Sex, Eggs, and Chocolate Cake (144)

PSI-1

When Calliope learned Mordecai did not require that any of the four dozen eggs be reserved for this evening’s chocolate cake, she requested a recipe card. Mordecai printed carefully, as he assumed it was going to get pasted into an art project, either before or after she committed it to memory. He could not picture Calliope with a neat little index of directions for baking, or directions for anything. Rules and instructions were just a starting point for her — she liked to have them so she could mess with them, then she wandered right off the page and started drawing on the wall. He respected that. She would’ve been really excellent at substitutions if she cared to try.

His mother had called it ‘Crazy Cake’ and her mother had called it that, so he continued to call it that, although he had made multiple alterations between his time baking for Cathy and baking for Solange. The water didn’t have to be warmed up for the vinegar to interact properly with the baking soda, for instance. And you didn’t necessarily have to have any flour or sugar, but he left those in the recipe and kept the substitutions to himself, for emergency use only. To his great shame, he had once produced a chocolate cake out of powdered sheet rock. Solange didn’t notice and she helped keep them all alive, but Alba got sick from it and didn’t speak to him for a week.

The recipe card already had glitter on it. For a one-time serious commercial artist, Calliope had a pre-teenaged girl’s affection for glitter and rainbows. Lucy was going to have a blast with her once she could operate a glue stick.

I wonder if she likes princesses? Mordecai mused, as he squeezed his way past the holiday art project in progress to get the unsalted butter of the basement. What is it about little girls and autocracy?

He knew it wasn’t just the dresses. He’d known too many women. They wanted to rule. The animation studios in Ifrana had decided to cash in on this after the success of Snow White and Cinderella — although Cinderella was not technically a princess until the very end of the story. If you went to an animated feature film these days, chances were someone had folded a princess into the mix somewhere — and it would be dubbed in Anglais with a cast of disturbing, humanoid animals for ease of worldwide distribution. He was grateful Erik was a boy.

He brushed past Milo, who loved princesses with every fiber of his being, and dresses (and probably autocracy, if you assured him nobody would be mad at him for ruling the world), but had never caused Mordecai to wonder about that for some reason. He was also availing himself of the glitter. It was the edible kind. It was safe. He had done his last three eggs in ombre gradients fading from magenta to pale pink.

Magnificent D’Iver did not require glitter, glue or food-coloring to decorate eggs — she had already done her dozen once and was doing them again, but different. There had been some attrition and she was down to ten eggs and two empty scorched spaces in the carton, but altogether she was satisfied with the results. They cycled through different colors as if lit by stage lights, and she was trying to get them to play music. She told Calliope she copied it off a raincoat her mother used to have.

“Don’t say you copied it when you do art, Maggie,” Calliope advised her. “Call it an homage.”

Milo knew what she was doing and he thought it was hilarious, but he decided not to help her modify the music spell to get it to stick to an egg instead of fabric. It was more fun watching her try. She didn’t even get that he’d made it for fabric!

(Had he explained it to her, perhaps with notation and a drawing, she would’ve been mystified to the point of offense. Mr. Rose, why would you subtract functionality from something that could be easily built as all-purpose? Milo, who had constructed this particular spell in a way Maggie and her mother would call ‘backwards,’ beginning with the desired result and breaking it into its structural components instead of using the obvious available components and building a spell out of them, would have thought, Huh?)

Erik was also eschewing the glitter, not so much as a design choice as out of a preference for not being covered in it all day. He was trying to do his eggs stripey like Milo, but he didn’t have the patience to get a really dark color at the bottom or a good gradient. They came out looking like watercolor washes in pastel shades, which were okay, but he’d prefer something a little less subtle in comparison to everyone else. They were each going to pick their best one and put it in the shrine and he didn’t have one he liked that much yet.

I wonder if there’s a god who does Pascha eggs?

…Probably, but not worth it.

