Happy Snak

by Nicole Kimberling

  Seigata made the smile expression. “Are the other creatures ever fooled?”

  “Sometimes, but not by me. I’m bad at disguising myself.”

  “Yes, you are.” Seigata’s volume rose while its tone descended. “You are very bad!” Its thunderous voice echoed throughout the circular chamber. Gaia swallowed. She broke out into a clammy sweat. Seigata grew even louder, working on itself like rolling thunder. “The reason I came is that the Corps Security Officer Singh contacted me to find out who had been making annoying calls. The call’s origin was from inside the Kishocha area, which was very strange. So I came to the area and found you here, disguised and stinking and holding the hand-held. What have you to say?”

  Gaia couldn’t squeeze out any words. Seigata’s furious voice rang in her ears. She hung her head. She focused on the floor, trying to maintain her balance, then she gathered her breath and slurred, “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you convulsed with contrition?”

  “Sure.” Gaia couldn’t bring herself to look at Seigata’s eyes. Her hands shook. Why did Seigata have to yell at her? No one ever yelled at her. She had no defense against it.

  “Good. Be sure to have Wave care for you until your health returns. And promise to make no more foolish calls.”

  “I promise,” Gaia intoned.

  “Good.” Seigata turned to leave. “I will become angry if I must swim back here again to stop you. But since your crime is only trivial I will say a prayer to try and relieve your malady. It is my greatest desire to never have to chastise you again. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” Gaia said. The Kishocha door twisted shut. Gaia stayed slumped over. She couldn’t believe how the evening had deteriorated. She felt sick. The alien didn’t return. Gaia looked experimentally up. The room seemed blurry and dim. All the colors looked mushy. The room lurched sideways and she passed out.

  Chapter Fifteen: New Product Line

  Gaia neither looked nor felt her best the next morning, which began with a second, milliseconds-long gravity failure that nonetheless triggered the requisite flashing lights and alarms.

  Not exactly the first sound a woman nursing a hangover likes to hear.

  But she rallied. She showered, ate some dry toast and went to the dining room, where she discovered Wave signing for the delivery of the remote kiosk.

  It came in seventeen boxes. The words some assembly required didn’t begin to describe the situation. The kiosk was like a three-dimensional yellow plastic puzzle.

  While Gaia perused the instructional pamphlet, Wave lay on the floor with an arm flung over its muzzle, still stained orange from the previous night. Roy arrived and started spraying antiseptic on the dining room tables. Because Happy Snak wouldn’t open for another forty-five minutes, Gaia decided to take a run at partially assembling the kiosk. She fitted the plastic-frame tubing together with shaky hands, feeling like she was doing a good job considering the viciousness of her headache.

  Slowly the pain and violent nausea were receding, but she still felt like she might die before they completely faded. Gaia had progressed into the silent-prayer-and-bargaining phase of being hungover.

  All she could think was: Please, please, let me stop feeling this way. If this just stops, I’ll never drink again.

  Not that Gaia believed in a higher power, she was just following the basic human instinct to mutely beg for relief.

  She didn’t even know why she was bothering to assemble the awning section of her new Xiao Enterprises concession kiosk. It wasn’t going to rain—ever. But somehow the hot dog stand looked bad without the awning. Besides it had the Happy Snak jester logo silk-screened onto its blue and yellow striped vinyl.

  As she worked and drank cola, time worked its magic. At last, Gaia was able to engage a cheeseburger.

  Attracted by the falling crumbs, a cleaner slid slowly up to her. The cleaners, which had started off as baseball-sized snails, were growing quickly. Now each was easily the size of Gaia’s thigh. They devoured a wide variety of molds, mushrooms and black scum which collected around the edges of refrigerator drawers. According to Wave they were supposed to grow to be about the size of Gaia’s torso, and strictly feed off refuse. Some human objects confused them. Anything with a battery, for example, had to be locked up. Cleaners were inexplicably attracted to batteries. Gaia also kept the cleaners out of her room, but Wave even let them curl up, like lapdogs on its sponge nest.

  Safe in the sphere of his hamster globe, Microbe deftly avoided the cleaner’s long, probing antennae, rolled up to Gaia’s foot and rammed it. Microbe loved his hamster globe. She knew this because when it was time to come out of the globe, Microbe would roll madly away from her and hide under the refrigerator.

