---

Nonetheless, Papa let it go. Papa. She didn't have to think about all the reasons she was mad at him right now. She didn't have the energy. She barely had the energy to be happy to see him. That came bubbling up, though.

As she told him about the people she'd met in Chibera, it occurred to her that she'd been through so much trauma with her mother's stroke that she must need the help of a good therapist. Did Dad know how to set up appointments for therapy for a daughter? Did he know how one went about researching good therapists? He did not. He was willing to help, but all he could think of was Yelp, and even he seemed wary of Yelp. He was used to trusting the opinions of others, but Yelp screamed, "these are not honest reviews" at him. "Yelp is 'yelling help'. Not as in yelling 'help' , but rather, it's as if you need help and everybody is yelling as helpfully as they can. But it's yelling. And not helpful."

He felt very clever, she thought.

And then breakfast was done, and it was time.

It was hospital time.

It was time to visit mom in the hospital.

With dad. Who hadn't spoken about mom the entire morning. Who hadn't spoken to mom in months. Who once told Janice that her mom and he couldn't be in the same room at the same time without arguing or the world would end. Who was about to be in the same room at the same time.

Foreshadowing thought Janice, who was as prepared as she could be for another dissociative episode where she translated what was happening to her into a fantasy realm that was maybe very probably about to be world-ending for her. She had, after all, escaped justice.

So they climbed into a Nissan Altima that dad had rented from the Hertz at the Columbus train station. He'd wanted a smaller car, but they'd upgraded him for free and wouldn't accept no for an answer. So he had plenty of room for all his emotional baggage.

He felt very clever about that one, too.

And they rode in the car. They did go past the Rice-ist. Oddly, it was closed at 10am on a Saturday. Janice tried not to worry about that fact, but memories that weren't not dreams but also weren't not not dreams floated around in her neurons.

They drove past a Walgreens, too. And Janice tried to remember if there was a reason she noticed the Walgreens. But it was unremarkable. She'd driven past it dozens... probably hundreds of times before, and it had never seemed remarkable. The family used Rite Aid as their Pharmacy, and she'd just never had occasion to go into the Walgreens. It seemed like an unnecessary extra store. But maybe that's what the Walgreens folks thought about Rite Air. A dirty gray hatchback pulled out of its driveway, and Janice thought, Oh, the proctor

Then they were out of town but not really. They drove past a green baseball diamond that seemed like it shouldn't be green right now. And there was a tree in the middle of it where and outfielder should stand.

And then dad pulled into the parking lot. There was a hospital outside. It wasn't so tall. It wasn't an imposing hospital. Or at least not anymore. It had felt so big the other day, but now it was just a building. It was building-sized. Inside it was a mom who was mom-sized. Many moms, in fact. If she remembered nothing else about that day, she remembered waiting for a man in the maternity ward. And waiting and waiting. And here now was dad sitting beside her, expecting her to know how to get to mom.

She didn't. She didn't care that dad knew. She was too tired to fake it. She imagined that she would have pretended that they needed permission to visit mom. That she would have gone up to a desk and told the lady that she was there to visit mom, and the lady would have told her where, and she would have pretended she already knew and was just checking in and then she would have read a sign that would have said where to go and then she would have led her dad there as if she hadn't needed to read the sign. She imagined she would have done that if she'd had any energy at all. But she had no energy, so she told dad, "I don't know which room is mom's."

And dad didn't seem to have expected her to, because all he said was, "we'll find her."

And they did. And the stood next to her. And it was true, the world did end. But Janice didn't notice, because her dad sat next to her mom and held her hand and only told her wonderful things about herself like he used to because that was the kind of dad and apparently ex-husband he was.

And then, as mom didn't or couldn't respond, they left. And went to The Fox and Hound, which was pretty fancy, considering they weren't looking for a fancy place to eat, she didn't think. And after she and her dad had dinner at which he ordered a reuben, and she ordered a steak and they'd each tasted the other's food, they got back in the car and drove to the Multiplex, where they watched a movie that they both forgot they'd each seen once before. He, on the night he'd gotten into town before deciding for sure to come to the house he used to live in. She, a matinee on the day before the SAT.