Hyacinth was doing dishes near the sink. The radio was on the counter, playing Milo’s favorite station, which was alternating secular stuff like ‘Peter Cottontail’ and ‘Pascha Parade’ with its usual saccharine fare. This was (more reluctantly by some than others) agreed upon as a compromise after Hyacinth’s top forty station was found to be playing ‘worship music.’ There were only so many versions of ‘Sumer is Icumen In’ and ‘Haec Dies’ that a body could be expected to stand.

‘The World is a Circle’ — which had been press-ganged into duty as a radio-legal alternative to the Maypole Song and which Mordecai had once needed to learn for Lost Horizon and promptly forgotten — had just begun when Mordecai came up from the basement, sans unsalted butter, but looking a couple shades closer to it. He lowered the volume to a murmur, drew Hyacinth aside and hissed something in her ear.

“What?” she said.

He dragged her nearer and whispered behind a cupped hand.

“They can’t possibly…” she said.

“Look at them!” he snarled, pulling her after him. They were still in the basement. He didn’t even want to touch the box.

Erik winced. Uh-oh, Milo’s in trouble.

Milo blinked and looked up from his glitter egg. It was like he’d picked up a distant radio station, with the emergency broadcast signal going. I did something wrong…

Hyacinth returned from the basement with a carefully neutral expression and a small pasteboard box clutched in her hand. She was not bothered about touching the box. She didn’t care to touch what was in it, however.

“Milo, I am not mad,” she said.

Yes you are, Milo thought. He edged back his chair.

“I am concerned. This is concern you are seeing. I am concerned…” here she gently set the box on the table. It rattled. “…that there is a box of human teeth in my basement for some reason. I know I did not bring these into the house because I do not drink until I black out anymore. Is this you?”

Milo’s eyes were scanning her clothing and avoiding her face. Gray cotton duck, scoop neck, raglan sleeve, no buttons, no detailing, that seam needs mending… Hyacinth, I wish like hell you’d buy something with ruffles for once in your life… And how about a petticoat? Your clothing is as fun as a paper sack. He nodded very slightly, like a fine line in hard pencil. You could only tell if the light was just right. A minimalist nod.

She slammed a hand on the table. One of the teeth jumped out of the box. It was a yellowish molar with a pale ivory root. Erik edged his chair back from the table too. Maggie leaned in closer. “Why is there a box of human teeth in my basement, Milo?”

Mordecai tugged on her arm. “Hyacinth…”

“What? You’re freaking out about this too!”

“Milo doesn’t do ‘why,’” he reminded her.

Milo had fished his cards and the stub of pencil he carried with them out of his shirt pocket and was attempting to do ‘why.’ He held up a rapid sketch and hid behind it.

Hyacinth plucked it from his fingers and glared at it. “What do headphones have to do with a box of human teeth?” she cried.

Milo dropped all his cards.

Calliope had gotten up from the table and was trailing a faint cloud of glitter behind her like a fairy queen. She collected the kitchen pad and put a gentle hand on Milo’s shoulder before leaning in to deposit the pad in front of him. “Draw it for me, babe, okay?”

“Auntie… Hyacinth… Please put the… teeth back,” Erik said weakly. They were too near the eggs.

“I would if I knew who he got them out of!” snapped Hyacinth. “They’re not yours, are they, Milo?” She thought there were too many for that. She would’ve noticed…

Milo nodded without looking up, still drawing.

“What?” said Hyacinth. “Milo, open your goddamn mouth!”

Milo diverted from his main statement on the issue and drew a quick box in the corner. The box sprouted a door, a plate glass window and a sign with a tooth over it. He put Ç3.72! next to it and underlined it multiple times.

“They’re his because he bought them at a store, Cin,” Calliope said for him.

“What kind of a mental store sells human teeth?” shrieked Hyacinth.

Calliope put her hand on Milo’s drawing hand and looked up with a frown. “Cin, do you want answers or do you want to keep yelling new questions? Pick one.”

“They make dentures out of them,” Mordecai said wanly. He had managed to find a pair of salad tongs. First he picked up the stray tooth and put it back in the box, then he picked up the box.

“Mordecai, don’t you dare put those back in the basement!” said Hyacinth. “I am not letting Milo play with medical waste! I don’t care what he wants it for!”

