Prissi awoke. Given how crazed she had felt after her battle with the zies and the death of their leader, she was surprised that she had fallen asleep.
A fleshy, black and pink hand thrust a battered Panera Bakery pak in front of her face.
“Poppet. Did you order take-out?”
At first, Prissi couldn’t get her mind around the question. When she did understand, her insides sagged. The zies had found her. Prissi tilted her head back to see an immense henna haired woman with a pendulous wattle, like a chocolate colored torque. Standing in her shadow was a silent bony-faced wraith with hands that twitched at each other in a way that reminded Prissi of a surreal Punch and Judy show.
“Take out? You order. We deliver.”
Prissi shook her feverish head in despair.
“Are you sure? You look like a bonnet, which has lost its bee, or, being. As you can see, the more you lose your B, the more you need a D…as in de-livery.”
The skinny woman reached out to touch Prissi’s wings. When the fat woman laughed, she made a sound like a flag flapping in the breeze and the flesh under her chin rose and subsided like a glassy sea.
“Yes, indeed, your livery is in need of delivery.”
Prissi recoiled when the bird-like woman’s hand darted forth to poke at her stomach.
“Take away a y, and why, because your liver itself needs its chicken removed as well as its r, so you can live again and forget those zies.”
At the mention of the zies, Prissi thought of how their leader had died. She groaned and reached toward the bite wound in her thigh.
When the fat woman’s hand snatched out with astonishing speed to catch hold of Prissi’s wrist, she didn’t resist.
“Don’t touch it. You’ll only make it worse. Come, poppet, we’ll take you out of here and take you there.”
The two women offered supporting arms to Prissi as they started across the broad expanse of the underground station. As they progressed, several of the lumps Prissi had noticed earlier stirred. Eyes without faces stared from the bundles of rags as they passed by. When one lump started to rise from its concrete bed, a slight wag of the fat woman’s index finger, as big as a boudin, suggested it reconsider. It did.
After crossing the station and re-entering the gloom, Prissi’s two companions walked for hundreds of meters before stopping. The farther they went, the less Prissi had walked by herself and the more she had been supported by the two women. Prissi’s fever began to overwhelm her mind and she let herself drift until she heard a jingle, a jangle, a click and a door, nearly invisible in the gloom and blackened wall, opened inward. The bird lady went first and the fat lady behind with Prissi sandwiched between the uneven slices.
Prissi was so exhausted and feverish that she was barely conscious of what was happening to her. She finally did realize that she was being tended to, but in a way that was very different from the care she had received at Columbia Unitarian Hospital.
Some brightly burning part of her mind tried to understand the aches and pains that seemed to come from bruises and sprains that were being nursed. Those hurts all seemed to be part of a body that was not quite her own. Somehow those hurts reminded her of being tickled by Nasty Nancy through a mound of winter blankets. There were scrapes, scratches and cuts. There seemed to be dozens of those. She was alert enough that she could locate one—it was on the right side of her jaw. It announced itself as a warmth—like holding a potato not long from the oven. Then, there was the third thing.
It was a hole, a very deep black emptiness. It had no feeling, but Prissi could tell that it held the promise of exploding with pain. It took Prissi several moments to understand that the black hole was where the zie had bitten her.
Prissi heard murmuring like the sound of mountain wind through grasses. She felt a tugging at the black hole. She thought she knew what that was and the thought horrified her. A black and red swirl, like lava swelling from a volcano started forming at the edge of her closed eyes’ vision. Prissi squeezed her eyes even tighter to push the image away, but the lava oozed past where she was squeezing and began to fill the space behind her lids.
Prissi bit hard on her lower lip to keep from screaming. She was terrified at how excruciating the pain would be if she couldn’t stop the flow of lava. When it became obvious that pushing back would not stop the molten threat, she thought of other things, powerful things, that would keep the lava away. Her fingertips stretched to touch her father’s face, to pat his hair, to gently hold his feeble neck, his worthless neck.
There was more tugging as the caregivers beyond her lids tried to stitch the leg wound closed. Tugging and tugging to close the lava hole.
A sound that began lower than a growl and ended an octave higher than a shriek erupted from Prissi.
“Yell, poppet, yell. It won’t seal the wound, but it may heal the wounded. Who did you dance with? That thief, the hyena? Well, we have just the thing for hyenas, don’t we, Lavie La?”
As the fat woman talked, Prissi unclenched her fists and let herself fly away from all that was happening, and all that had happened, to her.