  “Hey, Microbe,” Gaia said in her sweetest, lowest voice.

  “Hey, Microbe.” A sweet, low impersonation of her voice rolled out of Wave’s mouth. Gaia glanced behind her. Wave lay on the floor studying Microbe with an unseemly intensity. “Hey, Microbe,” the Kishocha said again. Microbe rolled over toward Wave, trying to sniff the alien through its clear plastic sphere.

  “Do you like my hamster?” Gaia asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Wave replied. “Watching him is very exciting.”

  “Do you have hamsters on your world?”

  Wave shrugged. “I’ve never seen one. But my experiences in our home waters were limited.”

  “What was it like?” Gaia put down the perplexing diagram. She had no idea what it said.

  “I remember the water was warm and clear. I pogged around with my siblings in the nursery pool and learned the names of the structures and our clan name, and they told us terrifying stories of the Sharks and of Yellow-Red War Riders.”

  Roy drifted over to them. Wave watched Microbe.

  “All of us pogs in that pool were of noble egg once, but the Yellow-Red Riders came with Battle Sharks and contaminated our parent with their seed. Lots of soldiers lost their limbs in the fight and also after as punishment for letting us seven be defiled,” Wave said.

  “Amazing.” Roy fished a hand-held out of his pocket and set it on the floor near Wave. One of the cleaners slid purposely toward the device. Gaia got ready to poke the thing.

  She said, “So you used to be a noble?”

  “No, never, except as an egg with only one parent still.” Wave dropped its voice even lower. “If I was to still be the child of a noble Kishocha, then my first parent would be the same first parent as the beautiful Kenjan and the wise Seigata. But since my other parent is a Yellow-Red Rider and worse than filth and I am so asymmetrical, I am an orphan-servant, you see?”

  “So Kenjan is your half-sibling?” Roy leaned forward.

  “No, but if we were humans that is how we would be related. Beautiful Kenjan and wise Seigata pogged together in a previous birthing pool. They are older.”

  The cleaner had reached Roy’s recorder and probed the device inquisitively with its wet antennae.

  “Where are your other siblings?” Gaia asked. “Are they on Ki Island?”

  “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Wave said. “First sibling and second sibling and fourth sibling all shamefully ran away to join with Yellow-Red Riders. A jellyfish ate fifth sibling. Sixth sibling is, I think, still servant within the Blessed Structure Reliable Sky Embrace on our home world. And seventh sibling teaches pogs.”

  “What happened to third sibling?” Roy asked.

  “Third sibling was won as a gambling prize by the zany Chambered Shell just before that beauty was wedded to Brave Lightning.”

  “Then?” Gaia asked.

  “Then Brave Lightning was chosen to lead the quest for heaven and we all entered the Blessed Structure Shining Heaven’s Pearl of Knowledge Island and lifted into the cold void.” Wave reached over and stroked the cleaner, who relentlessly sucked the microphone out of Roy’s hand-held. Roy didn’t seem to notice.

  “So Kenjan means Chambered Shell and Oziru means Brave Lightning, and Ki means Blessed Heaven’s Pearl of
Knowledge.” Roy smiled expansively, as though he’d discovered a new purpose in life. “And you are third sibling?”

  “Yes. Except that Ki means only pearl, and Kenjan could also be called Nautilus. The beautiful Kenjan once told me that it won me on purpose because I was its half-sibling. But one person overhears our talking and Kenjan’s kind words started a terrible fight and that’s when Kenjan was first called a heretic. It was before we even met you humans.”

  Microbe approached and Gaia nudged his hamster ball away from the zealous cleaner. She wasn’t sure what it would think of a rodent. “I thought that Kenjan’s heresy was human inspired.”

  “Kenjan was a perverted heretic long before humans were discovered. Humans just gave lovely Kenjan another excuse to be bad. One of the priests said that lovely Kenjan was without pogs because of its bad ways. Maybe I believe that, but maybe I do not.” Wave stroked the cleaner again. The striped animal was quivering in a distressing way. Wave reached into the pocket of its smock and pulled out two sets of tweezers. “The cleaner will make droppings now.”

