Tell them what, sugar? It was the tough tootsie, but for once she didn't sound cold, only curious.
What there really IS, How simple. just to eat ... why, just to have something to eat and then to be full afterward ...
'The Subaudible,' Trisha said. She watched the butterflies. Two white and one dark, all three dipping and darting in the afternoon sun. She thought of Little Black Sambo up in the tree, the tigers running around down below and wearing his fine new clothes, running and running until they melted and turned into butter. Into what her Dad called ghee.
Her right hand came unlaced from her left, rolled over, and thumped palm-up to the ground. It seemed like too much work to put it back and so Trisha let it stay where it was.
The Subaudible what, sugar? What about it?
'Well,' Trisha said in a slow, sleepy, considering voice. 'It's not like that's nothing ... is it.
The tough tootsie didn't reply. Trisha was glad. She felt so sleepy, so full, so wonderful. She didn't sleep, though; even later, when she knew she must have slept, it didn't seem as if she had. She remembered thinking about her Dad's back yard behind the newer, smaller house, how the grass needed cutting and the lawn-dwarves looked sly-as if they knew something you didn't-and about how Dad had started to look sad and old to her, with that smell of beer always coming out of his pores. Life could be very sad, it seemed to her, and mostly it was what it could be. People made believe that it wasn't, and they lied to their kids (no movie or television program she had ever seen had prepared her for losing her balance and plopping back into her own crap, for instance) so as not to scare them or bum them out, but yeah, it could be sad. The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. She knew that now. She was only nine, but she knew it, and she thought she could accept it. She was almost ten, after all, and big for her age.
I don't know why we have to Pay for what you guys did wrong! That was the last thing she had heard Pete say, and now Trisha thought she knew the answer. It was a tough answer but probably a true one: Just because. And if you didn't like it, take a ticket and get in line.
Trisha guessed that in a lot of ways she was older than Pete now.
She looked downstream and saw that another stream came pouring into hers about forty yards from where she was sitting; it came over the bank in a spraying little waterfall. Good deal. This was the way it was supposed to work. J This second stream she had found would get bigger and big ger, this one would lead her to people. It-
She shifted her eyes back to the little clearing on the other side of the stream and three people were standing there, looking at her. At least she assumed they were looking at her; Trisha couldn't see their faces. Their feet, either. They wore long robes like the priests in those movies about days of old. ('In days of old when knights were bold and ladies showed their fan-nies,' Pepsi Robichaud sometimes sang when she jumped rope.) The hems of these robes puddled on the clearing's carpet of needles. Their hoods were up, hiding the faces within. Trisha looked across the stream at them, a little startled but not really afraid, not then. Two of the robes were white. The one worn by the figure in the middle was black.
'Who are you?' Trisha asked. She tried to sit up a little straighter and found she couldn't. She was too full of food. For the first time in her life she felt as if she had been drugged with food. 'Will you help me? I'm lost. I've been lost for . She couldn't remember. Was it two days or three? for a long time. Will you please help me?'
They didn't answer, only stood there looking at her (she assumed they were looking at her, anyway), and that was when Trisha began to feel afraid. They had their arms crossed on their chests and you couldn't even see their hands, because the long sleeves of their robes flowed over them.
'Who are you? Tell me who you are!'
The one on the left stepped forward, and when he reached up to his hood his white sleeves fell away from long white fingers. He pushed the hood back and revealed an intelligent (if rather horsey) face with a receding chin. He looked like Mr. Bork, the science teacher at Sanford Elementary who had taught them about the plants and animals of northern New England ... including, of course, the worldfamous beechnut. Most of the boys and some of the girls (Pepsi Robichaud, for instance) called him Bork the Dork. He looked at her from across the stream and from behind little gold-rimmed spectacles.
'I come from the God of Tom Gordon,' he said. 'The one he points up to when he gets the save.'
'Yes?' Trisha asked politely. She wasn't sure she trusted this guy. If he'd said he was the God of Tom Gordon, she knew damned well she wouldn't have trusted him. She could believe a lot of things, but not that God looked like her fourth-grade science teacher. 'That's ... very interesting.'
'He can't help you,' Bork the Dork said. 'There's a lot going on today. There's been an earthquake in Japan, for instance, a bad one. As a rule he doesn't intervene in human affairs, anyway, although I must admit he is a sports fan. Not necessarily a Red Sox fan, however.'
He stepped back and raised his hood. After a moment the other whiterobe, the one on the right, stepped forward ... as Trisha had known he would. These things had a certain form to them, after all-three wishes, three trips up the beanstalk, three sisters, three chances to guess the evil dwarf's name. Not to mention three deer in the woods, eating beechnuts.
Am I dreaming? she asked herself, and reached up to touch the wasp-sting on her left cheekbone. It was there, and although the swelling had gone down some, touching it still hurt. Not a dream. But when the second whiterobe pushed back his hood and she saw a man who looked like her father-not exactly, but as much like Larry McFarland as the first whiterobe had looked like Mr. Bork-she thought it had to be. If so, it was like no other dream she had ever had.
'Don't tell me,' Trisha said, 'you come from the Subaudible, right?'
'Actually, I am the Subaudible,' the man who looked like her father said apologetically. 'I had to take the shape of someone you know in order to appear, because I'm actually quite weak. I can't do anything for you, Trisha. Sorry.'
'Are you drunk?' Trisha asked, suddenly angry. 'You are, aren't you? I can smell it from here. Boy!'
The Subaudible guy gave her a shamefaced little smile, said nothing, stepped back, raised his hood.
Now the figure in the black robe stepped forward. Trisha felt sudden terror.
'No,' she said. 'Not you.' She tried to get up and still couldn't move. 'Not you, go away, give me a break.'