It was just as forgettable the second time, but now, hopefully, they would remember it as that movie they both forgot they had seen. Maybe the marketing was especially designed to make you think you hadn't seen it yet. That seemed like it would be a neat trick if someone could do it.

And then, since it was past everybody's bedtime, they made the only reasonable choice. They went to a diner.

Chapter 12

For

https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-399-5-minute-freewrite-friday-prompt-beast

Swellven and Chanbun let people finish their meals. They probably would have let them all crash on the floor if they were too full to even roll out the door, but that hadn't been necessary. The people all went home on their own. They stopped by the square, but apparently the hanging had been postponed, delayed, rescheduled, canceled. They were too full to care.

"I guess that's it. We did it." said Swellven, even as Chanbun was drunkenly chasing bitter mead with bitter mead.

"I'm drunk, Swellven. I'm not happy about it, but there it is." Chanbun gestured to Swellven that he should set his lute carefully in a secure place and come lean on the counter where he would be less likely to fall over, seeing as the floor was pitching from side to side like a schooner in frigate weather. That certainly was what Chanbun believed she was gesturing. Swellven, who thought he spoke drunk better than he did, was pretty certain that her gesture meant "carry me to sleepy-time-place"

So that's what Swellven did, and it turned out to be a fine mistake. Chanbun fell fast asleep. Swellven washed bitter mead mugs until he felt too tired too and then he fell fast asleep.

---

A beast roar. Somewhere in the forest, Coriander and Lavender had lost Jani. Not only lost her body, but lost her mind, clearly. She had become someone they didn't know. She had moved in a way they didn't know was physically possible for a person to move, for a body to move. They realized what had happened before they knew which way she had gone, even.

"There's something controlling her. Something nasty has taken her mind. A TELEPATH." Lavender had read a book by an adventurer once, and he'd gone on and on about the evils of telepaths. Of course, he had also gone on and on about the boredom that shepherds experience, and she knew sheep to be fascinating conversationalists, especially if you valued that rarest of all personality traits, a good listener. She did value that, and so she knew her sheep to be not boring, and so she had taken the raving about telepaths with a grain of salt. It seemed that perhaps she shouldn't have. Here was solid evidence. Jani had been going on and on about being two minds in one, though no matter how much she had tried to clarify, nothing had ever seemed clear about that.

"Or what if-" Coriander stopped when Jani, astride a grizzly bear, barreled through the underbrush directly at them both.
As she leaped aside, Coriander thought, that doesn't seem friendly

Her face was contorted. What had been a conflicted face that had real regard for the consequences of her behavior and had made a hard choice, but a necessary one within the ideological framework she would or could develop was now an angry face. Not just an angry face, a vicious face. A face that seemed intent of thrusting fear upon all who looked upon it.

Lavender saw the beautiful soft features of her party leader contorted like that and yelled, "POSSESSION"

From somewhere the thought, possession is nine tenths of the law sprang into Coriander's mind, but then was gone. The bear swiped at Lavender as it passed her by, flinging her across the undergrowth to land on a sticky web.

A sticky web.

Coriander clocked the bear and the web. She grabbed a branch from a pine, pulled the bendy, still-living wood towards the earth, and let the strength of the bough returning to its natural form slice just cleanly enough, just as a butcher knows how it must slice with or against the grain of the meat, with or against the grain of a long legs sticky silk web so that her daughter could be free.

Her daughter was free, but vibrations on the web had alerted the long legs. Long legs, though the forest is their home, seem to have no compunction about eating the arbiters and defenders of the forest. They live a different set of arachnid morality... one that has more to do with eating whatever is available and saving meals for later in times of plenty than any higher sense of duty to the forest.

And so the longlegs reach for the largest food source, and a mighty battle between bear and long legs began. A face-distorted beast of an elf rode the battle.

...where's my cat? wondered Coriander.