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Sunday, October 13, 2024
#2024MakeAMonster day 13: Pet
#2024MakeAMonster
PetAll right, first day? Fine: welcome to the Illegal Preternatural Pet Trafficking Division. Got your license? Right, right - just let me scry it. Sorry, regulations.
Okay, you're good to go. Now, from the looks of you you're just out of grimoiry, so I'll start you simple. See this? Pet rock container. Open it up - hey, gauntlets on first! All right, all right, I'll put it down to first-day nerves. No, leave the spider-silk; you want old-iron mesh for this. You don't want a nip from these things. All right, open away.
Why the fallen face?
Of course it's a rock. Didn't you read the container?
Oh, you think that's not a problem? Well, let me tell you, since they started crossing pet rocks with hagstones it's been nothing but trouble. Pet rocks from proper breeders are fine - don't need feeding, don't shed, don't bark, don't claw the furniture. People think it's all cool and fashionable to mix in a bit of wild, but I'll tell you, we call wild 'wild' for a reason. Last backyard breeder, we didn't even have to arrest him. Look through a hagstone in the outdoors and you might see the future, but I'll tell you, when I looked through the holes in that guy, I saw my future. Didn't even need the vision to tell me I'm going to be a tired, tired man when I retire.
Saturday, October 12, 2024
#2024MakeAMonster day 12: Art
#2024MakeAMonster
ArtIt had been years since I tried to paint. Whatever joy I'd once felt in the process dried out drop by drop, until all the days when friends or family told me to 'Take some time for your art!' were something I dreaded. I'd stare at the blank page, and nothing I did to it would stop it being empty. There was a time when I could pick up a pencil or a brush and just start moving, and once there was a line on the sheet before me it'd come alive; I could play with it, follow its movement, turn it into something that really rejoiced. But things can die. Now when I tried, all I had was a blank piece of paper with some lines added to the top. No life in them; nothing I could make them do. It was a waste of good art supplies.
But people kept giving me more. They just wouldn't believe I was done. After a while - enough years of saying that this Christmas or birthday I'd like people to make a charity donation instead - they mostly got the message, but my friend Laurie just wouldn't take the point.
Laurie'd always been into the power of belief. We'd known each other since primary school - one of those friendships where you probably wouldn't be friends if you met today, and if I'm honest one of those friendships that would likely have faded if she'd put in as little effort as I did. But you couldn't stop Laurie. At five she covered her pencil case with rainbow stickers because someone told her that you couldn't have rainbows without rain; for about a year she was the Rainbow Girl who wanted to magic something colourful out of every bad day. At ten it was superfoods - she insisted on a blender for her birthday and made me share grainy smoothies out of her thermos every lunch. Some were delicious, really, but other days they tasted like a sink plug and she'd still insist we finish them: 'Taste is just a sensation! Think of all the good it'll do us!' She was into self-help and positive energy and manifestations and I-don't-know-what by the time we hit our teens, and she stuck to that with sparkly stubbornness no matter what. She was the kind of girl who'd have been called a witch if she didn't wear so much pink.
I loved to draw as a kid, and Laurie loved that for me. Or maybe she was jealous, but she was the kind of person who never admitted to jealousy; instead she had to translate it into her own language. So she called it a spell on the page, a manifestation of my own. I didn't see it like that - for me it was about what was in front of my eyes, not something I conjured out of my head, and so once my eyes stopped doing their trick my head was empty, and if it hurt too much to think about then that was my business. But Laurie just wouldn't let it go. I'd been friends with her because she was what parents call a 'nice little girl', but we weren't little girls any more, and the thing about me she'd loved was gone, and she wasn't willing to let it go.
One day I got so upset I was honest: I shouted that if she wanted to be my friend, she had to be friends with ME, not my painting. And if my painting was the only thing she ever liked about me, then she was wasting her time trying to be my friend any more. I was who I was, and if she wanted to paint she could do it herself, and if she couldn't then she wouldn't be any more of a painter by trying to force me.
Laurie doesn't cry, or not unless it's a ritual where you weep fertile tears for exactly ten minutes and then rise again refreshed. But she blinked at me, and then I could see her pull her face back into the expression she wanted. It was almost like watching a line turn into something under my pencil, back when I could do it. For a moment she was just wavering and lost, and then it all pulled together.
And then it was my birthday, and she insisted we go on a 'surprise experience day'. I had a bad feeling, but I felt guilty for upsetting her. She doesn't listen, but she really does mean well. Everybody says so.