Milo sketched a rapid trash can and crossed it out. No! They are not medical waste! They were just cheaper because they were ugly and imperfect! Nobody’s going to see them if I use them! He drew a tooth and put a curtain over it, concealing it. He erased the tooth.

“He says they’re not trash. Give them back and he’ll hide them,” Calliope said.

Maggie grinned. “Like, around the house, Milo?” This was a new Pascha tradition she could get behind. Maybe not as fun afterward as chocolate eggs, but way more challenging! Let’s play find-the-biohazards!

Calliope sighed. “In the headphones, Maggie, geez.” She looked up and pulled down her reading glasses to express her own opinion: “Also, ew.”

Mordecai was holding a blue pasteboard box of human teeth with a pair of salad tongs and looking at Milo, who was gazing up at him with one of the top ten pathetic expressions he’d ever seen in his life. ‘Pwease don’t throw my teeth away, Mr. Eidel. They were expensive. I wuv you and I’m adorable. I’ve had a hard life. My eyes are enormous. I’ve evolved this way so you’ll take care of me.’

…You know, it’s just as well he hardly ever looks people in the eye and he acts weird, Mordecai thought. If he were operating at full cute on a regular basis, he’d rule the world. He put the teeth on top of the trash can and put the salad tongs next to them. “Just while we’re talking about it, Milo,” he said. He washed his hands.

Milo made a vague smile. He returned to his drawings with new urgency.

Calliope pushed up her glasses, leaned over the table and became a modern-day scholar of hieroglyphs. Miloglyphs, maybe. “Okay.” She followed along with a finger, left to right. Milo obeyed Anglais writing rules and grouped things that were meant to be taken together with brackets, parentheses or arrows, depending on the interaction. Compound words had a dash. Sometimes he produced strings of weird letters and numbers which she didn’t get but Hyacinth seemed to. She just read those parts as (magic goes here). There was a little bit of that around the lightning bolt and the batteries. “He says they’re a power source… or they could be but he’s not done playing with them yet. Headphones have to fit on your head, and he can’t plug them in. Teeth have human tissue inside and they’re self-contained. They’re like batteries. He doesn’t want to fill up an old mage light with blood like the record player because it’s too big and it could break…” She broke away. “My record player has blood in it?”

Milo winced. He did another minimalist nod.

“That’s so metal! I wanna see!” She ran out. In Room 103, Lucy woke up and started crying when the door slammed.

“Shit, there goes our translator,” Hyacinth said.

“Did she say ‘metal’ or ‘mental?’” Mordecai said.

There was a snapping sound from Room 103, audible under the unhappy baby. Milo stood and stuffed a hand in his back pocket, where the screwdrivers were. He ran out too.

Hyacinth puzzled over the drawings, as if more answers might be in there somewhere. “Where the hell did he get blood?” she muttered. It wasn’t her record player, but she used other Milo-made appliances and she’d assumed he wasn’t killing things to make them work.

Erik put his hand on her arm. He looked pale and disturbed, but it might have still been about the teeth. “It’s his blood. Not from a store. He thought you wouldn’t be mad because he didn’t die.”

Hyacinth clicked her tongue and expelled an irritated sigh. “I need to have a talk with that kid. He is real smart. He can come up with a way to make cool stuff without hurting himself…”

“He did,” Mordecai said. He nodded towards the teeth.

“…And without robbing the mouths of the dead or paying other people to do it,” Hyacinth said.

“I mean, people get teeth pulled, Miss Hyacinth,” Maggie said. “They don’t necessarily have to be dead.”

“They don’t necessarily have to be alive,” Hyacinth said. She picked up the box and examined it.

Covington Dental Supply Co. … Sterile and ready for use… Factory seconds… Asstd. sizes…

Nothing about whether they were extractions or grave goods, though. Probably some of each.

Hyacinth shook her head. “Gods, Milo…”

“Are we letting him play with medical waste or not, Hyacinth?” Mordecai said. He thought he could manage throwing the teeth away if Milo’s sad face wasn’t watching him do it.

