Ool in the Bar

There is a longer creature-based work, which can only come out if people read it as it is forming itself. In that way it's like an alien caterpillar] The excerpts do not necessarily come in order. Comments welcome. 

Ool sat at the bar and ordered a martini. He wouldn’t normally do that. Order that is, instead of steaking and sit in plain view instead of lurking between the legs of the bar stools. But the server felt different. She wiped the bar with a cloth; served him his drink: ice-cold, human, and Ool could reach the bar fine enough if he stood on the stool. He placed his long face on the counter and watched the server through the clear glass.  

“Do you have money?” the server asked in a voice that was like the rustle of leaves back in the Thicket.

“Yes. But thank you for asking”. He paid for the drink and watched her move from the bar to the till, from the till to the door of the kitchen. She was graceful and dignified, and every few beats she seemed to vanish. Otherwise she passed for a very tall human.

“I don’t often see,” she hesitated.

“Folks form home not-home? We scuttle. We don’t drink martinis. You’re here long?”

She found all words a bit difficult. Sentences, the way they grew and sprawled was not how she remembered things growing and sprawling. Here, and long, she didn’t quite know what to do with Ool’s words. The bar was quiet, sunlight patches on the floor, dark furniture, and extra shadows that had crawled in from the heat

“I am a dryad” she said. “My tree died but was still standing. They cut it down.”

“I am sorry.”

“When the bar is closed, I sleep upstairs. I look out of the window in the morning. I dust. I come outside and wash the windows.”

Those brown chairs shiny with sunlight, those green pool tables, the smell of spilt beer, dark and happy, flowing through this place like sap. Ool imagined the bar as a tree, big-crowned, rooted in the city.

“Do you like going outside?”

She smiled: “Yes. I do now”

“But,” she added, “I don’t stray too far, I am glad to have this job.”

Ool found that martini wasn’t all it was cranked up to be. Slow bitter sips. He wanted to stay here for a long time and talk to the Dryad. Not because he missed the not-home, he met folks from the Thicket every day. But her sorrow was like leaves. Her grief for the tree was a quiet place. And in that place, he hoped, there might be answers. If he stayed here long enough, of course, because, trained in the tree-time she took a while to unravel others people’s words.

He would have liked to ask her about the shapes on the bridge. If she might have seen them too? And if there was a way to deal with them. Or he would have liked to tell her about the story that he wanted to tell to the log, except he now lost its thread, and he worried whether its meaning would hang around for much longer without a shape. Mostly he wanted to sit there, and to be reflected, unobtrusively, in her words

Humans came in; she served them with graceful movements, and only vanished for minute moments, their blinks of an eye. And nobody noticed Ool either, nobody commented on his furry face resting on the counter, or his awkward washed out suit, or his long winding tail. “I can go wherever I like,” Ool thought. And he remembered Igrik and his mom, and her tired talking wardrobes, and her brave face and hands that shook only now and again, and he decided to go back. He thought if they got sunny days, he could take Igrik to the park. Nobody would notice them; they wouldn’t need to scuttle, and he’d show him how to do simple magic.

And because he now felt her knew what to do, he finished his drink and thanked the Dryad, which is why he didn’t hear that she had also sailed across to the city with the Beetleman or that she had met Soyla and Yulanda on the lakeshore.