The place wasn't as bad as I'd feared, actually. I'd thought she'd drag me to a life-drawing class or something like that, but in fact it was one of those pottery-painting places that take footprints of your baby and stamp them onto mugs, that kind of thing. Mostly for kids, but they let adults come and paint if they want to, and when you're done they'll fire the cup and you've got your hand-painted art.
I really wished she'd just let it go, but she was sparkling again. 'I've got a present for you!' she said.
Even before I opened it I knew it'd be art supplies. She just doesn't stop. And there it was under the glossy paper: a set of sable brushes.
Red sable's the most expensive paintbrush hair you can get. It comes off this animal called the kolonok, a kind of blond Siberian weasel that overkills in henhouses and, if you believe the Chinese legends, steal your soul: they want to get into Heaven but animals aren't allowed, so they take it out of your body and slip in their own, apparently.
I'd never used red sable. Partly it was too expensive, and partly I'm vegetarian; I don't know how they get the hairs off those little weasels but I didn't like the sound of it. And if I'm honest, I was put off by the idea of a brush that so precisely answered my hand, which is what kolinsky sable is meant to do: I'd always relied on my mistakes, taking accidents and turning them into something. I didn't feel comfortable with any tool so obedient.
But Laurie was blinking at me in delight, and it was just a pottery place, so I said thank you. I didn't have to be brilliant, I figured; all I had to do was take a cup and put a decorative pattern on it or something that didn't need to be alive. Probably I was rusty, but basic technical skills weren't beyond me, and then I could either give the cup to Laurie or, if she wouldn't take it, get a little clumsy one day and drop it hard enough to break.
So we started. And I had to admit that I'd never handled a brush like it: it suck up the watercolour like it was thirsty, and held a tip fine as a fang. I started on the cup, meaning to just draw a geometric flower. But there was something about the curve of the pottery; combined with the unfamiliar feeling of the brush handle I found my lines going faster than I'd meant them to, and the flower came out messy. I could have washed it off and started again, of course, but instead I thought I'd hide it: I added some leaves on top, and then some more, and then before I knew it I had the whole cup turned into something. It was dark on the inside and covered in leaves and greenery, and when I turned it over I saw I'd made a weasel burrow.
'See?' Laurie crowed. 'You just need a little inspiration!'
Well, I had to admit it was better than anything I'd painted for years. But I wasn't quite comfortable. Landscapes had never been my thing; I'd loved painting animals. I didn't know what I'd been thinking making that cup.
Laurie insisted I keep it; she said it should remind me that talent never went away. And it came out well when they fired it, but it smelled a little off - something musty in the glaze, I thought. So rather than drinking out of it, I left it on my desk and let Laurie's brushes sit in it. That way when she came to visit she couldn't say I wasn't grateful.
Once it was on my desk, though, I kept staring at it. I wasn't inspired; that's not what tools do. But it itched at the edge of my vision like the brushes kept tickling my eyes.
Laurie invited herself round for dinner, and I thought it'd be all right, but before I started cooking she insisted on having a look around what she kept calling my 'studio', even though it hadn't been that for years and was just the room I kept stuff I hadn't sorted yet. She was so disappointed I hadn't done any more painting, and when I said I hadn't had time and also that I really didn't think it was the right moment, Laurie sat down, glittering determined.
'You need to get the habit back,' she said. 'You're not cooking and I'm not eating till you've spent half an hour painting.'
I thought about throwing her out, but my eyes started itching again. It felt like I might be able to cry.
'Come on,' Laurie said. 'I know you can do it. You can't keep me out, you know!'
I had to laugh a little; at least she knew she was being pushy. So I sat down and picked up the brushes; it was only half an hour.
It felt a bit dank inside the cup, but the brush was warm in my hand. I just started painting, I didn't know what.
It had been years since I'd painted an animal, but I thought I'd try something simple. A mouse would be nice and small, so I tried a bit of a curve, and the brush followed it so fast that the curve of its back came out wrong: too hunched and tucked-in. Well, it could be a vole instead; I painted and painted and sure enough, a vole started to shape itself on the page.
Laurie was giving little giggles of delight, I could hear that, small squeaks at the edge of my hearing. But I wasn't happy. It looked like I was doing what I'd always done, trying a line out and then turning it into something unexpected - but the vole didn't really look like something I'd do. Its back was curved like a rainbow, and it should have been a merry little thing, but it wasn't. It had big, scared eyes, and what stood out wasn't so much the fur as the fragility. A tender throat, with the shading pooling so that you could almost see the jugular within.