She flung a gesture. “Well, it seems like if we don’t let him buy it he’ll create his own, so I don’t know how we’re supposed to stop him!” She sighed again. “It says they’re factory seconds. Factory seconds. Teeth do not come from a factory.”

“They… grade them and… sort them out,” Erik said. He was not thrilled to have this information, nor a vision of what the assembly line looked like. “Uncle, I thought the mice took old teeth.” He’d always pictured them in smart little dresses and white gloves like the ladies who worked the elevators in fancy buildings. Not like big men with coveralls and bored expressions standing over a conveyor belt.

“Only baby teeth,” Mordecai said absently. He employed the tongs and took the box from Hyacinth’s hand. “I’ll put it back in the basement. We need new salad tongs.”

Erik sighed. He considered the jelly-glasses with the dye… and one floating egg which he’d forgotten about and was probably going to look really neat. He employed the wire dippy-thing and tried to corral it. “Auntie Hyacinth… darn… Calliope is making Milo take the record player apart. Can we have the rest of their eggs?”

“Sure, kiddo,” Hyacinth said. She turned up the radio. They were playing the Giovanni version of ‘Rigs o’ Barley,’ which had somehow been grandfathered into radio legality despite what they were obviously doing in the rigs o’ barley.

Mordecai returned from the basement just in time to see Erik rescue a brilliant dark purple egg from its bath and ask, “Auntie Hyacinth, is sex fun?”

“Who told you about sex?” the red man demanded.

Erik tilted his head in his uncle’s direction with such feigned exhaustion that it bobbled slightly at the end of its arc. One half-lidded eye and a narrow frown was all he needed to look like the most jaded creature in existence, but then again he was green.

Good boy, thought Mordecai. Vicious sarcasm and a low tolerance for stupidity is our heritage. Teach your children when I’m gone. He self-corrected, straightening his tie with one hand, “What I mean to say is, is it just them or have you been asking around?”

“Mostly them,” Erik said with a shrug. Soup and Maggie were too little. He was going to ask Calliope, but she wanted to see the blood in the record player. “Milo and Calliope are having it.” He shook his head. “Not right now. Maybe if Lucy goes back to sleep.”

Hyacinth pointed a finger at him, “Oh, thaaat’s what it is!”

“I suspected,” Mordecai said.

“Well, why didn’t you tell me so we could suspect together, you dummy?” Hyacinth said.

“It makes sense,” Maggie allowed. “Geez, I hope they’re using charms…”

Erik nudged her with a hand. “But… Hester Carthage keeps… telling everyone shut up about it and go… away because I wouldn’t… get it. It’s not just her.” If it were, Violet would’ve given him a clue-by-four as soon as he stepped out of the house. He’d tried it. “I get stuff,” he muttered, rubbing his cheek with his hand. “Pascha is about sex, isn’t it?” That lady with the enormous hat who liked the cherry blossoms had been talking to him about the eggs and bunnies before Hester threw her out. He suspected it was Saint Brigit, but it could also have been Dhavala, whom John had told him about, because she was wearing all white. He didn’t get a chance to see if she had four arms like she was supposed to.

“Pascha is about, like, fifteen different gods at once,” Maggie said. “And spring. And chocolate. It’s like a train wreck. There’s not even a date for it. We might as well hide teeth around the house if Milo wants.”

“Barnaby says when we quit doing Imbolic and Beltane it all went to hell,” Hyacinth said contemplatively. “I suppose he’s old enough to remember them.” She could picture him wandering naked around a circle of standing stones. However, she found it difficult to make him any younger than he was now, as if he were eternal somehow.

“Calliope’s dad got mad and walked them all out of the church when the priest-guy tried to say it was all about the Man Joshua,” Erik said. “He said it’s a lie, and the Man Joshua is a nice person who knows how to share and wouldn’t like people being grabby like that and saying it’s for him. They go to this little church now that’s a storefront right next to a bakery and they have Joshua and Miriam in the window. They’re both the same size and Rin likes that. Stephen likes the muffins. Calliope isn’t bothered about church anymore because she can get muffins wherever.” He blinked and shook his head. “I think that’s not supposed to be why you go to church…?” He looked at his uncle for confirmation. If it were all about pancakes and muffins, he thought his uncle would be way more into it.

