「WHO」 Cressida & Kelley 「WHAT」 Coworker intros or what have you 「WHEN」 12.21 5AM, after shift
It'd been a hard night. Annamaria Delgado, one of Cressida's regulars from the previous summer, had come in with blue news of her son, Charlie; the acute lymphoblastic leukemia which Annamaria had sold her car and home to try to treat had recurred. The countless hours the two women had spent scouring the improbable threads of the most unlikely futures in order to find the correct path to take pin order to help her son seemed for nought.
To compound the lamentable beginnings of her work shift, the Oracle's Sight had elected -as though it possessed its own mind- to be especially problematic. The Turkish lanterns hanging from the rafters of her tent had become watchful eyes, the candles lit within winking at her whenever a breeze set them swaying. Between clients, a cherub faced teenage girl skipped past the tent's open entrance, singing Miley Cyrus at the top of her lungs until a strange resonance changed the pitch into a banshee's wail, and Cress looked up from her work to spy the teen's eyes flashing like a cat's in the dark—staring. Twice, she'd thought shadows moved irregularly in her peripheral. Later, a white fog swirled through the tent's entrance, thick as the output from a smoke machine—only this fog had noticed her looking at it, and receded unnaturally, like an absentee god had pressed the 'rewind' button on that particular element of his globe-sized toybox.
So it was that on the last work night before winter holidays, Cress took herself to Nevermore for a vodka or five after closing up shop fifteen minutes early. Although the bar was well populated, she occupied a stool with two open spaces at her right and left. Five minutes prior, a woman visibly similar in age had considered claiming another of the stools. After a considerate look at Cress, she had taken to leaning against the far side of the counter. This was neither a novel, nor bothersome experience. With her hair so ornately tied and knotted it approached aggressiveness, and garbed in lengths of black lace, monochrome trims of velvet, mesh and sturdier boning which managed to be both strategically full coverage and a bit scandalous, the Oracle looked verboten even without the ebony cane with a sterling crow's head laid atop the bar, and the terrier-sized griffin creature stationed on her left shoulder. Periodically, he too searched the crowd as though he saw monsters, his enormous yellow eyes swiveling independently like a child's broken toy. Contrarily, the Siren was trying not to see them. It seemed that every time she looked up, she spied another character from Pan's Labyrinth or a B-movie nightmare. Trying to sort through what was and was not real had amped a normal migraine to a beehive's incessant buzzing inside her skull.
Having let her vodka breathe while she waited on a few slices of orange (the bartender had thought she was kidding) she wasted no time downing half her glass when properly supplied with the traditional Russian fruit complement.
"Son of a bitch." She winced, her sharp features tightened by the rubbing alcohol sting of well vodka—most certainly not what she'd ordered.
"SON OF DA BEECH!" Cornbread screeched beside the shell of her ear, with his head thrown back and his over-sized mouth open wide like a zoo dolphin anticipating a fish bucket. Ice water poured down the Oracle's spine would not have straightened her back more quickly.
"Stop that," she hissed, not because she cared that half a dozen judgmental eyes had just pivoted their way, but because she preferred her eardrums un-raptured, as normal people generally did.
"STOP THOT!"
Covering her face with splayed fingers like an alabaster Facesucker from Alien, Cress sighed and raised her free hand for attention. If she had to endure her feathered company, she'd at least do so with a proper pour.