Page 88 of Satisfied By the Slime
I have no frame of reference for this. Decades of careful navigation around human spaces, and now hands are reaching for me with gratitude. The sensation is overwhelming. A pressure in my body that I can’t categorize.
Maisie presses close against my side. Her hand finds the small of my back, and I feel her heartbeat through the contact, rapid but settling. She says nothing. She doesn’t need to.
Behind us, the Ridge Walker has pressed himself flat against the rock, his angular form folding into the shadows as though trying to disappear into the stone itself.
The crowd’s attention has moved on, but he can’t know that. He only knows the noise, the lights, the press of bodies, and everyinstinct he’s developed over decades of hiding must be screaming at him to flee.
Then Gram steps forward.
She moves through the crowd with the unhurried confidence of a woman who has walked this desert for fifty years.
People part around her without seeming to notice they’re doing it. She crosses to where the Ridge Walker shrinks against the hillside, and she stops an arm’s length away.
I can’t hear what she says. Maisie and I are too far back, caught in the slow dispersal of the crowd. But I watch Gram’s hand extend. Watch her weathered fingers reach toward that gaunt form.
The Ridge Walker flinches. His whole body pulls inward, and for a moment I think he’ll vanish into the rock.
He doesn’t.
Gram’s hand finds his. Her fingers close around his, and the rigid terror drains from his posture. He stands there in the half-dark, holding Gram’s hand like a rope thrown to a drowning man, and the silencearound them spreads outward until the nearest onlookers have stopped talking entirely.
Maisie’s grip on me tightens. I feel the tremor in her hands, and I know she’s seeing what I’m seeing.
Two people separated by decades, standing in the dust, their fingers intertwined.
Gram says something else. The Ridge Walker inclines his head. And then, with a final squeeze of his hand, Gram releases him and turns back toward the crowd.
The Ridge Walker lingers for a moment at the edge of the light. His pale green glow pulses once more, and then he steps into the gathering dark and is gone.
The crowd begins to break apart. Truck doors open and close. Headlights swing across the scrub as vehicles turn toward the road. Someone claps my shoulder again as they pass, and this time I manage something that might be a nod in return.
Maisie turns to face me and wraps her arms around me, pressing her face againstmy chest, and I feel the shudder that moves through her body.
I hold her. My body shifts to cradle her, and I feel the rapid flutter of her heartbeat slowing against my surface.
“They accepted me,” I say quietly. “Nobody looked at me with fear or disgust.”
She pulls back just enough to look at me. Her palm presses flat against my chest, and gold threads bloom beneath her touch.
“Why would they?” she says. “You’re a hero.”
“No,” I say. “You are. You’ve given me courage I never thought I could have.”
Her heartbeat pulses against me, and something shifts in my chest, a pressure that has been building for days, for weeks, since the moment she touched me in that crate and chose to stay.
“Maisie.” Her name comes out low, almost a reverberation.
She tilts her head up. Her eyes are bright in the last light of the headlamps, andI can feel the warmth of her breath, the quickening of her pulse.
“I love you.”
The words leave me before I can organize them, before I can find a better way to say what I mean. But there is no better way. Eighty years of existence, and I have never said those words to anyone. I have never had anyone to say them to.
Maisie’s breath catches. Her fingers press deeper into my surface, and gold blooms beneath her touch, spreading across my chest in waves.
“You—” She stops. Swallows. Her eyes glisten, and I feel the tremor move through her whole body. “You love me.”
“I do.”