“It may be why some people do,” Mordecai said. “When you do something on a regular basis it tends to become a habit, and those are self-sustaining. You don’t need a reason anymore, you do it because you always do it, and it gets very hard to sort out why you started doing it in the first place. Pascha is like that. Many of the traditions are so old, it’s hard to tell whether the eggs and hares are subbed in for sex, or the sex is subbed in for fertility or the fertility is subbed in for the blooming flowers. It is, as the inestimable Miss D’Iver puts it, a train wreck. Each car was chock full of customs, but no reasons, and now that they have crunched into each other we’ve got chocolate in the wicker men and no way to separate them.” He shrugged. “But nobody really wants to. Everyone’s having a great time, even the gods.”

Erik beamed. “Am I… old enough for the… wicker man this year?”

“No,” Mordecai said categorically. He had decided long ago that Erik was not going to be old enough for the wicker man until Erik was old enough to sneak out and navigate San Rosille at midnight by himself. Hopefully not until his late teenage years. They used to put real animals in that thing! Not to mention all the drinking, drugs and people hooking up for casual sex, which he recalled from his own later teenage years.

“I went last year,” Maggie said. When Erik turned and goggled at her, she shrugged. “I can turn into a bird, Erik, Mom’s not the boss of me anymore. My night-vision sucks, but everyone has bonfires.” She did not mention that after midnight and post-bonfires, she had to turn back into a cute little girl and get on the bus with money she’d lifted from people’s pockets. Everyone stared at her, but that might’ve been because she was missing a shoe. “It wasn’t a big deal. I don’t know why they bother. It’s like another bonfire, just a funny shape, and only for a little while. Then it falls apart and everybody goes home.” She had noticed quite a lot of them going ‘home’ in large groups with apparent strangers, but that didn’t seem fun to her, just uncomfortable. “Honestly, I’d rather go to the movies.”

Erik lifted a finger and noted, “They are actually showing The Wicker Man at La Stella, Maggie. And the short feature is ’Oss, ’Oss.”

Maggie groaned and put her face in her hands. “Friggin’ documentaries! Geez! You know, maybe I don’t get sex either, Erik. It has to be fun. Why else would people be so interested in something that looks so boring all the time?”

“Close your mouth, Hyacinth,” Mordecai said.

Erik looked wounded. “I didn’t… say I didn’t… get it. I said… Hester wouldn’t… let me… try!”

“Horehound candy!” Hyacinth burst out.

“Hyacinth, if you are making a pun…” Mordecai said.

“I’m making an analogy, Mordecai, close your mouth. You kids like horehound candy?”

“It’s okay,” Maggie said.

“Yes!” Erik said. It wasn’t Pascha candy, and he already had plenty of that, but if Auntie Hyacinth was offering, he’d take it.

“I used to,” Hyacinth said. “I don’t anymore. I grew out of it. If I didn’t remember liking it I sure wouldn’t understand why kids spend so much time eating it. Why would you spend money for something that tastes terrible and spend upwards of an hour sucking on it?”

“Oh, my gods, Hyacinth!”

“Chill out, Mordecai. They get what I mean.”

“So do I!”

“Sex is something you grow into,” Hyacinth said. “And maybe out of again if I should live so long. I don’t know yet. Physical pleasure is all-access, but the intimacy thing…” She winced and shook her head. “That’s an acquired taste. You need a different kind of brain to understand that and do it properly. Like David always said I’d like steak tartare when I grew up. I never did,” she said. “But there’s other stuff I really did grow into, so I get it, even when I don’t get it. You get it?”

Steak tartare or boys, Erik thought. He frowned. I wouldn’t want to marry a boy either. I mean, why would you?

Even John didn’t want to marry one, just run around together and do fun stuff. With occasional kissing.

Okay, I could see that, but girls are better for all those things too.