Laurie was delighted, though. 'See?' she said. 'So sweet. I could just eat you up.'
'Eat it up, don't you mean?' I said, and Laurie laughed again.
She wasn't going to let it go, so when she was gone I looked up sable brushes. They do kill the weasels for them, though probably not just for the tails; other parts of the animals go to other uses. People kept saying not to worry, though: weasels are pests. They'll get into a henhouse no matter how much you try to guard it, and once they're inside they'll take everything that's there.
I dreamed of rainbows that night. Started seeing them when I blinked, but the optician couldn't find anything wrong.
It turned into a habit: Laurie would come for dinner on Thursday nights and sit over me until I painted. Animals started happening - moles, shrews, earthworms, tiny writhing things. Always, the brush picked out the shadows around their bodies where the skin was thin and the blood was near the surface. Once I even tried to paint a plain circle, but it got away from me: it turned into an eggshell, but the top was hatching and their was a naked, velvety little chick coming out, bulged blind eyes and crushable bones and raw, quivering meat.
'It's all right,' Laurie said. 'Let it come. You need to let it manifest.'
'Manifest what?' I said.
'You can't keep out what needs to come in,' Laurie said. She smiled so bright when she said it. 'Just trust the process.'
My eyes were starting to go strange. I tried the optician again but they said there was nothing wrong. Laurie visited again and again and her smile was full of sparkling prisms. But the rest of the time things were too pink. All I could paint was these prey animals, and I never painted blood on them; I wouldn't even keep red paint on my desk after a while. But when I looked in the mirror I saw the same thing: thin skin, and everywhere a vein pulsed near enough to bite.
I was tired all the time, these days. I didn't know why. Light was starting to hurt. I kept the curtains closed, and my other friends thought I might be depressed. 'You don't seem like yourself these days,' my cousin said, but I didn't know what to tell her. Laurie thought it was beautifully cosy in my flat, 'a lovely little burrow.'
So she made me paint, and the hair on the brushes drank down everything they touched.
'Laurie?' I said to her. 'If the weasels steal what's inside a person so they can put their own soul there, what happens to the soul they stole?'
Laurie smiled. Her teeth were bright and glimmering as diamonds. 'Don't worry about that, my pet,' she said. 'It's a beautiful cycle of nature. Everything goes to feed something in the end.'
Friday, October 11, 2024
#2024MakeAMonster day 11: Cosy
#2024MakeAMonster
Cosy
I was walking in the park the other day when I saw it: the hollow of a tree, filled up with rainwater. Copper leaves lying atop, and the surface shimmering like silver.
Johnny stopped me when I went over to touch it, though. He said it could have all sorts of dirt in it. I shouldn't have got angry; I know he was right. He always is. It just looked - cozy. The water fitting so perfectly to the edges, nestled in place, a perfect little teacup of a pond.
'Of course the water's up to the edges,' Johnny said. He looked puzzled. 'Don't touch it, though. It's probably full of larvae.'
He was probably right. He always is.
Later that night he was angry with me because I got distracted and burned the dinner, and he went out without telling me where. I was tired, because I knew it wouldn't be over. He'd come back tomorrow night, probably, and then I'd have to think what to say. If I didn't ask where he'd been it'd show I didn't care if he was safe, and if I did I'd be picking a fight and showing I didn't trust him, and whatever I said would be wrong. I'd have to figure out the right thing by having a long fight with him and waiting and waiting until I could see what would fix it. There would be a right thing to say, but it'd be a long time before I found it.
I couldn't think about that right now. I threw the dinner in the bin. It needed emptying, he'd told me that, and he was right. But I was too worn out, and it wasn't all the way full yet; there was still a little space at the top, and it itched at me. It should be filled all the way up. That gap gave me a cold feeling.
The heating was on but I was still chilly, so I went and ran myself a hot bath. I timed it exactly: when I got in, the water rose right up to the overflow and not a drop more. I could sink in it, paddle my fingers and let the ripples run over my skin.
It was a pretty narrow bath, and Johnny was always saying we should get a bigger one. I didn't feel like we could afford it, but he said not to be selfish just because I was smaller than him; we'd pay halves. I liked the tight sides, if I was honest; it was comfortable to squeeze into. But I supposed that soon enough the bath would be gone.
I lay there, splashing. Little silver ripples on the surface of the hot water. My body filling the tub from edge to edge. The movement of the water tickled; the more I flicked my fingers, the more I could feel little currents running under me, almost like tiny snakes. Not real, of course, but little larvae of movement. The water infested with comfort. I stayed in that bath a long time.