  “What?” Roy sat up straight and noticed what the cleaner was doing to his hand-held. The microphone was completely devoured. The last of a long blue wire was disappearing into the cleaner’s mouth. “Hey, that’s mine!”

  “Don’t worry, Roy. I’ll get it back for you, more beautiful than ever.” Wave flipped the cleaner over onto its back.

  “That’s okay, don’t kill it,” Roy said quickly.

  “I won’t kill it, I love little cleaners.” Wave looked appalled that Roy had even suggested such a thing. “I’ll get the microphone back in a couple of days, not this time. This time it’s just a normal dropping. See, look, the dropping emerges.”

  Gaia watched as a tiny, gasping anus seemed to open out of nowhere, and a silvery-gray and glistening nub came into view. The cleaner shook violently. Wave reached down and grabbed one end of the nub, pulling and twisting it expertly. A rank fishy odor filled Happy Snak.

  “What are you doing now?” Roy crowded in closer.

  “I’m making a gambling piece.” Wave focused on manipulating the piece of excrement into an artful position. When the turd was fully extracted, it was about the size of Gaia’s thumb. It was cylindrical. The turd dried rapidly, forming a hard, shell-like surface. Wave’s attentions to it became more intense.

  “Now is the only time its shapeable.” Wave paused to blow on the turd. If Gaia hadn’t known it was a little piece of dung, she’d have compared this process to shaping molten glass, but she couldn’t make that comparison because it wasn’t molten glass. It was a little piece of dung.

  “What is it?” Roy forgot about his mangled hand-held.

  “A piece for gambling,” Wave said. “My pieces are in top demand. People are always gambling me for them because I have the beauteous pieces they desire.”

  “That’s what a gambling piece is made of?” Gaia felt her jaw slacken and her upper lip rise in an unstoppable sneer of revulsion. “That’s what all the gambling pieces in your pocket are made of?”

  “Yes!” Wave said.

  “You have pockets full of shit?” Gaia felt her blood pressure rise. The health department could never know.

  “Don’t they disintegrate in water?” Roy asked.

  “Never.” Wave put the final twist on its gambling piece. By this time the cleaner had righted itself and was slowly pursuing Microbe across the dining room. “It stays hard forever.”

  Wave explained the intricacies of twisting excrement into art to Roy. Gaia could not listen. How could she salvage her idea now? She’d already bought the kiosk. She’d already put pictures of the jewelry up on the jewelry channel at the station. She had advance orders, sight unseen, for these little pieces of crap. Literally—pieces of crap.

  Gaia held her head.

  “Is there something wrong?” Wave asked.

  “I didn’t realize what gambling pieces were made from.”

  “Not all of them are made from the secretions of cleaners, just the ones for orphan servants and soldiers and peoples like that. We have no gold or ivory so we make these. They last a long time.”

  Gaia pressed her eyes shut, just to not have to look at the gambling piece anymore. “People don’t want to wear shit.”

  “Were you planning on selling these?” Roy asked Gaia.

  “I was going to let the Kishocha use them for money because I thought that humans would think they made great jewelry. I have over a hundred advance orders. I used the money to buy the concession-stand permit and fifty cases of clams. Oh, God.”

  The three sat in silence. Wave hung its head, knowing it had somehow disappointed Gaia, but mystified as to how. Gaia rubbed her temples.

  Roy gingerly lifted the gambling piece. “I don’t think you have to tell people that they’re made from…feces. I think you can say it’s a secretion from a mollusk, or snail or something. It’s not slimy or anything and the smell is gone now.”

  “What about when it gets wet?” Gaia asked. “Does it stink then? I really think I’m going to have to pull the plug. I can’t sell people turds to make earrings with.”

  Wave broke in. “But it’s not like the human turd! It’s hard, like shell. No bad smells. The pieces are eternal, like gambling itself.”

  Gaia got the feeling that this was some kind of Kishocha idiomatic phrase. She would have been pleased to note this, perhaps even fantasize about relating her linguistic discovery to Fitzpatrick, if she hadn’t been so depressed about the crushing of her dream. How could she unload fifty cases of clams? Chowder maybe?