“What if I don’t grow into it?” Erik asked. He didn’t like the idea of this new kind of candy coming up that everybody else liked but he might not. It would be lonesome, being the only kid with no lollipop, and not even wanting one because it tasted like boiled carrots or something.

“They make a lot of different kinds of sex,” Hyacinth said. “Chances are you will find one you like, if you don’t give up and stop trying. Don’t settle, Erik,” she scolded, and she pointed an index finger at the ceiling to declaim, “That’s something awful old society grand dames do, and they make themselves and everyone around them miserable.” David had told her this, and she thought it was a dig at Veronica and Barnaby, but he wasn’t wrong. “If you give it a fair shot and you really don’t like it, though, I don’t think you have to have it,” she said. “Intimacy with another human being, probably. We’re built that way. But it doesn’t literally have to be sex. When you grow up, you don’t have to have anything you don’t want. You can drop it and find something else. That’s what growing up means.”

Mordecai, who had briefly told himself Hyacinth was handling this moment of parenting appropriately, had been about to start peeling potatoes for dinner and dropped the paring knife in the sink. “Damn it, Hyacinth, that is not what growing up means! You certainly don’t have to have sex if you don’t want it, but mature people are constantly doing things they don’t want, or putting off things they do! That’s what living in a society means! Where in the hell did you grow up?”

Hyacinth sniffed and brushed back her hair. “We were very wealthy, Mordecai.”

“I always forget,” he replied. “You don’t look it.” He turned to Erik. “Erik, you must be extremely careful when you learn things from your Auntie Hyacinth. She grew up in a gilded cage and it’s crippled her to this very day.”

“I thought it was more the brain damage and insanity, but we all must have our theories,” Hyacinth said with a smile. “What’s your excuse?”

“If we’re going to start excusing our behavior in this house, I have an invoice of back orders I’d like filled,” he said.

“You guys are gonna pickle our eggs,” Maggie said dryly. “Grow up, you grownups.”

Erik piped up and sang along with the radio for a verse of ‘Seasons in the Sun.’ “I don’t get why I’m not allowed to know about it because I’m too young to do it right!” he added, before his upset overrode the music trick. “Nobody would let me fly an airship yet but there’s books about how fun it is in the library, with pictures!”

Maggie dissolved into laughter and hid her face in her hands.

“Oh, my gods!” said Mordecai. Not about the airship book, but at the idea of the equivalent. Airship Bill, meet Sexual Intercourse Sam! He has a big, big bed! “Erik, no!”

Hyacinth indicated his distressed expression with both hands. “This, Erik. This is another thing you will grow into. It’s called shame. You don’t have very much of it right now because it interferes with asking questions and learning about the world, which is your job at this age. I also don’t have very much of it, because I got shot in the head and I don’t give a damn anymore. All my damns leaked out and David didn’t bother to stuff them back in. So I get how frustrating it is.

“The bottom line is, some things bother adults way more than kids. Every once in a while you’re gonna run into those things, and then you get to watch the adult person do a little dance. They will come up with a whole lot of reasons why not talking about something is better than talking about it so you’ll go away and leave them alone. It’s not that you’re too little to know it, it’s that the adult person is too scared to try to explain it to a person of your littleness. There is, like, a maximum height difference for people to be even halfway comfortable discussing sex with each other, and you are way over it. You’d do better with Maggie, even if she doesn’t know as much.”

“My mom says it’s a distraction that must eventually be dealt with and she gave me a book,” Maggie said. “It has line drawings that don’t look like real people and a diagram of a vagina. I’m allowed to submit questions in written form. I’ll ask about sex being fun, but she still hasn’t got back to me about what ‘feminine hygiene’ means, so…”

“A… diagram?” Erik managed at last.

“No!” said Mordecai, reflexively.

“Would you rather he stick mirrors on his shoes and try to get a look at one going by on the street?” Hyacinth said. “You think he’s gonna stop wondering about it just because you’re not ready? He’ll just stop asking you about it. Erik, let me tell you,” she turned to him, “just in case you ever need answers and you’re not getting them: your Auntie Hyacinth doesn’t dance. I’m available seven days a week and I make housecalls.”