The next day the bin was still full, but there was that empty space at the top and I couldn't make myself take it out. It wouldn't have been so bad, except that a rat had got in from somewhere. I could hear it thrashing around, and when I looked down I could see the little thing: grey-brown fur and small pink hands, struggling against the sides. It wanted to get out, and I should have done something, but I couldn't think what. Every idea was wrong. If I released it, it'd be in the house, but if I tried to trap it, it'd bite me or something like that.
In the end I had a thought: I carried the whole bin up to the bathroom and turned the shower head on it. Water filled it up, and the rat struggled around a bit more, but it drowned in the end.
There: solved. No more rat.
I should have found a way to get rid of it, I knew, but I couldn't just leave it out for the bin men. I'd killed it; I owed it more than that.
Johnny still wasn't home, so I went out to the park. The tree-stump was still there, all glossy and secure. It could be there were larvae in there like Johnny said, and if there were, they'd want things to eat. So I put in the rat. Back to nature. It was a burial of sorts. I'd murdered it, but I could leave it somewhere nice and cosy.
Johnny came back that evening. He yelled for a few hours, but I figured out the right thing to say in the end. We went to bed, and I lay under the covers wishing I was back in the bath; the sheets were too flat and clean and nothing felt friendly. I wanted to be back in the water with currents running over me.
A few days later Johnny said he'd had enough and it was time to replace the tub, and yes I could afford it if I went into my savings, and of course he was right, if I did then I could. He said some kind of mould had got into the whole thing and he couldn't stand the smell. I could have told him about the rat, and how I'd emptied the water down the drain afterwards, but I didn't. I took the money out of my savings because that cost me less in the end.
But I couldn't settle in the new tub. It was too long and too wide, and I floated about. It just wasn't cosy. I lay there and thought about the rat tucked into its watery tree, and how held its little corpse must have felt. All I could do was paddle my legs - there was more room for them now - and make waves to wash ripples over my skin, which was as comforting as I was going to get in the new tub.
I didn't mean to splash the floor, but I suppose I must have. A few weeks later we had damp in the walls. Not black mould, exactly, but little flecks here and there. Johnny said they looked like grubs, and he wasn't paying for this when it was all my doing. And he was right - there was something a bit like larvae about them. Sometimes when I blinked hard to keep from getting weepy they seemed to writhe.
Well, I told him I'd get a man in to have a look. But I did something wrong. I lied.
What I did was, I took the money out of my savings and started a new account with it. Different bank, not one I mentioned to him. I don't know why, except that I didn't want an argument about it. And I could move the larvae myself. It wasn't even difficult. Once he was gone and I had the heat of the house up to full blast, I just went around with a cloth. A gentle little flick, and each smudge fell off into my hand. I stroked the air above them, just a soft caress to make some ripples, and they curled up in comfort.
I went out to the park and tipped them into the little pool in the tree. The rat was quite gone. The pool was still there, its top bright as moonlight. When I gazed into it, I saw something like my own face, except that face was smiling.
The new tub didn't feel quite so big now. Johnny said he didn't know what I was thinking hiring that cowboy who replaced it, because the mold was worse than ever now; every day we cleaned it, or at least he told me to clean it, and whenever either of us washed in it the water left dark scum. Little grubs of grey-soap limescale.
It's all right, I told him. I cleaned them up every day. I tucked them into the tree in the park, the cosy little pool. Everything in it fitting just so, like a hug.
Then came the wet week.
It was pounding rain on the roof. The window in our bedroom started to leak - just little trickles of water round its edges. Johnny said, hadn't we agreed I'd get it repainted before the winter came? And now look. I couldn't do anything right, not the simplest thing.
I agreed. I couldn't. There wasn't much point trying any more.
What I was thinking, going for a walk in all this weather, Johnny couldn't imagine. I didn't even explain it to him, so there was going to be a row when I came home. All I knew was that it was better to be stroked by the raindrops than it was indoors, so I went out to the park. It was damp dog-walkers and birds hunching in the branches, and at one point I saw a rat run across the path. It didn't stop to blame me for what I'd done in my bin. I'd drowned its rat friend months back, but it didn't have a bad thing to say about me.
So I went to the tree with its comforting little pool, and I bent over the surface to gaze. The face in the water wasn't mine any more; the patter of rain broke it up into a million ripples. But none of them were crying.
