Page 30 of Satisfied By the Slime
“Which are you?”
“Cold.”
He considers this with the gravity of someone receiving important intelligence.
Then he lowers the pizza back to the shelf, exactly where he found it, and closes the refrigerator door with a gentleness that makes the bottles inside barely clink.
The kitchen goes dark.
Not completely: the moonlight through the window over the sink lays a silver grid across the counter, and Oz himself gives off a faint bioluminescence that shifts with his mood.
Right now he’s all deep teal with those gold threads winding through, and the kitchen looks like the inside of a tide pool at dusk.
I should go back to bed.
I should absolutely go back to bed, because tomorrow starts at five-thirty with abatch of lavender-honey bars that need to be poured before the Verdance labels arrive, and sleep is a resource I can’t afford to waste.
I pull out a chair and sit down at the kitchen table.
“So,” I say. “Do you eat?”
He settles across from me, his form pooling into something chair-shaped against the opposite wall.
The humanoid silhouette softens at the edges, shoulders rounding into curves, legs blending into a broader base. He’s less careful about maintaining the shape when it’s dark.
I wonder if he knows I can still see him.
“I absorb.” He pauses, selecting words with the care of someone who’s learned that the wrong ones get you put back in a box. “Minerals, mostly. Calcium. Trace elements. Your water here has a high mineral content. I absorbed some from your dripping faucet. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. You’re a guest in my house. You can absorb water from my leakyfaucet all day.”
He jiggles slightly, it seems in contentment.
We sit for a moment.
The swamp cooler rattles.
A coyote yips somewhere up toward the ridge, and two more answer, their voices braiding together and falling apart.
“Can I ask you something?” I pull one knee up onto the chair, resting my chin on it. “You don’t have to answer.”
“You can ask me anything.”
“In the studio. When you were—” I gesture vaguely at the air between us, which does absolutely no work as a communication tool. “Could you feel that? What I was feeling?”
He goes quiet.
The teal deepens, the gold threads slowing their drift.
“Yes. I felt the release in your body as a kind of warmth. A saturation. The way a dry thing takes on water and changes weight.”
The violet blooms along his edges.
“And I felt something in myself that I don’t have a comparison for. Slimes don’t have a history of language for this.”
“For sex?”
“For being chosen.”
