffles. She let her dog in as the bacon finished frying, watching him nervously as she set the table. Captain Booger marched right up to the platter of bacon and looked speculatively at Dawnya’s parents, who were both casting smirking eyebrows at their daughter.
Captain Booger’s tail began to thump loudly, and Dawnya sank into her chair with a resigned sigh. The dog glanced suddenly at her and lay down, tail still, with his eyes cast upwards. Dawnya’s parents chortled and her dad said, “See, Dawnya? That’s how they learn.”
Dawnya busied herself with her syrup soaked waffle so she wouldn’t have to see the satisfied looks they were giving each other. She fondled Captain Booger’s ear with her toe under the table, and smiled quietly to herself when he gave her foot a sloppy kiss. He didn’t ask for a bit of bacon a single time.
Dawnya finally allowed herself a sneaking glance at her parents as they cleared the table, and promptly dropped the stack of plates she was carrying.
“Dawnya!” Her mother said, staring at the pile of ceramic shards around her daughter’s feet. Dawnya swallowed, trying and failing to respond to her mother’s admonishment. Her parents’ faces looked like Picasso’s toilet paper. Flat and folded, their features contorted in miniature sideway lunges every time they moved. Dawnya blinked hard, shook her head, and tried to will their faces back to normalcy. Captain Booger barked happily in three solid dimensions.
Dawnya muttered a flustered, “I don’t know,” and fled out of her front door with her dog at her heels, pausing only to grab her purse.
She trotted towards her favorite coffee place, where Captain Booger was welcome both inside and out. She scanned the people in the store and exhaled loudly when they all registered as completely three dimensional, with features that did not lurch in impossible angles at any given moment. Captain Booger found a full water bowl near the entrance. He busied himself with sloshing it all over his face and the floor while Dawnya ordered herself a mocha.
“Can I get sugar free chocolate syrup and whip cream on top?” Dawnya asked, feeling the need for creamy goodness, but wanting to avoid a hefty sugar rush.
“The sugar free mochas don’t have whip cream.” The barista didn’t even glance up; he stared at his uneven fingernails and then used two of them to pull at a stray cheek hair. “It’s either or.”
Dawnya had hoped for more of an explanation but when one didn’t emerge, she nodded and said,
“Ok, just a regular mocha then.”
The barista smirked and walked away to fix her drink, but not before Dawnya spotted a sudden flatness across his face. Before she could react, her own face clenched horribly and she stumbled backwards, hands clutching desperately at what used to be her nose.
The customers glanced at her curiously. Dawnya’s fingers slid unfettered across the flat expanse between her cheeks and eyes. She leaned over the counter and half-shrieked,
“No thanks! No thanks! I really didn’t want a regular mocha!”
A manager sauntered to the counter and listened while Dawnya hiccupped a description of what she actually wanted. The manager’s face was also two-dimensional. His eyes blinked the wrong way, like elevator doors. His mouth pulled open from opposite corners around words that dropped like tin coins on a copper platter. Dawnya eventually bawled that she just wanted her nose back and a coffee would be nice, too.
The manager heaved what was probably a disgruntled sigh; the outline of his torso jerked upwards and the rectangle on his face made a sound reminiscent of exasperation.
“I suppose, since you have already paid, we will make an exception.”
The manager left, and Dawnya crumpled into the nearest chair. Customers around her avoided eye contact, which was fine with Dawnya as every last one of them now had the same faces that sent her running from her house less than a hour earlier. Dawnya didn’t blame them for avoiding eye contact. Maybe she looked terrifying to them, too. Maybe they didn’t see anything terrifying at all and thought she was just having a bad day. Maybe both. Maybe both, as well as other things that Dawnya just didn’t know about. She took slow breaths and decided to look the terror head on.
As she lifted her head, her face lurched. Captain Booger trotted to her side, unfazed and unrepentantly three-dimensional. Dawnya leaned over to give him a hug. He licked her face, and she exhaled in relief as his tongue swiped against the fresh contours of her nose. She gazed at the people in the restaurant. She watched them sip their coffee, their fingers folded like paper around cups that wavered in and out of depth. She looked at her own hands and watched them flicker from sculpted reality to vaguely organized lines, and back again. She pretended her heart wasn’t pounding as she perused the customers, looking for anything that would serve as an answer.
Captain Booger grew bored of sitting with his distraught human and ambled between the tables. He snuffed around one in the corner, out of Dawnya’s line of sight, and then lay beneath it. Dawnya, still peering apprehensively at her flickering hands, made her way to the table.
Captain Booger was cozied up against the legs of a round cheeked, bespectacled customer. The customer had barely noticed either the dog or Dawnya, being buried in a large book with very fine print.
“Sorry about my dog,” Dawnya said. She waited to see if this person would flicker like everything else, or worse, entirely flatten into an illustrative horror.
The customer looked up, smiled in pleased surprise at Dawnya, and gestured for her to sit at the table. “No worries,” they said. “I’m Dorsey. I take it you asked them to make a special order for you?” Dorsey smirked, scanning the still-present angles of Dawnya’s face.
“Why aren’t you like the rest? What makes us change?” As Dawnya asked her questions, she could feel her face tensing and twisting. She began to sweat, wondering fleetingly what two-dimensional sweat looked like.
“Well you’ll notice that you aren’t one or the other, right?” Dorsey looked pointedly at her flickering hands. Dorsey wedged the tome into the leather bag nestled under Captain Booger’s rear. Captain Booger farted softly in protest.
Dawnya nodded. Dorsey had dimples that popped on either side of gloriously purple painted lips, and sparkly lashes so long they bumped into the bright green glasses balanced precariously across a narrow nose bridge. Dorsey’s long legs stretched past either side of Captain Booger, swathed in metallic green mermaid leggings that caught the lights of the café and cast mini halos across her dog’s fur.
“Do you come here a lot?” Dawnya asked. “I come here all the time. I’m surprised this is the first time I’ve seen you.”
Dorsey shrugged, “Most folks miss me. You get used to it.” Dorsey gave Captain Booger a solid scritch behind the ears and slung the leather bag over a rounded shoulder. “It was nice to meet you, though. Hopefully you’ll see me again sometime.”
Dorsey waved and walked off before Dawnya could reply. Dawnya watched Dorsey’s sharply defined figure disappear out of the café entrance.
Dawnya walked home. She watched the sidewalk and streets flicker while the trees and grass remained sharply vibrant. She practiced bracing herself for the flatness of the humans she’d come across; she hoped being less horrified would lead to being better able to handle the shock.
She opened the front door of her home with slow, deliberate, movements, thinking she’d sneak in and avoid an immediate confrontation. Captain Booger pummeled through the door and her legs, barking gleefully as he zoomed through the hallways. Her mom trotted swiftly to the entrance and asked,
“Why did you leave like that?” Her mom crossed paper limbs over a trapezoid torso and her eyes became singular lines stretching across a triangle face.
Dawnya grit her teeth and thought about telling her parents everything, even Dorsey.
“Either you respect us or you don’t, Dawnya.”
Dawnya did respect her parents, and nodded emphatically. She felt her limbs tighten and her face lurch, feeling the succumb in muscles that flattened as she stood there. She let go her clench on the shades of gray where she felt at home, because she did respect her parents. And either she made choices or she didn’t.
Dawnya soon stopped recoiling at the stick lines of everyone’s features. She traipsed quickly to the days where she barely noticed them. Eventually even noticing it wore off, and she saw nothing out of place with the dimensions of her surroundings.
She never saw Dorsey again. But it didn’t matter, because she never remembered that she’d seen her coffee mermaid in the first place.