I went home with a handful of dead leaves. When Johnny shouted at me, I threw them at him, and then when he grabbed at me all the little creatures came out. They'd been black grubs of mould before, but I'd given them time to grow somewhere comfortable, and when the larvae rests for long enough, it opens out its wings.
They didn't buzz as they flew around the house. Black mosquito-wings shimmering faster than eyesight, but they were as big as my fist. I'd waited a long time for them to grow.
I never did see what the larvae did to that rat I drowned. From what I saw with Johnny, here's what I think: first of all they ate the skin. Peeled it off bite by bit, little loving nibbles all over so the muscles showed through. Then they'd have eaten the muscles, and by that time the water would have soaked through as well - all that damp clinging close, nestling right in amongst the meat. I think it would have bloomed under the water, spreading out into clouds among the feasting creatures, and they swallowed it down till there was nothing soft of it left, just the bones that had always been hard at its core.
The bones take longer to eat, but the little creatures will get through Johnny's eventually. I have a festival of shadows in my house now, and when I open the windows to let in the rain they dance in it. When they need a rest from their meal they huddle up close to me. Sometimes they pierce my skin too, drink little sips from inside me, but I can run as much water as I like now and I keep drinking, and I don't mind it too much. When they swarm me all over it's like the dark itself is hugging me. It's almost cosy.
Thursday, October 10, 2024
#2024MakeAMonster day 10: Trash
#2024makeamonsterWarning: violence, misogyny, decomposition and body horror
Trash
He wrapped me in bin bags after he killed me. No one ever tucked a duvet around me so tenderly as he wrapped those plastic sheets. Masking tape fitted around my arms and legs tender as a tailor; he tucked in the stray ends as if I were Cinderella preparing for the ball.
In life he'd never touched me. He'd been a fussy man, nervous-handed; I'd seen him down the hallway sorting his mail, setting his shirt-cuffs straight, turning his key with careful precision in the lock. The people above complained about a smell, and that surprised me because he always seemed so clean: clothes freshly washed, hair shampooed every day, and just a little too much aftershave stinging the eyes as I walked past him.
I'd say, 'Good morning,' to him, or 'End of a long day, huh?' because I like to be on good terms with my neighbours. He'd nod to me and never said anything. Not till he had the rope around my throat, when he told me I'd wanted to be looked at and now I'd caught the eye of a man who really saw me, a man who knew a slut and a tease when he saw one, a man who could give her more than she'd bargained for.
Well, I hadn't bargained for it. So much pain, now I look back. Afterwards my nerve endings lost their charge and stopped bothering to hurt. It's funny; you miss pain more than you'd think. There's no sweet pleasure in the absence of it when you know you'll never feel it again.
I wasn't the only girl under his floorboards. We were all wrapped up like Christmas presents. Perhaps he'd had more tenderness for my dead body than for the others, because mine was the neatest bagged of all, or perhaps he'd just been getting better at his work. That was how it seemed at first, but I understood when I began, like them, to melt. The finest-tucked trash liner starts to buckle when your flesh begins to swell.
There was only so far we could rise, it seemed; like dough in proving tins we bloomed, but the floorboards kept us pressed and he had heavy furniture on top. A sofa, it was; at nights he sat on it and watched television. A quiet man, you might say. A homebody.
The bags were tucked tight enough that I felt it when the started to split. I'd died too young to know much of stretch marks on my own skin, but the bag did my aging for me. Thin puckers appears as my body bloated; wrinkles gathered in the tightening masking tape. For a while I got to be an old woman, my retirement years lived out beneath his floorboards as what was left of me entered its final riot.
But nothing lasts for ever. The other girls had already been through it; they had passed their swell and settled into rot. Soon enough I was with them. Flies tickled my muscles and maggots nuzzled my bones. I thought, as I lay there, of the people that had touched me; in tenderness, in play, in care, in aching desire. All those hands smoothed over my skin. I'd been a lucky girl, really. Only once did anyone touch me too hard. It just turned out that that one time, he touched me too hard to survive.
Now I was back in the arms of the insects. Me and my new friends, my last friends, we lay together. Mites crept from one of us to the next, little traces of our melting flesh on their delicate feet. It was a sewing machine, the tap, tap, tap of insect feet tacking pieces of one of us into the next, the next, the next. Our flesh greened and liquified, and through the tattered bin bags, we seeped. We couldn't reach hands to each other, but this we could do. Where our flesh ran, it ran to each other.
The neighbours above complained of the smell. My brain pulped quickly, but I didn't need it to remember. We floated atoms of ourselves aloft. With our throats honeycombed by the beetles' kiss, it was all we had to scream with.