Erik’s single eye that did recognizable human expression narrowed in appraisal. The other one whirred and adjusted. You danced when I wanted to know if my uncle was gonna be okay.

But she still talked to him about it. She didn’t tell him he was too little to understand and go away, even if she lied a little bit.

She met his gaze. She wasn’t ashamed. Or she didn’t get she ought to be.

He nodded once firmly and offered his hand to shake, “Okay.”

———

Calliope and Milo emerged from Room 103 with Lucy and the Lu-ambulator in tow. Lucy did not want to go back to sleep. She was capable of detecting when people were going to have fun without her and she wanted to be included. Calliope let her ‘help’ take the record player apart. She seemed like she liked it, or maybe she just liked her mother liking it.

She definitely liked the Lu-ambulator. They’d engaged the motion function and it was bopping back and forth as it walked like a happy minstrel.

“I’m sorry I cracked the case where it says ‘CalliopeFair’ on my record player you fixed for me,” Calliope said. Again. This was both an attempt at penance and a mnemonic. She needed to put a pin in ‘I’m sorry’ and stick it up on the wall or else she was gonna forget after all the fun they had. It was not okay to hurt record players a nice person made for her, even if they looked cool inside. She would not screw up in that specific way again.

She’d pick a new way to screw up!

Milo waved a generous hand and shook his head, as if dismissing the peasants from the throne room. I break things all the time too! It’s how you find out about them, and sometimes people will give you it to play with. I can fix it! I’ll have to tell you about what I did to the hospital vending machine! I didn’t even fix it! But they were mean to you, so to hell with…

“Miss Otis!” a voice hissed from above. Barnaby pronounced it with a short ‘O,’ like opportunity. The attic stairs were down and he was crouching behind the upstairs railing as if it might conceal him.

Milo scuttled behind one of the high backs of the upholstered chairs and did likewise.

“Hey, Barnaby, what’s up?” Calliope said mildly.

“Is there cake frosting yet, or are they still having the awkward conversation about sex?”

Calliope signed him a thumbs up. “I’ll check for ya.”

She peeked into the kitchen just in time to catch Mordecai saying, “Damn it, Hyacinth, I’m just saying if he’s going to look at a diagram of a vagina I want him to look at it with me! Oh, my gods, that doesn’t sound right… Calliope!” He staggered back into the kitchen counters and kicked one of the lower cabinets with the heel of his shoe.

Calliope turned and called out, “They’re still talking about sex, Barnaby!”

“Thank you Miss Otis! I’ll give it another hour!” a faint voice called back.

Erik looked up from arranging his set of deeply-colored eggs in all six colors and frowned at her. “Calliope, is sex fun?”

“Yup,” she replied.

Erik nodded with the whole upper half of his body and flung a showman’s gesture at her. Behold! The tattooed lady! “Okay. Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know. I don’t… care about the eggs and the dumb… bunnies in the train car.”

“They look really good, though.” She picked up and examined the orange one. “You want glitter?”

“Nuh-uh. Thanks. I’m good.”

Milo peeked in, with Lucy behind him. The Lu-ambulator did a suitable impression of leaning to look past him and then leaned back in the opposite direction. Milo thought he heard yelling a second ago. Were they still mad?

“Hey, babe, I’ve got blue powder coat with sparklies in it leftover from my collage with the sexy shoe,” Calliope said.

Milo stumbled over the kitchen step and sat down. Oh, my gods, now I can’t have it on my wall… He pressed both hands over his blush but it didn’t make much difference. She didn’t even notice he fell down. She was looking at Erik’s eggs.

“…I put it in the plaster, but we can use it the real way if we get a sprayer. I think Chris has one. You wanna make blue headphones with no wires and teeth in them? I like your industrial-minimalist aesthetic, but it’s fun to paint things with you too. You get all rococo when you have access to color. ”

I’m gonna let Calliope paint the toaster, Milo thought. And all the decoys. I’ll get primer that sticks to magic. I’ll find a way! He nodded.

She smiled at him. “Cool.”