  “Please, Gaia,” Wave said. “Please let my other friends buy snacks for pieces. They’ve never had a snack before. They don’t understand what freedom is.”

  Wave solidly faced Roy, drawing itself up to its full height. “Snacks are freedom, Roy, there is no doubt. If a person has a piece, it can say, ‘I want a snack,’ and then that person could go and get a snack—any one they want. And all that person has to do is put up a piece and say, ‘I want orange,’ and it doesn’t even have to ask. It could just say, ‘Orange!’ if it wanted to.” Wave searched for the right words to convey this experience. “I want orphan-servants and soldiers to have snacks anytime they want one. As if we were clean and smart.”

  Gaia felt a pang of compassion. She wondered how Wave could find every chink in her emotional armor without even trying. Maybe it was Wave’s sincerity, or maybe it was the Kishocha’s alienness. Gaia didn’t care much for people. Since the divorce, she had felt like she lacked some vital social quality, whose absence rendered her unable to interact normally. Maybe that quality could simply be described as the desire to care about someone or something. That desire had returned now, with a vengeance. She wanted Wave to be happy. Not because happiness was more convenient for herself, but for its own sake.

  Wave was pure, not good or moral, but honest. It said exactly what it thought. Right now, that meant Wave thought that snacks were more than a business proposition, snacks were a whole new way of living. Gaia didn’t know if that was strictly accurate, but then, who was she to say what Kishocha thought or felt? Maybe for them even the tiniest freedom was so amazing that it could change the world.

  “Gaia Jones.” Wave drew nearer. “Fate and the god have decreed that you, a snack seller, are here in this place and time. Could it be for any reason but to give snacks to my people? No, it is your destiny.”

  Gaia glanced at Roy, who shrugged as if her place in history was all settled.

  She said, “Fine, but you have to remember that there are no snacks without pieces, right? Don’t go soft on me. And you have to not let people gamble for snacks. This is a fair exchange. One piece for one snack, end of story.”

  “Absolutely not, that constitutes theft, which creates shrink. I will do as the employee handbook asks and never fail.”

  Gaia wondered if perhaps Wave should be doing the books instead of her. It seemed to have absorbed all the most noxious accounting lingo in a matter of
weeks. Perhaps later, if this venture ever got off the ground. And that all depended on Wave keeping its mouth shut, which might or might not be possible.

  Gaia said, “Listen, you must never, ever, ever, under any circumstances tell any human what these gambling pieces are made of. If anyone asks, tell them it’s an ancient secret.”

  “But that’s a lie.”

  “Do you want snacks for your people or not?”

  “I do.” Wave had a particularly determined look in its eye. “I will lie about the pieces. I will never say that they are droppings.”

  “Then it’s settled. We’ll open up the concession stand tonight, as planned.” Gaia allowed herself to relax slightly, now that the impending PR disaster had been averted. “Now, what about the menu?”

  Wave had devised a menu that it felt would be profitable, according to some restauranteering book it had read. As the menu scrolled up the screen, Gaia began to regain her sense of adventure.

  Stunned Snake Snack with Orange and Pickle

  Excited Clam with Coffee Syrup

  Sucked Clam in Taco Shell with Paste

  Live Snake on Jell-O with Orange

  Slippery Butter Pats on Paper Squares

  Dramatic Chicken Bird Egg in Shell

  Lastly, came the mysterious Prophet’s Favorite Snake, which turned out to be chicken satay with two shots of orange on the side.

  “Its a limited menu,” Wave said. “But this way I can really perfect my preparation before I expand.”

  “Expand to what?” Roy asked.

  “Full menu treats like Sucked Clam Platter and Quivering Grass Jelly. And also bigger stunned things like Stunned Crab and Stunned Cow Spider. Later maybe I will offer Delicate Kelp and Water Snail in Pool of Seawater. That was lovely Kenjan’s favorite Kishocha food. But I’m not a master food maker so it could take some time to learn that. The bowl has to be shaped just right so that the snail does not escape.”

  “And all these things cost one piece, right?” Gaia clarified.

  “Exactly!”

  “I’m proud of you, Wave. You’ve done a great job, and I want this thing to work out as much as you do. So, I think for the first week we’ll run a buy-one-get-one-free special to try and encourage business.”