But it wasn't all we had to do. Liquid runs; liquid seeps. Liquid knows.
By the time we'd softened his wooden floorboards, we were one. Life had made us separate, but we hadn't the movement to keep apart any more. We were there, we teemed beneath him, we waited.
Of course I wasn't his last girl. Nothing made the us that once was me any different from any other body on earth; that was what the floorboards taught us. For a while she'd been contained in a skull, but that skull was feathering holes through its dome now, and she was back with us now. Everything softens. Everything is matter. When we stop running, we run together.
So when he prized up the floorboards, his face covered with a scarf, the new body was wrapped tidy as anything. Pristine edges, firm and sealed within her skin. She was trapped for now, but she was ready for us, and we were ready for her.
But he shook his head. He shook it angry, frustrated, bewildered. He thought, us crowded together so safe and intimate as we'd become, there wasn't enough room for her.
He turned away. He was ready to deny us our sister. He wouldn't give us back to ourselves.
When we stop running, we run together.
It was easy to tower the maggots up; we are flesh and maggots are we. They made beautiful rippling ropes, their white backs boiling in the churn as we lifted them high, high, high, wrapping around her to drag her down to where, an ocean of patient green, we waited.
He screamed aloud; his throat was still tight-strung enough to sing out like a violin. It was the girl our maggot-tentacles reached for, our thrashing, craving hunger to welcome us back to ourselves. And he tried not to let her go; we had to wrestle him for her. The maggots fell in showshowers where he swatted them, but we were beyond pain and he wasn't, and when we broke his legs with our knotted arms of pupae, she fell down to where we waited and he screamed again.
It was the screaming that got his door opened; he couldn't run on his broken legs, and those above with noses to smell our mute cry had ears to hear his open one. The police came, and they were wrapped too: plastic on their limbs like it had covered ours, holding them separate from what we'd always been, always but for the brief dance of life where, for a few short years, you forget.
They took her away from us.
They tried to pull us apart too; skeletons, they said. And what was once her skeleton, her skeleton alone, now rests somewhere. People cry over it, but we can wait for them to stop. Pain doesn't last. All of us together, our mingled fragments, are too entwined to be dispersed, and now in the earth we wait, our buried joy. The end of a long day, and after it, the union. This graveyard has so many more of us. We lie together, and we blend and blend.
But she that she took away - we don't forget those plastic-coated moving bodies that carried her away from our embrace. Our flies will whisper in their dreams. They won't forget that they took her from where we lay, soft-hearted and tender, waiting for her to join us.
Wednesday, October 09, 2024
#2024MakeAMonster day 9: Coffee
#2024makeamonster
CoffeeGood morning and welcome to Waker's Coffee! No sleep too deep, that's our motto. Yes, we have all kinds here. Blonde roasts, single-origin, even Kopi Luwak. You know, those coffee beans that pass through the digestive system of a civet cat and get mellowed on the way? Ethical? Well, mostly. If you want wild-harvested civet droppings you'll have to pay wild-harvested prices, I'm afraid, but those'll run you pretty high. Civets don't eat coffee beans every day, and even if they do, they have to live long enough to pass them out. They aren't apex predators you know: crocodiles, hyenas, even snakes can take them out. So the real wild stuff's a pretty penny. We do have a discount, and it's - well, ethical enough, I think. We don't used caged civet farms, that's for sure. We're . . . barnyard civet, let's say. Dotty and Fluff out the back are busy little creatures. Pretty mad with caffeine, I'd admit, but it's not iron bars that hold them in. We have . . . gentler methods of discouraging escape. There's things they can't break past - and then there's things they don't want to pass. No, I don't think that's a kettle boiling. Yes, I can hear the hiss, but I assure you, it's purely an illusion. As I said, they aren't apex predators. Not fond of snakes. Just don't laugh too loud where they can hear you; a snake's something to stay away from, but hear a hyena and they might run. Ah, Jimmy sent you. Well then, let's talk real business. Show me your palm. Ah. Interesting life-line you have there. More than one break in it you've been brought back from. So all right, I'll ask the two real questions: how deep a sleep do you want your patient woken from? Because the real sleep, the long sleep, like the kind you've woken from - more than once, if I don't miss my guess - well, the beans for that'll cost you more than a pretty penny. That'll take a positively beautiful one, if you get my meaning. And if we're talking frankly, I must ask - are we talking about a loved one you want to bring back? Or are you more in the market for a mere servant? Because when we're pricing out your coffee beans, that's the other question: how awake do you want it to be?
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