Dream
Songfic for Halloween Contest 2006
Al spun to the rustle in the trees and drew a bead on the little mouse girl kneeling in the firey autumn leaves, a deeper red than the shawl draped around her shoulders. As soon as he saw he pulled the sights off her. "Hey."
She fell as she spun away from him and scrambled away on her butt for a few feet. Then she stopped. He recognized her—seen her around somewhere.
"You're the pig that runs the hot dog stand!" she squeaked.
"Uh huh," Al nodded. "You're from town? What are you doing out here?"
"Finding acorns," she answered, showing him the half-filled basket of dusty nuts. "What are you doing?"
"Hunting," he said in his deep bass, lifting his shotgun crossways. It wasn't much good against robots, but it helped keep Lower Mobius fed. "You see anything around here? Feral deer, anything like that?" She shook her head. "No luck," he snorted, snapping his thick fingers. "What are you doing out here all by yourself?"
"I have to get acorns for All Saints."
"All Saints?" he asked, and then he remembered about he'd bought the sack of little hard sugar candies from the vixen on the corner the night before. He missed her meaning because his family had always used the more traditional—
"Today is All Hallows' Eve," she explained in her soft young voice. "Today all the demons play. But then tomorrow Jesus and all the saints drive them away, so it's a holy-day and we have a big feast."
That's about the shape of it. "Your mom teaches you about Jesus?" he asked.
"Yes! Jesus died for our sins," she recited.
"That's right." Sweet little girl. "It's getting kind of late, though." She was sweet, and it would be awful if something were to happen to her out here. What kind of parents would let her go out by herself? He guessed maybe it was nice to give her a little slack in the leash; he'd felt a little restricted as a kid. The day was kind of getting to him on some level, he realized. He wouldn't have worried about it as much normally. But still—really, you never could tell when a swatbot patrol was going to come skimming low over the canopy, checking for warm bodies . . . .
They walked side-by-side down the path, Josephine—the girl's name was Josephine—swinging her little basket and holding the wind-blown tails of her little blanket around her shoulders, Al taking wide slow strides, shotgun laid on one shoulder. It was getting on toward the middle of afternoon; you could kind of feel the dusk coming, somewhere behind the trees.
"Do you believe in Jesus?" she asked him. She talked about Jesus a lot.
"Sure," he nodded, thinking about the sorrowful eyes and hanging mouth of the short-horned ram nailed up on the cross. Knew it backwards and forwards. "Jesus loves me, this I know."
"'Cause the Bible tells me so!" she answered.
They walked on in silence, a strong rustling wind beginning to build in the trees. Maybe a cold front coming down from over the city. It felt colder, and Al thought he could smell something bad in the air.
"I wish Jesus would make Robotnik go away," Josephine said.
"Well, His world isn't this world," Al replied. "Does your mom tell you that?"
She thought, scrunching up her nose uneasily. "Give to Acorn what is Acorn's," she recited after a few seconds.
"Right," he nodded. "We take care of what happens here, He takes care of what happens later. No matter what happens you've got heaven to look forward to, right? Robotnik's not the devil. He's just a person."
That seemed to bother her. "He does bad things," she said quietly.
"He can't touch your soul, right?"
"Mom says he can't do anything to dad's soul," she whispered.
Al shivered. The wind was constant now. You couldn't hear the drone of a hoverpod until it was right on top of you, in weather like this. Pressure drop, definitely, cold front; his heart was doing a little overtime to warm him up. "There's nothing special about Robotnik," he insisted. "Nothing supernatural. When I get scared of him—are you scared, Josephine?"
She nodded, eyes wide and deep.
"When I get scared," he continued, talking fast, "I just think, he's a bad guy, but there's nothing special about what he's done, the kind of things he's done. He's just a person, a really bad person. Anyone could do what he does, if they were evil. We just aren't. Griff could do it, if he wanted. You or I could do it."
"I don't like that idea," she said, drawing her shawl tighter and plunging forward into the wind, speeding up the trek home.
"It makes me feel better," Al said. "You see how, right? Because he's only a—"
"I think so," the girl answered.
"Helps me to remind myself, every once in a while. Hey, Josephine."
"What?" she chirped, turning her head to stare between the sights and up the long barrel, receding up and away towards the arched roll of fat flesh above his gaping eye.
"She—could you turn that down, please?" Griff bleated angrily, turning away to survey the kids running up and down the street in the dim crystal light of the night-cycle with whatever they could find (bedsheet ghost for the wealthiest, and for the less well off the slightest stuff—a raccoon with a pressed leaf on his forehead to be a tanuki demon; a goat with a arrowhead rock tied to his tail).
Al had negotiated with Griff's public-works lieutenant to draw power for his boombox on Saturdays. It was blasting out one of his three beloved blues albums, the electric one. The guitar groaned out a slouching, sluggish two note wave that broke again and again, with a slinking, deep baseline audible at its greatest ebb. Good for Halloween, he thought! The best he had, at least; it would really give the customers shivers.
You keep runnin' away don't matter how fast or long you always wind up—
He paused it with a thick index finger.
"Thanks," Griff said. "She's really worried, and I'm not having a lot of luck so far—they're kind of these religious types, you know? Keep to themselves, maybe a little too pushy about it, so nobody really . . . ."
"I gotcha," Al nodded, scratching his chest through his stained cook's apron. "Like I said, Griff, I saw nobody. And with the wind up there she never would have heard—"
"I know!" the goat hissed through clenched teeth. "Shit."
"All the kids are out. You know, she's probably around here somewhere."
"Maybe." Griff shook his head. He spat in the dust next to Al's counter and rubbed it away, smiling angrily and then giggling with a faint tinge of hysteria. "Another one bites the dust. How can we live like this, Al? How can we sleep at night?"
Al put two fat pink fingers under his eyes and pulled them down, showing the hidden tomato flesh on the underside of his eyelids. "With both eyes open."
Griff chuckled once, nervously. He turned and walked off down the street.
"Want some butterscotch?" Al called after him, holding up the bowl. Griff didn't answer, just kept walking.
Al went back in to grind up some more meat
(Inspiration: the title track off Ministry's Filth Pig.)