“Throw it.”
“You pick which one.”
Lou Ellen drifted over to the bucket and pointed, but as Glory tried to toss it, it nipped her, pinching like crazy. She danced around, waving her arm and yelling ow, ow, leggo, leggo, her eyes so scrunched up it took her a moment to notice the two people who came out of the reeds across the pool and walked across the deep pond toward her, their feet leaving not so much as a ripple in the mirror surface of the water. In my dream, I had seen them coming.
Glory’s eyes flew wide, and she forgot about the crawdad, which hung twitching on her finger while she stared at the impossible people. To me they looked to be partly silver and partly blue, as though extremely cold people were contained inside coats of clear ice, but they didn’t look at all frozen. Their eyes and arms and feet moved, their huge, furry ears twitched back and forward, and their little pink triangle noses wrinkled at the corners, just like cats. They had that same sort of upper lip, too, split just below the nose and curving up on either side to make a rounded W shape. If cats could smile ingratiatingly, that’s what these people were doing.
Glory said something like How do you do, or Hello there.
Lou Ellen said, “Who you talking to?”
Glory looked down where Lou Ellen was sitting at the end of the pier and said, “Them.”
Lou Ellen looked all around. “Who’s them?”
Glory turned toward the smaller cat-person, and said angrily, “Now, that’s not fair! You’re going to get me locked up again, everybody thinking I’m crazy, and that’s not a nice thing to do. You let Lou Ellen see you, too.”
The bigger one remarked, “Of course. How thoughtless of us,” and he cast his eyes over toward Lou Ellen, who immediately screeched and grabbed at Glory, getting the crawdad’s other claw instead. It pinched her, and she howled.
“What is it your intention to do with these creatures?” asked the bigger one.
Glory said, “We’d planned on eating them.”
“Are they edible?” the smaller one asked. “They seem to be quite barky and fibrous.”
“The tail meat inside the shell is very nice,” Glory said, self-consciously shifting herself into politeness mode. This meant doing what I had told her, over and over. Concentrate on good grammar, speak quietly, without expletives—even silly ones, like “Ballygaggle” instead of her daddy’s “Balls!”
“Then you’re carnivores,” said the bigger cat-person.
“No, we’re Judsons,” Glory said. “Gloriana and Lou Ellen Judson.”
“A judson is…” said the smaller one, leaving it hanging like it was something she didn’t know what to do about.
“A family,” Glory told them. “It’s a family. Like, we’re related. Lou Ellen and me, we’re cousins. Her daddy and my daddy are half brothers, Billy Ray and Jimmy Joe Judson, and her mama and my mama are twin sisters, Mayleen and Maybelle Mackey.”
“Sisters who are very like one another, perhaps?” asked the smaller one, her eyes glowing.
Glory took a long breath before she said, “Not all that much, no. Aunt Mayleen thinks my mama’s cornered the market on selfishness, and my mama thinks Mayleen’s too lazy to breathe on her own, but it makes no nevermind because Lou Ellen and I are best friends, no matter what.”
“It’s good to have friends,” said the smaller one to the bigger one. “No matter what kind they are…”
“Besides,” Glory interjected, “I didn’t catch on to your asking about carnivores right at first, because I was thinking of the Conovers, the folks on one of the farms down the road. But I do know what a carnivore is, and we’re not quite. There’s another word for what we are…”
“Omnivores,” said the smaller one in a satisfied voice, like she’d been planning a dinner and had been worrying what to serve. “No, we’re omnivores, too, so I wasn’t worried about our having a meal together. My companion’s name is Prrr Prrrpm by the way. I am Mrrrw Lrrrpa, and since you have called your cousin Lou Ellen, you must be Glorrrr-iana.”
In my dream I said their names, over and over, the r ’s rolled like an engine running, and when they used Gloriana’s name, her jaw dropped, and it took a minute before she could say, “I’m Gloriana, but how come you know that?”
“We were given directions,” said the larger one. “We were told to find Gloriana Judson at this river, by this pier, early summer, period two, day ten, at twelve-forty-nine in the afternoon local time. We have a locator.” He removed a gadget from his belt and held it out: an egg-shaped, translucent blue thing with a silver handle.
“What does it say?” she asked.
“It says you are…who you are.”
“And why does it say that,” Glory demanded.
“Because,” said the littler one more softly, “you, no other person, are the optimum person to help us with our task.”
Gloriana considered this. She looked baffled. They just stood there, as though they expected her to do something, and in the dream, I could see her considering what might be proper.
“We were about to have our lunch. You’re welcome to share it, if you like. We’ve got enough crawdad tails for five each and enough potatoes and bacon and apples for everybody.”
“What fun,” said the smaller one. “What can we contribute?”
“There’s that roast pleckle leg,” he said. “And a whole basket of whalp berries. And those preserved grum stalks the trader gave us when we visited on…somewhere.”
Or something similar. The two cat-people walked up onshore as if it was all decided, shedding their ice coats as they came, and almost immediately the two of them had a fire going, the groceries out of their bags, and water boiling a lot faster than water ever behaved for me when I was in a hurry!
Glory wrapped the potatoes. “We’ll prob’ly have to have ’em for dessert,” she
